Which shopping cart framework should I pick?
Well, if you already have a store up and running, this wouldn’t be a challenge but if you are still contemplating which should you pick, you can consider our suggestions:
- OpenCart: This is primarily a light shopping cart system built as an opensource framework with quite a number of themes, plugins and support over the years. Its developers are based in Hong Kong and have quite been active with it. There are a lot of language translations for it as well. You can check out the community here to learn more: www.opencart.com
- WordPress: WordPress is primarily a blogging platform turned into a shopping cart with the help of external plugins. One of them is WooCommerce, which our own plugin complements. It probably has the largest theme community on the internet as well as plugins. Updates are zappy and very forward thinking, embracing modern technologies and even the admin panel is very mobile friendly. Developing for WordPress was the easiest of them all as they had developers and ease of integration in mind all the way!
- PrestaShop: Prestashop like OpenCart is built up as a shopping cart platform and is more robust than OpenCart but again, this makes it a bit slow at times, as most of its functionality, including core ones are all built around modules. It is active and has a lot of developers churning out themes and modules to expand its capabilities
- Shopify: This is a hosted shopping cart framework with great support. If you want out of the box solution with easy installation, this is should be your choice but deep customization might be a bit limiting. But they do have great collection of apps as well.
Our thoughts: If you want a light shopping cart with just-in-need features, go for OpenCart. If community is your thing and want to blog alongside your store, WordPress is the ultimate bet considering also it has a plethora of themes and plugins; WordPress developers are as the seashore sand. PrestaShop is best suited for large stores and will require a lot of computing power.
Lastly if you want a granular control of your shop and have all the resources, time-wise and coding skills or you have a team, you should do custom integration.