B2C eCommerce platform and software solutions

Running an online store is harder than ever. You need to exceed your customers' expectations and offer a flawless experience if you want shoppers to visit your site again and again. Whether you're expanding your online store, looking for new solutions for improvement or starting a business from scratch, choosing a business ecommerce solution has a significant impact on the profitability and success of your online store. That's why you need to find the most reliable and secure platform among the many alternatives.

In business, before making large investments, you need to assess how effective and profitable the investment in a premium online store platform will be. Let's take a look at the possible options for enterprise e-commerce solutions.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce is a plugin for WordPress (also known as "WP"), the world's most popular content management platform.

The advantages of Woocommerce

• Free of charge. The central system of Woocommerce is free of charge and enables, among other things: Inventory control, discount coupons, access to digital sales statistics.
• *simple control of processes. It can be integrated with various services, e.g. PayPal.
• Very secure, as updates and releases of new versions are carried out frequently, which reduces failures and errors.
• Very flexible. It is possible to add new changes and features because the WooCommerce system is open source. This solution enables the creation of extensions and plugins.
• As it is based on WordPress and aims to prioritize content, Woocommerce offers excellent opportunities for good marketing and SEO measures, which are very helpful in managing your online store.

The disadvantages of Woocommerce

• If you have many products and customers, the Woocommerce system may slow down. However, if you have a development team, this can be solved, but depends on regular investment.
• This plugin is perfect for working in simple online stores, but has only a few functions compared to ready-made systems. If you have a good developer or programmer who adds new functions, this is not a disadvantage.

Various estimates suggest that this free open source plugin supports almost a third of all e-commerce stores operating on the internet. While small businesses make the best use of WooCommerce, several large companies believe that this e-commerce plugin does not provide the value and expertise that their extensive operations require. So WooCommerce is not a suitable option for enterprise online stores.

Shopify

Shopify is a hosted e-commerce platform that can be used to create a custom e-commerce store. To use this software, one only needs to pay a monthly fee and then build a webshop. It offers store owners several features such as organizing products, accepting payments, tracking orders and customizing the online store. Shopify Plus is the Enterprise Edition of Shopify for fast-growing, high-volume e-commerce businesses.

The advantages of Shopify Plus:

• Shopify is the easiest platform if you want your business to run as fast as possible. It is very easy to use and is intuitive to understand.
• Simple workflow. Handling tasks, tracking orders, performing transactions and managing inventory is easy with Shopify. You'll find all the functionality you've ever wanted under one roof, making your workflow easier.
• Secure and reliable. With Shopify Plus, you don't have to worry about your store being attacked by viruses and trojans. As Shopify developers continue to monitor their networks from time to time, your problems are sure to be fixed. Shopify is the fast, agile and reliable solution.
• Scalability. Shopify Plus offers scalable SaaS hosting. This has the advantage of reducing IT and personnel costs. Performance and flexibility are also guaranteed.
• Multi-channel functionality. Shopify Plus is also available for all major marketplaces and social media. Get to know your customers where they spend most of their time. The multi-channel functionality improves your interactions with them, makes it easier to sell products and services and increases brand awareness.

The disadvantages of Shopify Plus:

• No changes possible at checkout. If the store is not running under a Shopify Plus license, the checkout process (in this case the complete order process after the shopping cart) is no longer part of the respective template, but outsourced to checkout.shopify.com.
• The checkout cannot be customized. The checkout can be customized with CSS, but additional fields cannot be edited and control is limited. It can be very frustrating for some retailers to add advanced features such as searching by zip code.
• Region-specific functionalities. It has been observed that Shopify is biased towards its customer base in the UK and North America. Some of its features, such as language availability and payment methods, are more convenient for the merchants from the above-mentioned regions. Although it is a very minor issue, it may cause certain problems for merchants belonging to other regions.
• The markup language for templates. Shopify's markup language is known as "liquid". Use the combination of objects, filters and tags to load content. When building your store, knowledge of Liquid can come in handy.
• Difficulties when switching to other platforms. Although the content and products remain the same, the overall appearance and functionality of the platform change. If you decide to switch from Shopify to another platform in the future, you may have to rebuild everything from scratch.
• Limited CMS. Shopify's content management system does not allow store owners to publish rich content such as blogs or vlogs.
• Platform-bound. If Shopify runs into financial problems, your business is at risk. You don't have your own servers that you can easily back up and move to another company. This is a significant vendor risk that you need to consider.

Pricing in Shopify Plus

There is no fixed price for Shopify Plus. Pricing is negotiable, but depends on the size of your business, current turnover, annual turnover, etc. Pricing varies from company to company, and it may be helpful to know that the cheapest cost for Shopify Plus is $2000 per month.

Magento

Although there are many big players in the e-commerce market, Magento is the leader in the online business world. The Magento platform was officially launched in 2008 and has evolved over the years with updates and redesigns. In 2018, Adobe finally bought the company Magento Inc for 1.68 billion. Magento is used in more than 240,000 stores worldwide and is present in more than 50 countries.

Magento Enterprise is ideal for medium to large online stores with high turnover and loyal customers. One of the main reasons for choosing this platform is the ability to segment buyers. This functionality allows you to treat unique customer groups in different ways: you can make sales, offer special prices and encourage personalized purchases.

