Ecommerce represents the platform of communiqué between companies and their customers through the internet. It started almost three decades ago and has grown stronger, with over 28 million eCommerce stores worldwide. And that number is growing every day.
Ecommerce communicates with its clients through various services like shopping and online banking; thus, it facilitates people to do online shopping at their convenience. They can buy, order, and at the same time, stay in touch with the latest trends.
In a nutshell, ecommerce offers” convenience” to both companies and their customers, which is why it is growing with each passing day.
Considering all the above, you want to start an online eCommerce website, so you need to decide which platform is right for you. Selecting a platform requires extreme caution because your choice can be critical for the future of your eCommerce store.
If you have a WordPress website, you can now convert your website into an eCommerce store by integrating it with any eCommerce platform. This helps you with all the essential features to run your eCommerce store by providing you with all the tools to complete the intricate process of running your physical and online store.
In this article, we compare WooCommerce vs PrestaShop, the two major players in eCommerce entity. But before comparing, we would like to introduce them first, so let’s dig into it.
WooCommerce
WooCommerce is extremely customizable and flexible. It appeared in 2011, and since then, it has continued gaining popularity. In 2015, Automatic, the owner of WordPress, acquired WooCommerce, which boosted its fame significantly.
Due to its versatility, WooCommerce suits almost any kind of online business. WooCommerce assures optimum ease of use with all its unlimited features and functions—this guarantee smooth sailing for you and your eCommerce store in the eCommerce world.
Being built on WordPress, WooCommerce is flexible with unlimited possibilities. And it provides seamless integration with sites powered by WordPress. Currently, WooCommerce is at the peak of all eCommerce platforms, with a 29% share of the total market. It is an undisputed choice for both small and large-scale businesses.
PrestaShop
PrestaShop started its journey in 2005. Since then, it has gone through many phases of success and failure. In 2021, PrestaShop joined the MBE worldwide group to increase its augmentation and become the leading commerce platform for accelerating business expansion worldwide.
PrestaShop can be defined as a dependable content management system for eCommerce stores. It is open source like WooCommerce and has built its reputation among developers worldwide. PrestaShop provides and caters to many eCommerce avenues, but the main focus is on an eCommerce store.
Due to its strength in eCommerce stores, it has become popular among eCommerce store owners. PrestaShop is not short of features and offers dependable administrative tools to run your eCommerce store smoothly.
Now that we know both platforms, we must compare them on certain key features criterion. This makes the comparison more effective and can help you do that for other platforms.
- Market share
- Ease of use
- Store management
- SEO friendly
- Security
- Flexibility and customization
Market Share – WooCommerce vs PrestaShop
Market share is the key parameter to determine how good you are in terms of credibility, confidence, and popularity. This also shows how much user base a product has.
WooCommerce is the leader in the eCommerce market, with a share of 29%. That means WooCommerce enjoys user confidence and has a huge satisfied user base. This outstanding market share is also due to the popularity of WordPress, which is powering 43% of all websites on the internet.
PrestaShop is also getting popular worldwide; according to BuiltWith, PrestaShop is the 6th most popular in the open source category and 7th most popular in the same category worldwide. The total market share of PrestaShop is 0.8% of the total content management market.
Thus, it’s safe to say that WooCommerce has a huge advantage in terms of market share.
Ease Of Use – WooCommerce vs PrestaShop
Being a businessman, it is a fair desire to have an eCommerce platform that is up and running in no time and start selling goods. With WooCommerce and PrestaShop, you must keep that desire aside for a while. Since both are open-source platforms, they require a steep learning curve.
WooCommerce
WooCommerce is easy to start with, but you must arrange everything since it does not come with hosting, domain name, and SSL certification. Hiring a reputable hosting provider resolves all these issues. Most hosting providers offer pre-installed WooCommerce.
Now you can set up your store with easy to use of Setup Wizard, which guides you through the basics of an eCommerce store, like pages, payments, currency, shipping, tax application, linguistics, etc., in a few minutes.
WooCommerce is extremely flexible and customizable, and if you want to take full benefits of this platform, there are add-ons, plugins, and themes available to be integrated. For that, you require knowledge of WordPress or can hire a developer to take the eCommerce store to the next level.
PrestaShop
Like WooCommerce, PrestaShop is also a self-hosted platform, so you know the drill for WooCommerce can be applied here. PrestaShop is not easy-to-use software. You have to have advanced PHP coding knowledge to integrate the platform.
Being more technical, the software is time-consuming to set up. Although, PrestaShop offers demo videos that help you gear up your store. You can also check its responsiveness on mobile. Since the software is free to download, there is no harm in giving it a try.
Regarding ease of use, both platforms fall on the same page.
Store Management – WooCommerce vs PrestaShop
An eCommerce platform promises abundant features required to run the store smoothly and clutter-free. It means that platforms ensure an optimized customer experience right from entry to exit.
