All About Ecommerce – “Choosing Right CMS”

In the first blog of this “All About e-commerce” series, we discussed the importance of having an Ecommerce for our business, now lets move on to some other insights about Online portals.

Most Important step when starting an ecommerce is to choose a right CMS, CMS is a platform on which websites are developed. Various CMS are available that are specifically designed to support Ecommerce but choosing the right one depend on various factors.

What is a CMS?
CMS stands for Content Management System, it is a software that simplifies the process for managing content on a website.

CMS can be chosen on the basis of business model, size and functionality requirements. Different CMS serves different kind of purposes like Exclusively.in uses Magento as its CMS, Flip-kart uses Magento as well and you can get 90% of Flipkart’s features in Magento’s default CMS Setup. Some CMS like Drupal can also be used for setting up an Ecommerce but it it not specifically designed to assist Ecommerce. WordPress is another user friendly CMS, it has plugins that support Ecommerce.

We have listed a few Open source Free CMS, these are more popular than others because of their support and features:

1. Magento
2. Prestashop
3. Zencart
4. QuickCart
5. Opencart

Magento : Magento is an eBay owned open source Ecommerce web application. Magento Provides three platforms; Magento Community Edition, Magento Enterprise Edition, and Magento Go. Community support is excellent for Magetno and it is very flexible and powerful. Magento is chosen by more than 150000 business around the world. See Ecommerce based on Magento Exclusively and Amydus.

Prestashop: Presrashop has better administration panel and it is quite easy to master. It has large community support as well. Prestashop is better for beginners and intermediate online shop owners for more complex structures and functionalities better options are available. Ecommerce Based on Prestashop See List.

Zencart: Zen Cart is an online store management system. It is PHP-based and it use MySQL database. Support is provided for numerous languages and currencies, and it is freely available. Zencart is a one of very popular Cms for developing Ecommerces. This Uses Zencart

QuickCart: QuickCart is a very good if you don’t need all the fireworks. It’s one of the easies to use scripts available on the market. The good news is that there’s not much of the PHP and HTML code what makes modifications much easier. It’s extremely efficient as long as it doesn’t manage thousands of products. For more demanding programmers OpenCart or PrestaShop is preferable.

Opencart: OpenCart is a good alternate for Prestashop, it has large number of plugins, very efficient and easily customizable. It works for almost any number of products and just like Prestashop it is useful for beginners and intermediate online shop owners. Ecommerce that Use OpenCart , see list.

It is always better to hire an experienced web development team to develop the portal but if you don’t want to hire developers some Paid CMS like Shopify are also available. These ease the process and take care of development on their end, only limitations in these kind of CMS is of customization and pricing.

Up Next in the series “ 5 Must Have UX Features ”. Now that we have understood the concept of Ecommerce lets see whats factors affect the Conversion of an ecommerce and how can we enhance it.