OpenCart vs Wordpress?

judaculla said:
That is probably good advice, although I've never had experience with opencart directly before. Opencart is designed to be an ecommerce platform and will likely out-perform Wordpress. However, take into account the following situations in which I feel you would likely find an advantage in using wordpress:

You want an easily-managed Blog (again, no experience with opencart)
You want an automated email responder series to begin sending for every new customer you get
You want to automatically publish new posts and products to your social media websites

These are all very vital functions of websites, and Wordpress handles them (through plugins mostly) very well. There are often 20+ different plugins available for any given task you're trying to accomplish in Wordpress, which makes things very easy and adjustable.

In my experience with ecommerce, albeit very limited, I never got many sells from people that seemed to come to my site to 'browse.' I got sales from direct visits from emails, social media, and organic search results. None of these involved having a good categorical menu structure, an intuitive shop page layout, or other features commonly associated with eCommerce platform advantages. This is obviously not how many larger ecomm sites would describe their experiences, but for a new business just starting out—reaching your customer is going to be more important than having a brilliantly-designed website.

IMO, Wordpress would likely be much easier to manage in this regard.
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I find these arguments incredibly strong. I will surely need a good email responder because I want to gather a large e-mail database. Aren't there any blogs with OpenCart? If I can implement one, then I think that I can go with it. Also, do you know whether there are any good and free plugins because there are many on Wordpress.

I have created a marketing strategy where social medias are ranked first and they will receive a lot of attention from my brand.
 
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roki4ka said:
Why not Presta?!
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Well I haven't considered it that's why. Wordpress because I have experience with it. OpenCart because I have heard that it's a good e-commerce solution, which I'd like to try. Magento, will be considered at a later stage when I am going to hire experienced developers to do the job.

Do you suggest Presta @roki4ka
 
Eternal1912 said:
I find these arguments incredibly strong. I will surely need a good email responder because I want to gather a large e-mail database. Aren't there any blogs with OpenCart? If I can implement one, then I think that I can go with it. Also, do you know whether there are any good and free plugins because there are many on Wordpress.

I have created a marketing strategy where social medias are ranked first and they will receive a lot of attention from my brand.
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I'm sure there is blogging accommodations with Opencart. It's important to realize that it will be an extension of Opencart though, and won't come close to the power of a Wordpress blog. This is very similar in how WooCommerce is an extension of Wordpress, and will never come close to the ecommerce power available with Magento.

I had a Magento site for a year or so (pre-version2) and found that the best blogging solution was really just a method to use wordpress functionality. It rocked for managing a store with large products, and with the right hosting Magento has incredibly low page-speeds.

All that being said, mail integration is such a popular demand that companies like MailChimp, Aweber, Madrill (not free anymore), and similar have integrations for most ecommerce platforms. For wordpress, MailPoet is a good free plugin that I used to use on a few sites. It's not what I would consider 'robust,' but alarmingly powerful and feature rich for a free plugin. I've been using a plugin called MyMail (available on CodeCanyon.net) lately, and really like it. It can be a bit over whelming getting used to all the features, but it is a really powerful plugin.

Regarding social media, Wordpress has a great plugin called NextScripts Autoposter that allows very customized posting to a lot of social sites. You can schedule posts, filter by category & tag, do link shortening, and a lot more. The free version is all right, but if you're doing a lot of social outreach it pays to upgrade to the premium. All things considered, I'd like to speak to the authors of the plugin and see what's holding them back from further development. As it stands that plugin doesn't really have any competition, and could dominate the social autoposting market completely, but development just sort of flounders around. It used to be able to take old posts and repost them, but that functionality doesn't work with newer versions of wordpress anymore.

That's more info than you want probably, so I'll leave you with this final thought:

On CodeCanyon, there are 4849 premium plugins available for Wordpress, and 984 specifically for WooCommerce. There are 366 available for Opencart.
 
judaculla said:
I'm sure there is blogging accommodations with Opencart. It's important to realize that it will be an extension of Opencart though, and won't come close to the power of a Wordpress blog. This is very similar in how WooCommerce is an extension of Wordpress, and will never come close to the ecommerce power available with Magento.

I had a Magento site for a year or so (pre-version2) and found that the best blogging solution was really just a method to use wordpress functionality. It rocked for managing a store with large products, and with the right hosting Magento has incredibly low page-speeds.

