Various CMS E-commerce tools are available these days. Among them Magento, Shopify and OpenKart are most popular.
Magento
Magento is an ecommerce platform built on open source technology which provides online merchants with a flexible shopping cart system, as well as control over the look, content and functionality of their online store. Magento offers powerful marketing, search engine optimization, and catalog-management tools.
Online Magento development services apply the conventions of object-oriented programming and model–view–controller architecture.
Its a subsidiary company of Adobe.
OpenCart
OpenCart is an online store management system. It is PHP-based, using a MySQL database and HTML components. Support is provided for different languages and currencies. It is freely available under the GNU General Public License.
The OpenCart marketplace features 13000+ modules and themes to jump-start, grow and expand your business. You can find beautiful themes for just about any sector, service integrations, payment providers, shipping methods, social media, marketing, accounting, reporting, sales as well as language packs.
Magento vs. Opencart – The similarities
Generally, Magento and OpenCart actually have a lot in common. They are both open source platforms that are ultimately designed to facilitate E-commerce activity.
Both are developed in PHP and use templates to upload products, so they can be maintained by non-programmers. They are also rich in resources such as extensions, add-on products and plugins that can easily be added to them to support new functions.
One of the greatest advantages that both Magento and OpenCart users enjoy is their ability to support multiple languages and currencies, making them a global solution that can suit businesses all around the world.
Hosting Plans and Options
Besides the selection of the e-commerce platform, the quality of the web hosting service you purchase will also make a big difference in the performance of your online store. Bare in mind though that Top Magento development company tends to consume a lot of resources, which means you will need a stronger hosting plan to support your store performance. Forget about shared hosting as it will most likely be outgrown before you notice it. You may also receive recommendation such as hosting your back-end on a separate server.
Open cart in this case will be cheaper to host thanks to its light weight, and will tend to work better for small to medium size stores. Magento performs better in hosting medium to large sized business websites.
There are also some e-commerce platforms like Shopify where hosting service is provided by platform itself. It is included in the user’s plan subscription.
Usage and Features
Magento has been gaining worldwide recognition for its ability to do just about anything you like and build the store of your dreams. It offers highly customizable shopping experiences, unlimited design options, powerful SEO resources and unlimited plug-in and integrations. Every feature you can think of was probably built already and is available on MagentoCommerce. If it’s not on there, then surely a talented and certified Magento developer can create that solution for you. Magento has far better capabilities when it comes to SEO as compared to opencart.
OpenCart on the other hand is a lot easier to program, but has a smaller community basis. It’s great for start-ups that need to deliver quickly without much integration. It provides a powerful shopping cart and some great tools which are far more intuitive and straight forward.
Both CMS has their own advantages. Magento is using worldwide while Opencart is easy to use.