Do you need or want to redesign your e-commerce site? You want to know which is the best e-commerce platform for you but you don't want to spend days there in specifications, writing functional specifications, design or other?
So is there a way to choose the most suitable e-commerce solution for you in 5 min ?
Well yes and no. This article will indeed allow you to know which e-commerce platform is the most suitable for your merchant site, but to choose in 5 minutes, you will necessarily have to simplify and take shortcuts.
So be careful, this is an article to allow you to quickly focus your attention on the platform(s) that may interest you , but it's up to you to take the time to check and dig to be 100% sure of your choice.
Of course, it is possible to entrust this task to one of our e-commerce experts who will be happy to create a high-quality matrix of e-commerce platform choices.
SO HOW TO CHOOSE AN E-COMMERCE CMS IN 5 MINUTES?
Whether you have an e-commerce site or not, you can choose your e-commerce platform quickly by eliminating market solutions that are not suited to your needs. Be careful, there are several hundred e-commerce solutions available.
We obviously can't see them all here, so we'll focus on the biggest e-commerce software on the market.
Rather than making a list of e-commerce solutions, we will organize them by type of target customer.
You are new to e-commerce
You don't have an e-commerce site yet, you don't know anything about html, CSS and you don't want to manage the technical part? So you have to focus on e-commerce solutions called SaaS.
The most important today in France and the most dynamic remains Shopify. you can make the site yourself if you don't have a budget but it will take time and may have average results or go through a Shopify e-commerce agency to get a real professional site.
If for some reason you don't like Shopify , then you can turn to Wizishop, which is pretty much the same thing, more French, a little less advanced but in the same price range. Be careful, there are fewer Wizishop applications and agencies so you will have less choice in prices.
If you want to try the adventure, you can use BigCommerce , which has been arriving in France for some time, but the bet is still a bit risky because the ecosystem is very small at the moment.
We advise you to avoid Oxatis , which is now more or less based on BigCommerce because the solution lacks visibility on its future and can represent a risk today.
You have good technical web knowledge
If you know what an apache server is, PHP, CSS , a template but e-commerce is not yet your daily life, then you may prefer an open source solution. It will take you more time to create an online sales site, but at least you will have the satisfaction of being able to manage a lot more things on your own.
At Qined, we have long been a fan of open source solutions for a whole host of reasons, but in the end, we still saw that it was often a huge waste of time for merchants.
Just the technical maintenance can represent a substantial budget and the days are already very busy, no need to spend hours renewing an SSL certificate that has expired for example.
In short, if technical grub and code are your thing, then in this case, you will surely like Prestashop (more flexible and permissive on the dev side), Magento (more robust and long on the dev side) or even Reaction Commerce . Forget solutions like OsCommerce which have not been updated for a long time.
Be careful not to choose too old versions or risk seeing all your time and investment go up in smoke due to a security breach.
In short, even if open source e-commerce has its fans and its advantages, especially among agencies, you have to think that on the merchant side, it's much less obvious.
You want to make a subscription e-commerce site
Do you want to make an e-commerce site that is based solely on subscription? It's a good idea because it's usually quite profitable. But for the moment, in French, there are few good e-commerce solutions to recommend.
On the other hand, if you speak English, you can clearly use a subscription e-commerce solution like Subbly . This allows you to manage subscriptions natively, but obviously, if you sell single products in a few months, you will have to support it with a Shopify or other.
Besides, why not offer Shopify in e-commerce solutions to make subscriptions? Well because it's complicated… Since Shopify Payments is still not available in France, it is almost impossible to use the subscription features on Shopify.
So yes, it may change one day but we know it's a slow and complicated process. And even if it's supposedly possible with Paypal, or to pay in installments or other, it remains exceptional cases, often subject to authorization. In short, it is currently complicated to create e-commerce sites by subscription with Shopify.
You want to dropship
And yes, dropshipping is also E-commerce! Even if it has bad press and Dropshipping has generated a lot of questionable sites, you have to see that it is above all a logistical method.
As the site says, don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. So if you want to make a Dropshipping site, which e-commerce solution to choose? Well there, you have the main solutions in France: Shopify (again) or Dropizi. Dropizi is the dropshipping version of Wizishop.
At Qined, we are big fans of Shopify so we obviously recommend Shopify in N°1 but if you want more information, it's because with Shopify you can easily transform your dropshipping site into a real e-commerce site. tomorrow if you need it.
