In this presentation I lay out the factors that are important to consider when choosing a shopping cart for your business. This includes Cost, Technical Ability Required, Advanced Features, Specialized Use Cases like O2O and Omnichannel.

1. www.greyloud.com
Choosing the Right eCommerce Platform for
Your Business
Presented by Richard James McGirr
Co-founder - GreyLoud Software Development

2. What is an eCommerce platform?
It is a software technology solution that allows you to build storefronts
(a storefront is any customer or business facing proposition relating to the selling of
products and services)
www.greyloud.com

3. eCommerce Platforms
www.greyloud.com

4. eCommerce
● helps to deliver goods;
● provides information and helps to make EFT payment;
● uses different digital media;
● conducts commercial transactions;
● implements pre-sale and after-sale support.
www.greyloud.com

5. What is important in choosing eCommerce platform?
● Development and license budget;
● Comprehensive technical support;
● Technical resources available for development and
administration.
● Size of business, # of products.
● Specialized functionality;
www.greyloud.com

6. Solutions for advanced technical skills
● Magento
● Brightpearl
● Hybris
● Yahoo Small Business Ecommerce
● X-Cart
www.greyloud.com

7. Solutions for low technical skills
● WooCommerce
● BigCommerce
● Shopify
● 1ShoppingCart
● Wix
● 3DCart
www.greyloud.com

8. Solutions for small-sized and mid-sized stores
● Etsy
● 3DCart
● Shopify
● Volusion
● Magento
● Bigcommerce
● X-Cart
www.greyloud.com

9. Solutions for low budget
● WooCommerce (free)
● Magento (open source version- free)
● X-Cart (very basic version)
● 1ShoppingCart ($10/month)
● Volusion ($15/month)
www.greyloud.com

10. www.greyloud.com

11. WooCommerce
Features:
● Mobile friendly
● Vast Customization Options
● Easy Analytics
● Big amount of WooCommerce Extensions
● Open Source + Extendable
www.greyloud.com

12. Benefits:
● Geo-location support
● Secure, audited code
● Easy Customization
● Huge Flexibility
● Free and paid extension
marketplace
● Modern and clean interface
Disadvantages:
● Updating the plugin can make
changes to the front-end
● Adding many advanced
WooCommerce extensions can
get expensive
● Lack of Features
● WordPress is a relatively
insecure platform
www.greyloud.com

13. Shopify
Features:
● Unlimited bandwidth with all plans
● Easily integrate with shipping carriers
● Mobile app for both accepting payments and managing your store
● Point-of-sale system
● Huge number of apps
www.greyloud.com

14. Benefits:
● Easy to use
● Great value for money
● Focus on design (great looking
stores)
● Huge collection of great
resources for starting and
running an online business
● Easy to edit templates
Disadvantages:
● Transaction fees for Basic and
Professional plans (2%)
● Need to enter in a credit card
number to launch your trial store.
www.greyloud.com

15. BigCommerce
Features:
● Integration with Paypal and a wide range of payment gateways
● Full content management (CMS) functionality
● Good search engine optimisation (SEO) options
● Integration with Alibaba.com
● Mobile e-Commerce
www.greyloud.com

16. Benefits:
● Provides a 10% discount if
you pay upfront for a year's
service
● A powerful toolkit to drive
traffic and increase sales
● Industry Standard (HTML,
CSS, JavaScript)
Disadvantages:
● Offers only 3 pricing plans
● Availability of Add-ons
● No affiliate program is
integrated into the shopping
car
www.greyloud.com

17. Volusion
Features:
● Integrated live chat
● Ecommerce analytics
● Shopping feeds
● Design custom add-ons
● Professional services (store design, SEO, etc)
www.greyloud.com

18. Benefits:
● Easy to use
● Cheap: Smallest plan starts at
$15 a month
● Many built-in features and apps
● Provides additional marketing
and business services from
industry experts
● No transaction fees
Disadvantages:
● Limited bandwidth
● API access and other features
only available with Gold plan
($135.00/month)
www.greyloud.com

19. PinnacleCart
Features:
● Integration with Intuit QuickBooks out of the box
● Instant sales with QR Codes (omnichannel applications)
● Advanced Analytics
● Advanced Product Management
● Product Syndication (eBay, Amazon, Yahoo, Google Product Search,
PriceGrabber, NexTag, etc.)
● powerful SEO tools (sitemap, meta tags and keywords, etc.)
www.greyloud.com

20. Benefits:
● Extend functionality with
Facebook and mobile
stores/Log in with Facebook
● Easy to use design features
● Extensive features and
customization
● Off the shelf product
syndication
Disadvantages:
● Limited storage and
bandwidth
● It doesn’t have a built-in
point-of-sale system
● Many features = more
complicated
www.greyloud.com

21. Magento Community
Features:
● SEO
● Mobile commerce
● Product management
● One account for 2 and more online stores
● Thousands of design themes
www.greyloud.com

22. Benefits:
● Able to host on your own server
● The top open-source e-
commerce software
● Large number of payment
gateways
● International commerce and
multiple languages
● Can scale to Magento Enterprise
when ready with ease
Disadvantages:
● Heavily layered and overly
complicated coding style
● The technical documentation is
very limited
● Runs fairly slow
www.greyloud.com

23. 1ShoppingCart
Features:
● Advanced website customization using HTML/CSS/Javascript
● SEO friendly product category and page URLs
● Email marketing
● Integration with Quick Books
● API Access to products, orders and clients
● Simple Analytics
www.greyloud.com

24. Benefits:
● Support over 50 payment
gateways
● Mobile store included
● No programming skills
required
Disadvantages:
● Expensive Customer Support
($34/month, $379/year)
● 1shoppingcart is slow
www.greyloud.com

25. Wix
Features:
● 100s of Designer-Made Templates
● Intuitive Website Builder
● Drag n’ Drop Website Editor
● Text and Image Editor & Free Fonts
● Email Marketing
● Tutorials and walkthroughs
● SEO
www.greyloud.com

26. Benefits:
● Easy to customize
● No coding
● Very low coast to start
compared to other platforms
Disadvantages:
● Templates can’t be changed
● No access to the source code
www.greyloud.com

27. X-Cart Cloud
Features:
● SEO & Statistics
● Open source, OOP, PHP 5.3.x+
● Integration with Drupal 7.x
● Multicurrency, multilingual
● Integration with eBay
● Includes a CMS editor and a WYSIWYG catalog
www.greyloud.com

28. Benefits:
● Auction available
● All types of goods
● Product comparison
● Option to include customer
reviews and ratings
Disadvantages:
● Paid technical support
($149/month or $99/one
single accident)
● Licensing fees for system
● Not for beginners
www.greyloud.com

29. 3DCart
Features:
● Mobile front-end and a mobile back-end offer
● SEO ($149.99/month)
● The option to sell re-branded stores
● CRM features like Mailing List Manager
● Inventory control, including batch editing and low stock alerts
www.greyloud.com

30. Benefits:
● 3dcart is integrated over 100
external payment solutions
● No transaction fees
● Unlimited storage space
● Payment gateways
● 24x7 Phone, Email and Chat
Support
Disadvantages:
● The shopping cart does not
have POS integration
● Limited bandwidth
www.greyloud.com