Now that you’ve identified what your business requires in an e-commerce platform, it is time to select the best option for your site. Blue Zenith currently partners with Bigcommerce and Woocommerce.
Which Platform Is The Right One For My Business?
Now that you’ve identified exactly “what” and “how” you’ll be selling online, it is important to choose the right e-commerce platform for your new site. In this blog post, we will introduce you to our current e-commerce partners – Bigcommerce and Woocommerce. This blog post is not a self-help guide for our clients to choosing one solution over another – one is not necessarily better or worse than the other, and at Blue Zenith, we personally consult with all of our new clients and offer expert advice and expertise tailored to meet your specific business needs.
Bigcommerce
Bigcommerce is a comprehensive, on-demand platform that includes everything you need to successfully begin selling your products and services online. The service includes a virtual shopping cart, a feature-rich product catalog, a payment gateway with comprehensive shipping and tax calculators, easy-to-use marketing and SEO tools, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) features and powerful conversion and analytics tools. In addition to being feature-rich, Bigcommerce is also reliable with a 99.994% average up-time! Your store will always be available to your customer, no matter when they choose to shop online.
Woocommerce
Woocommerce is a WordPress ecommerce plugin that offers “enterprise-level quality and features”. Woocommerce differs from Bigcommerce in that the former is a toolkit that expands the capabilities of WordPress, a Content Management System (CMS) and blogging platform, while the latter is a stand-alone CMS and e-commerce platform. Like WordPress, Woocommerce is Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) and it is designed to work with standard WordPress themes; in addition, the developers of Woocommerce have designed both free and paid “premium” themes that are designed specifically to work with Woocommerce.
Which Platform Should I Choose?
Neither, at least at this point. You may notice that we haven’t offered a side-by-side comparison of each service, or compared the “positive” and “negative” attributes of each. Each platform provides different values to a project based on what you, the client, want included in your e-commerce site and how you want your e-commerce business to function. We ask a variety of questions centered on the day-to-day operations of your business, including who will actually be running the store, how they will be fulfilling orders, and how the notification, record keeping and fulfillment processes will actually function. Once we have a complete understanding of your individual business model, we will review each solution and recommend one that best fits your business.