Custom development vs Magento vs WooCommerce for Shopping Websites

Digital world is a perfect place to develop an online business. If you finally decided to get started with ecommerce web development, there are several possible options to consider. Undoubtedly, custom ecommerce offers more personalized approach to your brand identity. However, this option is more costly and will take longer to get created. From this perspective, Magento and WooCommerce are the most widely-used and affordable ecommerce solutions on today’s market that will appear first on your list if you think of setting up an online shop. Each one of these three approaches has its pros and cons. So which one to choose?

Typically, the most picky and VIP clients vote for custom ecommerce solution, WordPress users use WooCommerce, while eBay users prefer Magento. In this article, we will talk about the advantages and disadvantages of each solution for shopping websites in detail.

Custom Shopping Websites

Traditionally, custom-created shopping sites offer numerous benefits. First of all, the flow and functions of your website will have no dictate from any pre-designed platform. This provides you with the ability to add any features you want, maximizing the appearance and keeping your clients coming back. For example, you are free to customize the check-out process as well as to decide how your clients will add products to their cart. In addition, custom shopping solutions allow to make whatever changes you want, such as set up the feed to make more sales.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Custom-Created Shopping Websites:

Advantages:

• The ability to handle bulk visitors and large number of transactions at a time
• Advanced and extended functionality
• Unique appearance
• The possibility of integration with other platforms

Disadvantages:

• Locked source code
• No possibility of a third-party input

Magento & WooCommerce

Both platforms offer basic features, allowing to build a standard shopping website. WooCommerce is a WP plugin perfect for beginners. It comes with a simplest set of features. You can rate items, feature best sellers, and sale your products using the available widgets. However, any other action requires paid add-on. Although the navigation is sometimes too sophisticated, WooCommerce allows integration with many others WordPress plugins. In addition, it comes with multiply partially free extensions (SEO by Yoast, Askimet, Gravity forms, etc.). WooCommerce is a great solution for those who want to set up a small online shop without too much efforts.

Magento offers more possibilities when making sales. Moreover, it allows you to customize your online shop by adding extra features such as discount codes, advanced product filters, etc. Also, if you have several stores, Magento allows you to manage them all from the same account. However, as you have probably guessed, Magento is not that easy to setup. To do this, you may need to find a Magento coder.

How Are They Similar?

Both solution are great for building a ecommerce shop. Magento and WooCommerce can also help you with SEO optimization, they make it easy for you to  upload and manage an unlimited number of products as well as to create a blog to communicate with your customers.

Any Differences?

Although Magento offers tutorial videos and documentation in order to teach you how to use it, yet it may be difficult to manage it. On the contrary, WooCommerce is very easy to use which makes it great for beginners. Moreover, the variety of available plugins allow you to customize your website through WordPress absolutely free (to a certain extent).

Variety of Themes

Why WooCommerce and Magento are a preferable solution to both businessmen and coders? That is because of themes.They both provide thousands of free/paid themes with numerous features to choose from. Furthermore, with WooCommerce, you can easily integrate your theme with many other WP themes.

Expenses

Well, both WooCommerce and Magento are initially provided free of charge to users. You can easily download them and get started on building an online shop right away using available functions. At the same time, any further development of your ecommerce website will require additional expenses.

Also, any website needs hosting. With Magento, you will need to use dedicated or cloud servers, while WooCommerce works using WP hosting which gives it a relative advantage over Magento.

Which is Better?

Custom ecommerce solution comes with many pros outweighing all cons. This approach will give you the ability to handle unlimited products and many users at a time. Moreover, custom shopping websites support integration with the other gateways and CRMs.

Magento was built specifically for shopping websites. It is a bit more costly and complicated compared to WooCommerce. At the same time, it has multiply basic features which makes Magento perfect for ambitious businessmen.

WooCommerce is a WP plugin, not CMS. However, it will perfectly showcase your products and sale them. WooCommerce is ideal for small business owners as well as for people with little coding knowledge. And, of course, if you are a WordPress user already, WooCommerce is a best choice for you

We hope that this article was useful for you. In case if you need any advice on what approach to pick, please contact us. Our team consisting of professional designers and web developers will be glad to help you.