Cost Effective Alternatives for Your E-commerce Store

If you are among those website owners who are looking to migrate to some other platforms, there are various good alternatives available, but the choice completely depends on your own set of requirements and preferences.

However, before moving on with the migration to other better alternatives, it is necessary to evaluate the drawbacks that have caused its failure among its clients.

It becomes important for the website owners to migrate their online store to some better alternatives without affecting the pace and productivity of their businesses. For this, we have selected some alternatives that you can easily select to migrate your store and these are:

• Shopify
• Bigcommerce
• Prestashop
• Woocommerce
• Zencart
• Ubercart
• Opencart
• VirtueMart
• OSCommerce
• Wix

1. Shopify

Shopify is a one-in-all eCommerce online shopping cart solution for those online store owners who are thinking to migrate their store. It includes everything that online retailers require to sell their products online.

Benefits of choosing Shopify as an alternative:

• It allows the categorization of products based on their collections.
• It comes with an advanced Content Management System that helps you to check your website’s visitors, sales, referrals, and traffic sources.
• It comes with a rich text editor that you can use for developing impressive product descriptions.
• It is blessed with a rich app store for adding more functionality to your online store.

2. Bigcommerce

If you are having a startup business and planning to switch your online store to a more affordable and best-feature online shopping cart solution, Bigcommerce is there for you. Being a hosted solution, Bigcommerce helps you in saving your investments required to keep a development team for introducing changes to your online store and it is blessed with regularly updated and new features to make your website more customizable and personalized as per your preferences.

Benefits of Bigcommerce as an alternative:

• It comes with nearly 1000 templates to choose from that are all easily customizable to fit the merchandising requirements.
• Comes with fly-out and standard category menus
• Integrated with a smart search box along with “did you mean” functionality
• Supports multiple currencies, taxes, and languages

3. Prestashop

When you have decided to migrate your online store to Prestashop, you can do so by registering your account at Cart2Cart with your Google or Facebook Account

However, the main question is why choose Cart2Cart to migrate your store to Prestashop. This is because there are no specific technical skills required for performing the complete migration of your website and the security and data transfer accuracy are also guaranteed.

Benefits of choosing Prestashop as an alternative:

• Comes with a free shopping cart
• Integrated with a vast range of product management tools
• Advanced SEO and marketing tools
• Various payment and shipping gateways

4. Woocommerce

Woocommerce, a free WordPress plugin is very useful for businesses, which are planning to switch their online store. This WordPress plugin makes selling the products online very easy and it’s a good option for first-timers since it does not require tough technical expertise to operate your online store.

Benefits of Woocommerce as an alternative:

• Besides being free, it is very easy to install and operate.
• It offers a very professional and attractive look to the online stores.
• It offers enhanced security to the online store owners since it continues to update on a regular basis thus eliminating the chances of security issues.
• It offers greater flexibility to the website owners to add and sell their products.

5. Zencart

Being free, versatile, and strong online shopping cart software, Zencart is treated as one of the ideal alternatives for store owners to migrate their online shopping stores. Apart from offering personalized customization facilities to the website owners, Zencart can do automated tasks and it allows easy navigation of the products and categories.

Benefits of Zencart as an alternative:

• It offers various currencies, taxes, and even languages. It offers different options for shipping and payment to customers and website owners.
• It allows the search engine optimizations with the use of Meta tags and keywords, which could also be optimized as per each product and category.
• It allows the shopping cart to act as the main page of your website.

6. Opencart

An open-source shopping platform, Opencart offers a good choice for migrating your online store owing to the wide range of plugins available for this platform and it also comes with an easy customization facility that makes the migration much more convenient and effortless.

The migration to Opencart can be done using the Cart2Cart service, which provides automated shopping cart migration without any worry of data inconsistency or redundancy

Benefits of Opencart as an alternative:

• A large number of plugin availability makes Opencart a good choice over other platforms.
• Has a good technical support community along with discussion boards for answering the queries of its customers.
• It comes with vast in-built functionalities like Magento and Prestashop that offers the website owners an opportunity to make their website migration adjustable as per their requirements.
• Comes with an easy and clear administration panel offering first-timers a better choice to opt for.

7. Ubercart

Considered Drupal’s eCommerce shopping cart solution, Ubercart is a perfect alternative due to its incredible efficiency and usefulness and is regularly updated with a skilled technical support community. This eCommerce shopping cart solution allows the users to use Drupal’s core code, which is a complete package of great capabilities and performance. The website owners have the choice to customize the features of Ubercart as per their choice to give their websites a more personalized feel and touch.

Benefits of using Ubercart as an alternative:

• Easily compatible with Drupal
• Product catalogs can easily get customized
• Provides flexibility and versatility in its code
• Comes with payment system integration
• Users can easily pay and checkout a single page
• Filling the cart and maintaining the orders is easy

8. VirtueMart

VirtueMart is another better alternative for migrating your online store since this could also be achieved by using the services of Cart2Cart which offers automated, quick, and appropriate transfer of the existing eCommerce website to VirtueMart. By using Cart2Cart for migration, you are saved from worries of losing your important data, redundancy, or any other potential errors that occur while the migration tool is placed from one store to another.

Benefits of choosing VirtueMart as an alternative:

• Highly advanced and most popular eCommerce software in Joomla
• It is ideal for carrying all important and basic online store applications
• It comes with the facility of managing the products, and user lists with greater ease within Joomla
• This could be easily integrated with the Joomla Content Management System for offering a safe online shopping environment.
• It offers a host of features and the functionality can be extended using several plugins, templates, and modules.

9. OSCommerce

Rewarded as one of the most popular and comprehensive open source eCommerce solutions, OScommerce is considered a good alternative due to its immense list of features and it is also one of the most versatile shopping cart solutions that provide immense customization choices for the store owners depending on their needs.

Benefits of choosing OSCommerce as an alternative:

• Comes with full features and options for customization
• Supports a vast range of shipping services and credit card processors
• Handle the vast amount of databases with the indexing feature
• An immense number of add-on modules are available

10. Wix

Wix is one of the most dependable e-commerce platforms you can consider if you are looking for an alternative to migrate your online store. With robust yet easy-to-use features, Wix allows you to create, manage and promote your e-commerce website with ease.

Also, you will get numerous templates to choose from and customize. Due to the availability of drag-and-drop features, you can easily build your e-commerce website even without any technical know-how.

With Wix, you can showcase your products in stunning galleries, with the flexibility for you to modify product options, add images and alter descriptions. Moreover, Wix is mobile-optimized, enabling your customers to access your online store on any device, anytime and anywhere.

Benefits of Wix as an Alternative

• Allows you to set the tax as well as shipping rules about the customer’s location
• Provides a store manager panel for tracking inventories and orders
• Highlights products with limited stocks or discounted prices with ribbons
• Allows displaying unlimited products and adding up to 15 images per product

Conclusion:

If you are going to migrate your online store, you absolutely need not worry, since the alternatives discussed above are good choices and our skilled team of eCommerce developers is there to assist you in this crucial process of your branding and business. However, if you have any other platforms in your mind that you are planning to switch your site to, do share them with us in the comment section.

You will never go wrong with any of the above-mentioned platforms. They are all great choices for running a successful eCommerce store.

In the end, going through a list of best-suited alternatives for your eCommerce store is not about picking the best or the worst, rather it is about having a holistic realization of your requirements, skills, and budget. By considering these, you can comfortably choose the right platform which is absolutely suitable for your business.