Hi everyone, I am creating a store and I was wondering what is better, a shopping cart plugin or an e-commerce platform? I want it to be cost-effective and optimum in the long run.
You have not given us enough information. Like what do you mean 'long run?' A year? A month? A decade? Or? What kind of products? How many do expect to sell per hour? per day? or whatever? How are you planning on getting paid? Are you stocking items or drop-shipping them? How do you plan on scaling up should your sales explode? Those are just some of the questions that you need answers for.
Hey, thanks for mentioning this. So basically I have been selling small products/ merch related to cat themes (we are a group of artists) using WooCommerce. We usually manage around 15-20 sales per day on average, however, in the month of July, we saw an increase in our sales. Then Idk maybe because there was a rush to our site, we found our site to be super slow and glitchy and it started affecting our sales. We are witnessing a need for growth in all our functions, marketing, shipping, order management. We have been thinking about integrating all functional efforts with our business which is why we are considering a whole eCommerce platform. We just wanted an opinion on what option would be more feasible.
Shopping cart plugin works well in case you have a small business because you just have to add it to your website. If you’re thinking of scaling up your business this will translate into an increased number of operations and you will need to look into other areas such as marketing CMS and ERP integrations, omnichannel presence, analytics, etc. It’ll be better if you try finding all these features and integrations in one eCommerce solution. Hosted solutions usually prove to be more convenient. Most hosted e-commerce solutions provide you with order management, marketing, shipping integrations, etc. If you do decide to go for a hosted solution, my suggestion would be to check out StoreHippo. It’s a DIY platform with a host of features to accommodate small businesses as well as enterprise-level needs.