The advantages of Magento

• Flexibility. With Magento, you can customize everything so you can create your website exactly the way you want it. With its flexibility, Magento is the best e-commerce solution for fast-growing businesses. Magento offers a lot of flexibility in terms of offering products in multiple colors, materials and designs.
• Integration of third-party providers. Magento offers third-party integrations for various purposes, e.g. importing products, analyzing website performance and retrieving real-time information.
• User-friendly interface. Magento websites have one of the best navigation systems available. The personalized user interface makes you feel more comfortable when selecting products.
• Scalability. Magento Enterprise can handle thousands of products. In fact, Magento can support up to five hundred thousand products and thousands of transactions per hour. This is a noticeable advantage because you can customize Magento without limitations. In Magento Enterprise Edition, you can create an unlimited number of SKUs.
• Magento is a mobile-optimized platform because it allows you to seamlessly create a mobile-optimized website and offer your customers the best mobile experience.
• There is a large community of Magento users as it is one of the most popular e-commerce platforms in the world.
• Magento Enterprise also supports multiple languages, multiple currencies and localized payment methods. Among other things, it takes into account country-specific features and makes it easy to calculate VAT.
• Magento Enterprise also offers excellent marketing opportunities. The system can be used to segment customers and also includes the functionality of product gifts, email marketing, SEO, customer loyalty program and automatic up-/cross-selling.

The disadvantages of Magento Enterprise

• Complicated solution. Magento is a multi-tiered software and its complex architecture makes the website development process quite difficult and time-consuming. With Magento, it often takes more time to make the same customizations as other platforms at a lower cost.
• Developer. Magento is a huge platform (over twenty thousand files and two hundred database tables). Finding a good Magento web agency with the qualified and experienced developers is not easy. The main reason for this is the need for a deep knowledge of object-oriented development and a lot of experience with the software.
• Cost. Magento Enterprise Edition is expensive compared to Magento Community Edition (if all functions are provided by third-party modules). Licensing for Magento 2 Enterprise Edition ranges from $22,000.00 to $125,000.00 per year based on expected annual gross revenue.

Shopware

Shopware is an innovative German solution for the creation of online stores that is becoming increasingly popular thanks to the many advantages it offers and its commitment to innovation and adaptation to the current needs of digital commerce. It is an excellent platform for creating modern and innovative online stores, characterized by its ease of use and emotional appeal to customers when shopping. It is the most popular software in the German-speaking e-commerce scene with around 80,000 installations and is primarily suitable for medium to very large online store projects.

With Shopware Enterprise, both B2B and B2C business processes can be easily mapped in one system solution. Thanks to the modular software architecture, it is possible to realize classic e-commerce requirements as well as specific sales solutions. The modular platform can handle even the most demanding and complex e-commerce projects and guarantees security, stability and maximum performance.

The advantages of Shopware Enterprise Edition

• Shopware is multi-shop capable. Just like Magento, Shopware also has the option of managing several stores under one roof. Product and catalog management is very easy with the Shopware solution. The extensive and flexible tools provided by Shopware make it easy to manage products and your catalog.
• Extensive marketing functionalities. The system provides numerous marketing functions. For example, it is possible to segment customers via customer streams according to interests or previously demonstrated purchasing behavior. Digital publishing allows you to create beautiful banners to create the best shopping experience.
• Flexibility. Shopware is a flexible platform that allows you to build an online business of any size and for any industry.
• High Scalability. Thanks to the integrated tools, it is easy for developers to increase performance and scalability.
• Specific functionalities for complex business models. These are offer management, rights and role management, field service function.
• Integrated ERP solution. Shopware has an integration with Pickware, which is an ERP solution that enables the connection between the POS system and warehouse management.
• Search engine friendly. Shopware is SEO-optimized. It offers the possibility to create SEO-friendly URLs, customize meta titles and descriptions, use rich snippets, has a built-in sitemap and you can easily work with redirects and canonicals.
• Unlimited staging environments. Enterprise customers can benefit from the creation of an unlimited number of staging environments and perform various tests.
• Extended CMS functions. The CMS extensions can be used to design the store pages according to customer requirements. With Shopware Publisher, creating, editing and publishing experience worlds is simple and intuitive.
• Elastic Search. In Shopware Enterprise Edition, users have access to the high-performance search function Elastic Search.

The disadvantages of Shopware Enterprise Edition

• Complex solution. You need an experienced Shopware Agency that has the high-quality expertise to create a high-quality Shopware Enterprise Shop.
• The costs. Shopware Enterprise Edition is quite expensive compared to Shopware Professional Edition. The licensing for Shopware Enterprise Edition ranges from 2.495,00 € per month or one-time for 39.995,00 €.

Choosing a B2C enterprise software is quite difficult. Enterprise-level digital commerce requires seamless integration into existing processes and systems. Therefore, you should analyze the whole thing carefully. In our opinion, Magento and Shopware are the best enterprise solutions for a B2C store. The second is cheaper and has been gaining popularity very quickly for a long time, even outside the DACH region, and is a perfect Magento alternative. We would be happy to advise you on this, please contact us.