Ecommerce luxuries and sophistications are growing to a new level, thanks to the online marketplaces and the development platforms that power these multi-vendor stores.
Here is the one month report on top ecommerce softwares from Aheadworks research.
According to the report, Woocommerce holds 26.5% of the market share while Magento CE (community edition) and EE (enterprise edition) together hold 29.1% of the market share followed by Shopify, Prestashop, VirtueMart and others. The top improvements have been shown by Shopify and Woocommerce.
1. Magento:
Magento is considered as one of the best software to build multi vendor ecommerce websites due to the following reasons:
- Open Source and Enterprise edition – Option to pick community edition and paid enterprise edition
- Community support – Millions of developer communities and forums to seek help from
- Extensions, modules and plugins – Millions of downloadable extensions, add-ons and themes
- SEO ready and friendly – Built to be search engine friendly
- Integrated payment-options – Built in support for 100_ payment gateways and 3rd parties like PayPal
- Marketing & Integrations – Compatible with 3rd party tools like MailChimp, Salesforce, Google Analytics
Choosing between Magento build and readymade scripts
Developing an multi vendor ecommerce website using Magento CE is advantageous but it has downsides as well. It is time taking and needs a dedicated development team to be on board. Performance optimization and server side technicalities have to be optimized in order to make your website perform at its best.
Well, this is not the case with readymade scripts. When you choose a Magento Multi vendor ecommerce script , you can save time and investment capital.
Magento readymade scripts are:
- Cloud ready – Ready to be deployed on cloud
- Customizable – Can be tweaked to fit in any specific need and compatible towards 3rd party integrations
- Functional – Pre-built with features to build a fully functional website in minutes
- Speed – Optimized for uncompromising performance on all devices
- Additional – Provide free themes, add-ons and extensions
2. Woocommerce
Among the platforms for building marketplace websites, Woocommerce is the major achiever in the recent past. This multi seller website building platform has climbed up the ladder in terms of ecommerce software market share from 20.8% in 2014 to 26.5% in 2016.
Woocommerce provides APIs that can be readily used for building extensions. The possibilities for customization are endless and you get a choice of 1000+ themes.
Apart from providing the essentials that an ecommerce multi vendor store build needs Woocommerce provides additional features that can do good to your mainstream business. For instance Woocommerce let’s you create a dedicated blog wherein you can publish and promote about your products and connect to customers.
3. Shopify
According to Aheadworks research, Shopify has experienced a 17.4 % relative market share growth index between October 2015 to March 2016. This Canadian ecommerce software which impress with a GUI that makes multi vendor ecommerce marketplace store build easy for any technically naive user, ditches out the dependency to hire a development team.
No problem if you are looking for enhancements. Just a few minutes in Shopify’s app store will help you find the desired add-ons. Dedicated support team travels along with you in installation, configuration and settings personalization.
4. PrestaShop
prestashop-logoProclaimed as one of the most sever-efficient platform for building multi vendor websites, this ecommerce website development software shares the third spot in the ecommerce software market. With advantages like built-in page indexing, faster page loading etc, Prestashop powered website have an upper hand in getting indexed by search engines.
The admin panel can be mastered quite easily as it is simple and straightforward which makes configuration settings and personalizations a cake walk. Of course, the benefits of an open source platform is included.
5. VirtueMart
The ecommerce wing of one of the leading content management systems Joomla, VirtueMart is 5th best option to build a multi vendor website. VirtueMart, though not built for ecommerce like Magento, this open source platform has made some significant improvements in order to make it sturdy enough to ecommerce websites that demand sturdiness.
From a technical point of view, VirtueMart reportedly seems to have less bugs compared to its rivals. The only thing which puts down is the time take for version updates. For upgrades and improvements you can fish out for add-ons in the Joomla directory. Joomla has loads of plugins which when installed can turn your marketplace website SEO friendly instantly.
6. Others
Other preferable ecommerce website building software are Volusion, Zencart, osCommerce, BigCommerce etc. Development becomes easy as it is either just a matter of ‘download and configure’ or ‘build it to suit your specific requirements’ using an smart interface.
To sum it up, Magento is by far the best choice to go for when it comes to ecommerce marketplace build. Hope this list will help you choose your best multi vendor store development software.
