WooCommerce is a powerful e-commerce plugin for WordPress, but WooCommerce isn’t your only option for selling online. There are a bunch of other plugins that allow your customers to make purchases.
Depending on your needs, one of the WooCommerce alternatives may be better suited to your desired functionality and less complex. Below is a selection of them worth considering their advantages and characteristics to build your own view of your business style.
What is Woocommerce?
It is a free, open source plug-in that, along with WordPress, forms an integrated online store, containing many features that help you build your own online store with a high degree of flexibility and simplicity in dealing.
Woocommerce is considered one of the most famous e-commerce platforms, as it allows anyone to quickly launch their own online store due to its ease of use. This component has many positives and features, including:
- High security.
- Completely free to install on your site.
- Easy to use and suitable for beginners.
- Its scalability and adaptability to the needs and requirements of each user.
- Enriched with design templates for multiple stores.
- Compatible with smartphones.
Why are we looking for alternatives?
During the development of work processes in any field, everyone always seeks to increase the available options and diversity in capabilities with the aim of achieving the best performance and meeting the desires of each user equally, and this encourages the spirit of competition in order to achieve the highest potential benefit from the multiplicity of alternatives.
Although WooCommerce has many wonderful advantages in the field of e-commerce, it may not be the ideal choice for the nature of your business and your needs, as choosing a platform that has many features that your business does not require is considered a waste of effort and money, as is the case with choosing an option that lacks features, or does not It meets its intended purpose.
Therefore, we have drafted this article in an attempt to help you search for the most suitable option in light of all these available options.
Available alternatives
Therefore, what are the alternatives available to us that can be used in this context as a competitor to Woocommerce, to provide us with all the required services with high performance and superior features that can be used in parallel to what Woocommerce offers?
Accordingly, we list the advantages and options of each alternative, in a way that helps you choose the most appropriate option for what you are seeking, according to your different needs and desired business requirements.
The first alternative (Shopify)
It is an open source e-commerce website building tool with a monthly subscription. This professional platform provides you with your own commercial website. It does not require the use of WordPress, as it is a fully hosted platform.
The platform provides a site that is almost ready to start and launch, and all you have to do is choose the appropriate template for your store and start directly adding your various types of products and begin sales and delivery operations immediately after that, without being preoccupied with the consequences of improving, programming, and developing the site. These matters are the responsibility of the platform itself. What you have to do is focus on your products only.
Advantages of this platform:
- It contains free and paid templates that allow the user to format his store in the way he aspires to with the utmost professionalism and creativity.
- It covers a good number of add-ons (applications) that provide the customer with more options and work to increase the store’s service capabilities.
- There are many subscription packages available to make it suitable for all types and expansions of businesses.
- A reliable, robust and easy-to-use choice, they offer great customer support.
Therefore, it is very suitable for beginners and non-specialists in the fields of programming and business owners who would like to create their own commercial websites to market their business at an acceptable monthly cost.
The second alternative (Magento)
Magento is a self-hosted e-commerce platform that offers endless scalability and customization, rich in features and benefits that you pay for, and is an open source platform with high flexibility (the ability to move to another host, choose a new payment provider, etc..).
Magento is ranked as one of the top e-commerce solution providers. It allows building mobile-friendly, easy-to-customize, highly secure and responsive websites. It comes in both free and paid versions.
The paid version includes advanced features to segment your customer base and improve customer retention. Overall, Magento is an excellent environment for building your e-commerce website.
Allows adding thousands of products, images and descriptions. But regardless of the number of pages, Magento sites remain SEO friendly. The entire site or its individual pages can load within seconds.
Advantages of this platform
- Open source platform.
- Provides strong scalability.
- Multiple languages and currencies.
- Its ability to improve search engines.
- The platform enables the development of responsive and mobile-friendly e-commerce websites.
- The platform’s library includes thousands of topics. You can customize and modify it according to your brand requirements.
- Secure, it allows you to implement multiple security measures and take additional defensive measures against hackers.
Creating a web store in them is quick and easy. Even non-developers can perform basic configurations and page creation, in addition to easy handling of products, including uploading, sorting, and catalog preparation.
Therefore, this platform is a suitable option for use by medium-sized institutions or companies, such as (managing a chain of physical stores through your website, to form a great commercial strategy from order to receipt), and it includes solutions suitable for all e-commerce requirements.
Third alternative (BigCommerce)
It is a fully hosted e-commerce platform and thus carries many features and e-commerce elements including (payments, shopping cart, content, design, support, marketing features, etc.) and combines them into one service.
It has its own application store and there are more than 700 applications within it that allow you to choose between them according to the functions required to improve your small store.
It has ready-made, pre-filled templates for you to customize and control. Other than that, all non-commercial matters will be the responsibility of the platform itself.
Advantages of this platform:
- High ability to improve search engines (SEO).
- Extremely fast response and synchronization capability.
- It includes approximately 150 themes that you can choose from, but of course not all of them are free, and you can also purchase and import themes into your control panel.
- Enjoy greater flexibility in pricing your products, depending on the classification of customer groups.
- It provides user support 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
- It provides you with multi-faceted search features that include filtering, enabling you to configure up to 250 options for each product, thus providing a more accurate and appropriate output for products of different shapes and types.
BigCommerce is the right choice if you want built-in features without the hassle of installing or paying for them separately, want to enjoy more design functionality for your store branding, run an online business and are looking to grow across multiple channels.
Fourth alternative (OpenCart)
One of the means of dealing with business, like previous platforms, provides customers with a good way to buy and pay with all speed and safety. It is a completely free platform in terms of use, while operation depends on paying for your hosting requirements, and this develops with the amount of expansion of your site little by little.
Being open source shows the amount of resources available online from independent people is much larger, and it is not limited to standard e-commerce system options, but rather it offers performance support options that include more than 400 add-ons (free and paid) that you can install on your own site.
It offers full integration for both Mac and Windows, as well as a range of web devices, lets you work with over 20 common payment gateways (e.g. Paypal, Stripe…), and works with a variety of shipping (e.g. FedEX…).
Advantages of this platform
- Supports multiple languages and currencies.
- Professionally designed to work with PHP and MySQL.
- Includes both ticket and phone support.
- Enables search engine optimization.
- This platform has the advantage of enabling you to create, develop and install your own extensions.
- Quite flexible.
Therefore, the OpenCart platform is your ideal choice when you need a basic foundation on which to move forward towards construction and expansion, and it is very suitable for large businesses or those that can be developed and expanded.
Your programming knowledge will play an important role in supporting you to be able to customize the appearance and style of your site, and therefore the OpenCart platform is not the ideal choice for people who are beginners in creating websites and who do not have acceptable programming and technical experience.
Conclusion
Choose the best for your project. There is no doubt that WooCommerce is a component with huge advantages and wonderful components, but it is not the only option in the end, as every project has its requirements and details that only the person responsible for its preparation and implementation is aware of, as he is best able to determine the nature of his work, his plans and his future outlook for that project. The project, as well as its budget limits and capabilities, review all the options, then choose the solution that you deem appropriate.
