If you were to track the rise of ecommerce in today’s business landscape, you’d have to go back to the dot com crash of 2000. Despite a tanking economy, the businesses that survived the crash quickly started adapting their selling methods, because, even with an economy going down the drain, it was clear that the Internet would hold the key to the future of sales.
Whether you’re struggling to create a pre-ordering option within your current ecommerce marketplace, or you’re anxious to find out how your warehousing setup will interact with your online store, there are plenty of ecommerce options out there that can help your business succeed.
It’s in that spirit that we’ve taken the liberty of listing out some of the best platforms that we think small to mid-size businesses should be using right now. Here they are in no particular order.
In this article review, we will compare both nopCommerce and Magento. nopCommerce and Magento are open-source e-commerce platforms offering a substantial catalogue frontend as well as a sophisticated administration tool backend. While nopCommerce is an entirely free platform, Magento offers a community version that’s free and an enterprise version that isn’t.
Overview of nopCommerce and Magento
nopCommerce is an open source ecommerce solution, which means it is available for free. It’s easy to set up and customize and has a whole range of features including mobile commerce, one-page checkout, gift cards and a lot of other both basic and more advanced options. Of course, as free open source software, it can be buggy at times. You also have to do your own hosting, there isn’t very much support available, and you have to use Microsoft licenses. On the whole, however, it’s a really solid shopping cart software solution that is incredibly impressive considering the fact that it’s free.
In other hand, Magento actually has a free community version that can be a solution for the extremely tech savvy, but they also have a heavy-duty Enterprise option. Magento is an ecommerce solution that is generally better for designers and developers who want unlimited customization options and know what to do with them. They also offer Magento Go, which is more accessible, but also has a fairly limited template and customization scheme.
Features nopCommerce vs Magento
Magento has been in ecommerce market for many years while nopCommerce is only for around 4-5 years. We have tried both nopCommerce and Magento and we found that both have great features and easy customization
Over 240,000 merchants from all the world rely on Magento’s powerful e-commerce platform and tools, which enable them to achieve their goals by attracting more potential customers, turn prospects into sales, and increase their sales. Flexible and reliable, here are some of the benefits Magento brings to the fray:
Absolute control of your online channel
- Leverage your online store with Magento’s enterprise-level functionalities and tools.
- Expands and scales with your businesses effortlessly and quickly.
- Get the functionalities you need as your business grows.
- Deep integration with eBay.
nopCommerce is also offer great features like:
– One Click Installer
We all like one-click installers don’t we. And nopCommerce has it. So installing nopCommerce is as difficult as clicking the Install button. As a matter of fact, nopCommerce is now actively supported by most hosting companies.
– Clean Documentation
Anybody who wants to use a software needs access to all the documentation beforehand. So if you are new to nopCommerce and want to know how to use it, head to it’s documentation and you’ll find that it’s very neatly written to the level of a novice.
– Contact Customer Support Easily
nopCommerce has a proud community of all kinds of people ranging from developers, designers, architects, store owners, security specialists etc. What that means to you as store owner is that in case you find yourself stuck at anything, there are people to help you out for FREE.
– Mobile Friendly
nopCommerce is compatible with your mobile. nopCommerce literally takes it seriously and their default theme is responsive out of box. In fact most of the themes (including those of third party vendors) that you find online will be mobile friendly.
– Multi Vendor Support
With more and more startups joining the eCommerce race, drop-ship model is gaining more popularity than ever. Even giants like Amazon are allowing other vendors to sell their products on their websites. So if you are one of those kinds, nopCommerce out-of-box supports multi-vendor shops.
– Payments and Shipping
One thing that may affect your decision of selecting or rejecting an eCommerce software is the support for different payments and shipping methods. Out of box, nopCommerce supports many different payment methods such as Paypal, Credit Cards, DirectPay etc. Similarly various shipping options such as FedEx, UPS, USPS, Canada Posts and more are available. Also there are many vendors who regularly release new payment methods and shipping plugins, so if you wish to use a particular payment or shipping method, it’s possible that it’s already listed on nopCommerce extensions page.
Hosting Price for Magento and nopCommerce
Hosting on Windows operating system is usually more expensive than on Linux. Simply because the Windows packages include licensing cost while Linux being an open-source platform is free. But, you don’t need to worry now as there are many cheap web hosting that support nopCommerce, you can check it on our blog to find out nopCommerce hosting recommendation.
So, the perfect e-commerce platform for your business is clearly one that’s compatible with your existing technical framework and investment, despite the disadvantages it may come with. Which is why we bet on both leaders of the e-commerce platform market. And in case you have limited expertise in handling backend work and want to run a low-volume site on a low budget, there’s always other alternative like WooCommerce or Prestashop.