Effective store management should offer multiple payment options, order handling, content management, promotion and discount tools, easy checkouts and reporting tools, etc.
WooCommerce
It is effortless to set up a store in WooCommerce. It will guide you in setting up your shop in whichever way you want. The Setup Wizard makes it very easy to configure the main settings, whether setting a theme or automating taxes calculation.
WooCommerce comes with thousands of free themes, plugins, and add-ons. And that makes store management quite convenient. You can employ any plugin for any feature for store management without using third-party paid extensions.
WooCommerce facilitates multiple payment gateways, shipping methods, multilingual features, etc. It has all the necessary reporting and analytical tools, and you can always go to the WooCommerce Settings tab to make changes to your store.
PrestaShop
PrestaShop has all features you may need for Store management. It is supplied with all the settings under the Shop Parameters tab, where you can configure it to resolve many issues like SSL certification, security settings, and multi-payment gateways. In addition to bank transfers, you can integrate third-party add-ons for any ease you want for your customers.
SEO – WooCommerce vs PrestaShop
Search engine optimization plays a vital role in the success of your eCommerce store. It is important to build a good ranking for your eCommerce platform. Because if the customer cannot see you in the market, the valuable client is lost.
WooCommerce
It assures credible SEO integration with its free Yoast plugin. WooCommerce also enables you to make adapted URLs, make detailed titles and meta-titles. When needed, you can upgrade your Yoast plugin for ultimate SEO performance.
PrestaShop
No platform can compromise on SEO capabilities, and PrestaShop is no exception. It offers a product editor, making adding meta titles and descriptions of items easy. Product redirections can be made through configuration, by which you can strengthen your catalog.
For more SEO options, you need to integrate a third-party extension, and unfortunately, there are not many options to choose from, and they also cost you.
WooCommerce offers a choice of a huge number of plugins, and it also inherits WordPress’s inbuilt SEO characteristics, which gives it an edge over PrestaShop.
Security – WooCommerce vs PrestaShop
Fail-proof security is the make or break of any eCommerce platform. Security features build customer confidence and bring credibility to your store. Since both WooCommerce and PrestaShop are self-hosted platforms, it is their owner’s job to arrange data security for their platform.
WooCommerce
WooCommerce offers plugin integration to provide dependable security of user data. You can employ plugins to create two-factor authentications for your customers. This raises your eCommerce store’s security level, and everybody who wants to log in will have to authenticate their user identity with a code in SMS, Email, or phone call.
Being a WooCommerce store owner, you are responsible for compliance with PCI-DSS. Support documentation is available for you on making your store PCI compliant. Integration of plugins like Jetpack, and Wordfence, takes security to the next level and offers Real-time monitoring, Spam filtering automation, and daily scan. These plugins automatically block malicious IPs, offer two-factor verification and password protection, and assure site recovery with file protection.
PrestaShop
PrestaShop is, by default, PCI compliant when installed. Being a European company, you must follow GDPR (general data protection regulation) to protect your data.
But to make the security foolproof, you need to integrate third-party paid modules like re-captcha and security pro, or you can install the Official GDPR compliance module developed by PrestaShop. That’s how PrestaShop assures the protection of your customer’s sensitive data.
Both WooCommerce and PrestaShop are open-source platforms, and considering vulnerabilities of overt source code, both need to employ plugins and modules to ensure the safety of sensitive user data.
Flexibility And Customization – WooCommerce vs PrestaShop
Flexibility and customization are the shining attributes of open-source platforms. With these, you can take your store to any extent; the only limitation is your imagination.
Customization enables you to convert your store according to your needs and run your store, giving your customers an optimized experience that helps conversions.
WooCommerce
In flexibility and customization, WooCommerce exhibits a swaggering edge over PrestaShop. It offers thousands of plugins with rich features. All these features enable you to give your store any possible functionality.
WooCommerce themes collection is enormous, addressing any business and style. Several third parties offer premium themes to cater to more complex business model needs. Furthermore, these WordPress themes integrate seamlessly with WooCommerce.
PrestaShop
It does not disappoint you with its flexibility and customization. PrestaShop offers a rich source of 3000 modules to help customize your store to any task with robust features.
It also furnishes you with many themes that suit any business type. These themes have the functionality of a template, which you can easily customize and set up by your business type.
Conclusion
It is for you to decide which platform suits your business needs. Both these platforms can handle businesses of any size and functionality. This is because they have limitless potential to expand according to your needs.
Furthermore, unlike fully hosted platforms where your hands are tied down on customization and flexibility, these open-source platforms let you develop an eCommerce platform that is totally in your control and gives you complete ownership.
These platforms are loved by developers worldwide. Due to this, both owners and developers enjoy a healthy relationship between giving and taking.
I hope this article helps you choose what is right for your business. GOOD LUCK!
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