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The best eCommerce frameworks to develop a customized eCommerce website

July 18, 2022

The best eCommerce frameworks to develop a customized eCommerce website

Increasing internet adoption, digitalization of life, and rising social media interactions have increased the number of online transactions worldwide. The impact is the biggest on online shopping. In 2020, more than 2 .0 billion people purchased goods online.

The Covid-19 pandemic intensified this trend because of social distancing, staying home, and working remotely. This led to a global retail eCommerce traffic numberof22 billion monthly visits in June 2020. And we all know how the pandemic has changed the world’s purchasing habits and online transactions in two years.

When customers are online, suppliers have to be online to reach customers. So, if you already have a brick-and-mortar store or are starting a new business, do consider building an eCommerce website. You can reach new markets, target new audiences, and get brand recognition with an eCommerce site.

For this, you need to create a dedicated eCommerce website to allow you to have control over all aspects of your eCommerce business. But a crucial step that you need to take is deciding on the eCommerce framework for developing your website. You need to understand your business needs and your goals from your eCommerce website to decide on the appropriate framework.

Let’s understand what is an eCommerce framework, its types, and the best options available in the market:

What is an eCommerce framework?

An eCommerce framework is a software used to build your online eCommerce store. The eCommerce framework helps you build a market to enable transactions and interactions. It creates an online store, which is like an offline store where customers come in contact with the products.

An eCommerce framework satisfies the need for an online store to manage backend and frontend functions. You can manage inventory, accounting, ordering, and customer service at the backend. And you can manage the front of the online store where customers find your products and buy them.

What are the types of eCommerce frameworks?

Three main types of eCommerce frameworks include:

It’s available free for installation and customization to anyone. But advanced coding is essential to creating websites on these types of eCommerce frameworks. The most significant concern of open-source framework is security, for which you may need to spend additional money.

Software as a Service (SaaS) is a subscription service with high scalability and security. It can handle different backend processes easily, making it a smooth ride. The prime point of apprehension is its high pricing, with components of fees for subscription and transactions, and additional charges for the plug-in apps.

In the case of headless commerce framework, the backend and frontend of an eCommerce portal are different frameworks. You enjoy greater freedom in choice and have control over the components of your eCommerce system. Your costs increase because of separate backend, frontend, and development work, but it allows swift changes.

Best eCommerce frameworks

The type of eCommerce framework you choose depends on your business needs. Other factors, such as budget, development time, features and functionality, etc. will contribute to decision making. But, ensure to have the features of product management, m-commerce, built-in SEO, integration and plugin capability, and security.

Some of the top-ranked eCommerce frameworks for a custom shop are:

Who in eCommerce doesn’t know Shopify? It’s the best eCommerce framework for small businesses who want a quick online store. With Shopify, building a website is a simple and smooth process because of the drag and drop facility and faster loading feature.

You can manage it all by yourself by adding products, integrating payment options, and customizing the appearance. A range of themesis available in Shopify’s app store, with some free themes and some paid ones. You can also find many other extensions, plug-ins, or apps to add to your website.

Security is a big plus in Shopify websites with 256-bit SSL encryption and 1PCI compliance. Being a responsive framework, it allows you to manage your store on desktop or mobile and make modifications. You can get many certified partners to help you with Shopify websites.

It is free only for the first 14 days, after which you need to pay monthly subscription fees and transaction fees. Also, although too many 1-click selling apps are available, these are highlypriced. The biggest drawback is weak ranking of Shopify websites, which is a big concern in the SEO age. Another area of concern is high costs spent on hiring developers to add advanced features to your Shopify website.

Magento is a preferred choice among big businesses. Magento is the go-to option for an eCommerce framework if you are looking for a customized eCommerce website. But you cannot do it yourself; you need developers to handle the immense coding it requires.

Its basic version is free, but the annual cost of the enterprise version is relatively high. If your business is big and too tech-savvy, Magento is the framework for you. But, if you are new with no strong money support, it will be a risky choice for you.

It is a feature-rich eCommerce framework that has the flexibility to integrate with any number of third-party apps from an extensive marketplace development of possible extensions. Magento framework has strong SEO, allowing you to rank higher with the right SEO efforts. It is highly customizable, scalable, durable,and spacious that allows you to handle 80,000 orders per hour on your website.

The best part about Magento is the big community of developers who can resolve your queries. Along with having a mobile-friendly configuration, you can host the website anywhere. It has versatile content management, customizable security permissions, recurring payments, and adjustable content per user.

Along with these benefits, it has its own set of flaws. With all these features and high customizability, websites built on Magento require enough memory and space to perform well. Due to this, it also gets slowed down easily. The themes are expensive, but you can save money by sharing custom extensions with multiple users of Magento.

WooCommerce is not an eCommerce framework; it is a free WordPress plugin. If you already have a WordPress site, you can turn it into an eCommerce store with WooCommerce at no extra cost. But you need to pay for additional integrations and extensions to make your eCommerce website functionality-rich.

It is a good eCommerce framework for small businesses. But if you intend to add several plugins, extensions, or products, it cannot handle the traffic burden. It might slow down and affect the website performance. That’s why while customizing your online store, keep a check on your online store performance.

You can reduce the burden of traffic by choosing a suitable hosting environment, which might turn out to be expensive. It is a highly secure and customizable platform, but you need extensions for every customization.Moreover, no complaints about SEO because WordPress is SEO-friendly.

WordPress users will find it easy to use. Just an installation, product additions, few extensions, and all set for running the store. Managing orders, adding products, etc. is a smooth sailing process because its interface is similar to WordPress’s. But if you are unaware of WordPress usage, the technicalities of hosting, installing, themes, extensions, etc., would be too much hassle for you.

Concluding thoughts

Besides these three, there are many other eCommerce frameworks, such as:

What eCommerce framework you choose for your online store depends on your business needs and preferences. You must weigh factors such as more customization, easy and fast set-up, SEO-friendliness or a balanced combination of multiple factors. Prioritize your needs tactfully based on your goals and type of products you will sell.

Budget is also a primary factor that help you decide the eCommerce framework to choose. Also, consider your future plans with the eCommerce store. Are you planning to go global? Will you be adding more SKUs? Will you add more customization? Carefully analyze these factors and choose the most appropriate eCommerce framework for your business.

Digiwagon Technologies can come to your rescue if you are confused about selecting the right eCommerce framework. We can help you with the choice as well as build up your eCommerce website. We offer clients our expert customized eCommerce development services to create a flourishing online business.

Whether it is B2B, B2C,D2C, mobile, or subscription eCommerce websites, we have the best services for your needs. We make your online presence stronger with end-to-end eCommerce consulting services to have an edge over others. In addition, we also provide digital marketing, IT consulting, and cloud services to clients worldwide.

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