Some of the Best PHP Ecommerce Software
Since PHP is one of the most widely-used scripting languages today, this language is used often for web development. In fact, it has been around the longest all of them all. On top of that, it’s one of the easiest ways to create a great ecommerce website.
Although today there are many great ecommerce platforms to choose from, there are a few written in PHP that we think might help you with selecting a platform that is right for you.
An ecommerce platform is what allows companies to sell items and services online. You can choose between a hosted or an on-premise platform, but the latter tends to be costlier and just more difficult to work with overall, which is why the best ecommerce software tends to be hosted. The thing is, online businesses also need extra software in order to handle functions such as accounting, order and inventory management, as well as customer service. In other words, in order to manage all of that efficiently, you need to have a solid ecommerce platform.
Before we dive into the world of ecommerce software, it’s important to address some of the main criteria that makes one good. For one, you want to make sure that there’s an active development team behind it that is constant with software updates and fixes. Additionally, you want to make sure that they’ve had some experience. It wouldn’t be fair to you to be their little experiment. Lastly, you’ll want to make sure that it’ll be easy for you to sell. Adjusting the prices, uploading photos, and adding pages, for example, all need to be easy processes either post a bit of training that they offer or right off the bat. However, these are just a few things that make up the top software. To see what other features and functions that they offer, keep reading further.
The best PHP ecommerce software
WooCommerce
This is actually a WordPress plugin. WooCommerce comes with a variety of plugins and themes that are either free or paid that’ll allow you to personalize both the website and the shopping cart. It’s a great solution if you’ve created your website using WordPress and are interested in integrating an ecommerce site into it. Overall, it’s not complicated to work with, it comes with many extensions, it’s free, and you can personalize it to your wants and needs with ease.
This software does, however, come with many updates. As a result, this causes the WordPress plugin to be up to date whereas WooCommerce isn’t in sync. Additionally, the expenses can add up when it comes to customization and you’ve really got to understand a lot if you want to efficiently use it.
Magento
You have to pay for this solution, but as a result, it comes with a lot more. It’s got many themes and modules, a few of which you can find for free, and you can personalize them to your preferences. A few things in particular that you can personalize include ensuring access to both shipping rates and businesses, in-store pickup, as well as both review and social media plugins. However, that’s just a glimpse of everything it has to offer.
The thing is, though, if you’ve got a small, single server, it will run slow for you. It also creates indices of lots of data and then compiles all of it into flattened tables, which boosts performance, but takes up the storage. It also comes with a big learning curve, so you’ve got to be willing to put in the work because it can get quite complicated.
OpenCart
Unlike the first three, this platform is free, since it’s opensource. Originally written in Perl, it has now been working in the PHP rewrite. It still continues to develop, however, and so far, it’s got more than 12,000 themes and plugins, a few of which you do need to pay for. Another addition that they have, which is unlike any other open source platform, is the ability to opt for paid support.
However, whenever there are any updates, a few functionalities won’t work or will show that there’s an error. On top of that, you just won’t really know when the next one will occur, which can highly impact your business in a negative way. Additionally, both their features and interfaces aren’t the most well thought out.
If you believe that none of these PHP platforms will help your business go in the direction that you’d like it to go, there are many other alternatives out there! A good platform that we’d suggest for beginning your search would be Shopping Cart Elite.
Shopping Cart Elite
This is a complete ecommerce solution that gives companies the tools and features in order to make and manage their online stores. They offer a variety of ways to support their clients such as via phone, live support, and training. They also integrate with eBay, Google Shopping, Amazon, and Newegg, just to name a few. Additionally, a few of their many features include website design, data entry, ERP, shipping, and automation. A few of their biggest advantages include no transaction fees, no limit on website orders, abandoned cart recovery, as well as lots of room for customization, since design is one of the biggest points in the creation of a successful online store.
Their only flaw would really just lie in the fact that Shopping Cart Elite doesn’t come with a mobile app. However, it’s not very useful anyways given the amount of space it would take up on the device and the amount of data that wouldn’t be seen on there, given the amount of information that the platform profb3avides.
Conclusion
Although each of these platforms offers their own strengths and weaknesses based on their differences, for instance being open sourced or not, each one of them is at the top for a reason. Due to customer satisfaction from the ease of use, functions, and capabilities, they have allowed companies to achieve all of their wants and needs. It may seem like a lot to begin the research for your business, but remember that there are actually so many others out there to choose from, so we’ve actually made your job a bit easier. However, if you don’t want to go through all of them, I would suggest starting with Shopping Cart Elite because they really do offer you so much at a really good value. They’re the ones that will truly get to know your business to help you move onto greater things.