With Dropizi , it will be more complicated. Also with Shopify, you can integrate any seller via automations with Airtable and Integromat .
To my knowledge, Dropizi is not integrated with automation solutions or Zapier for example.
You want to create a marketplace
If you are not the main seller of your products, then you will create a marketplace. Be careful, even if creating a marketplace may seem like a good idea because you don't have to manage the stock or the products, you have to see that it often costs a lot more from a technical point of view.
But do not panic, there are many solutions. Especially outside of Shopify. Indeed, Shopify has, in our opinion, missed this march of e-commerce and does not offer a reliable solution, for the moment, on the subject. This is going to change because a marketplace API has recently been available, but we will explain all this to you in a dedicated post because it is still a bit complicated.
Ah yes, even if there are applications to transform Shopify into a Marketplace, we strongly advise against using them. This will make your Shopify site really complicated for maintenance and upgrades.
So, to create a marketplace, you can turn to the leader in Europe: Mirakl . Good a priori if you are in the target of potential customers of Mirakl, you already know it. It is indeed a solution dedicated to very large accounts who already have a high traffic on their site and who want to make it profitable.
If you have a more modest budget, a few tens of thousands of euros all the same, you can go to Wizaplace or Izeberg marketplace.
There is still clearly a lack of a player on the market that is as affordable as a Shopify but in a marketplace version. If you know one from the long list of e-commerce CMS in the world, you can give the name in the comments of this article!
You want to create a B2B site
So, a B2B site is quite broad as a definition and it can bring together many very specific features.
Even though Shopify has been making efforts on this subject for some time, there is even a dedicated B2B feature on Shopify Plus , this is clearly not Shopify's strong point.
This is changing little by little because, for example, the evolution of tax management now makes it possible to create an entire e-commerce store without VAT!
But if you are looking for e-commerce functionalities such as the management of customer groups, prices by customer, batch discounts based on customer groups, e-procurement, payment by account, order management workflows or payment then Shopify is not made for that.
If it's B2B e-commerce very similar to B2C e-commerce, because your customers are self-employed, self-employed or other, then yes Shopify can be suitable.
But then, which merchant cms solutions to choose if you are doing advanced B2B e-commerce.
Well, on the market there is not really a universal solution unfortunately. Most merchants use open source solutions, usually a heavily modified Magento.
This requires considerable budgets and above all a lot of time in project management and the preparation of upstream work.
There are of course very small specialized e-commerce solutions, but if acting as a beta tester does not appeal to you, then it is better to start with an open source solution modified according to your needs.
What about “from scratch” development?
Among all the use cases, we only talked about e-commerce platforms on the shelf or ready to install and modify.
But should you develop your site from scratch, from scratch as we say in e-commerce jargon? What is the point of having an entire site coded without going through ready-made elements, whether open source or SaaS?
Well, I have to admit that I still sometimes see projects developed from scratch without any native e-commerce brick and that these are rarely real needs.
This is in most cases due to the client who uses a web or technical agency that does just that.
Except for non-e-commerce projects, this is defensible. But in an e-commerce project, this amounts to reinventing the wheel and being extremely dependent on your technical agency for the slightest evolution.
If you know what you are doing then go for it but if you are not a developer yourself or you have not planned to recruit any in your team then in this case, you must avoid starting with a 100 platform % custom made just for you.
You are in fact likely to have unpleasant surprises, to have additional costs on all sides and above all a partially operational solution and with significant transfer costs if you want to migrate to another e-commerce solution .
SO, WHICH E-COMMERCE SOLUTION IS IDEAL FOR YOU?
I hope you were able to find the answer to this question in this article. If an element or a type of e-commerce project is missing, do not hesitate to leave a comment and we will complete the article with your questions!
In any case, choosing an e-commerce solution should not be taken lightly and it is necessary to challenge the opinions of e-commerce agencies.
Indeed, we must not forget that if an agency only does Prestashop, it will want to sell you a Prestashop site at all costs.
When you have a hammer in your hands, everything looks like a nail. E-merchant proverb.
At Qined, we love Shopify after years of testing every other solution on the market, but if Shopify isn't right for your online business, then we'll be the first to let you know. Our goal is not to sell you a Shopify site but to create your e-commerce business unit with you on a good basis.
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