All that being said, mail integration is such a popular demand that companies like MailChimp, Aweber, Madrill (not free anymore), and similar have integrations for most ecommerce platforms. For wordpress, MailPoet is a good free plugin that I used to use on a few sites. It's not what I would consider 'robust,' but alarmingly powerful and feature rich for a free plugin. I've been using a plugin called MyMail (available on CodeCanyon.net) lately, and really like it. It can be a bit over whelming getting used to all the features, but it is a really powerful plugin.

Regarding social media, Wordpress has a great plugin called NextScripts Autoposter that allows very customized posting to a lot of social sites. You can schedule posts, filter by category & tag, do link shortening, and a lot more. The free version is all right, but if you're doing a lot of social outreach it pays to upgrade to the premium. All things considered, I'd like to speak to the authors of the plugin and see what's holding them back from further development. As it stands that plugin doesn't really have any competition, and could dominate the social autoposting market completely, but development just sort of flounders around. It used to be able to take old posts and repost them, but that functionality doesn't work with newer versions of wordpress anymore.

That's more info than you want probably, so I'll leave you with this final thought:

On CodeCanyon, there are 4849 premium plugins available for Wordpress, and 984 specifically for WooCommerce. There are 366 available for Opencart.
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Hmm, from what I see the benefits of Woocommerce are bigger. At least, I have the journal theme for free. Maybe I should install it and see whether it is the thing I want, if not I can simply change to a Woocommerce theme.

Aty said:
Magento
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What is your opinion about OpenCart and Woocommerce, Aty?
 
Eternal1912 said:
Well I haven't considered it that's why. Wordpress because I have experience with it. OpenCart because I have heard that it's a good e-commerce solution, which I'd like to try. Magento, will be considered at a later stage when I am going to hire experienced developers to do the job.

Do you suggest Presta @roki4ka
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For good or bad I have experience in all.

Last 2 years I have coded mainly on Magento but it is VERY HEAVY!!!

I like Presta because of their admin and organization.

If I have to put them in points I would do it like this:

1. Presta

2. OpenCart

3. Magento

4. Wordpress - I am putting it last because it is just a plugin and you can't have the full potential of an e-commerce platform
 
roki4ka said:
For good or bad I have experience in all.

Last 2 years I have coded mainly on Magento but it is VERY HEAVY!!!

I like Presta because of their admin and organization.

If I have to put them in points I would do it like this:

1. Presta

2. OpenCart

3. Magento

4. Wordpress - I am putting it last because it is just a plugin and you can't have the full potential of an e-commerce platform
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Thanks, so in my case, if it is not Presta you would suggest OpenCart? I will be opening a clothing e-commerce website with the Journal OpenCart theme, which has a blog implemented. My clothes will surely have attributes like size/color. I want my website to have newsletters, membership, discounts codes and stuff like that.
 
Whatever you choose you won't make a mistake. All are solid e-commerce solutions.
 
Go with Opencart , #1 opensource commercial platform support over 10k of products. Request less resources than any other (woocommerce+wordpress , joomla+virtualmart, magento).
Great premium themes available @ themeforest with average pricetag $25.

70% out of +2k commercial sites hosted with us are operating under opencart.

For less than 50 products you could go with WordPress+Woocommerce
 
tasburrfoot said:
Magento blows, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.
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Dude, you are kidding right? :p
By the way, it is not for newbies to be frank.

I have also worked with Magento 2.0.x but it's still a bit immature. Magento 1.9.x is as solid as rock! The only thing you need to do is learn it properly. Yeah, the learning curve is pretty steep indeed. Most of the developers do not understand the structure properly. It can be confusing at first, but it is not really bad.
 
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I know SEO said:
Keep in mind withing clothing/apparel each size/colour/design combination will result in 1 new product. With 50 product lines you're probably looking at 1000+ products.
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With magento, it's easily achieved using custom options. No extra configuration needed!! :)
 
Managing Shops with Magento was pain in the ass for me. User and support base is huge no doubt.
But thats experience from 2 or 3 years ago with the community edition.
The inheritance on several levels was sometimes a bit stressy.
Performance out of the box sucked, and I had to do multiple things to optimize that at that time.
Also magento optimized hosting was strongly recommended :(
But that may have changed.

I switched some shops with around 10 - 50K products to Shopware.
Most German inventory management systems work out of the box with it.
That's a huge selling point for us. Performance with out activated cache is nice and after it's impressive, on a medium VPS.
 
Magento or Open Cart will be your best bet. They are the better choices for long term.
 
CyberHour said:
Go with Opencart , #1 opensource commercial platform support over 10k of products. Request less resources than any other (woocommerce+wordpress , joomla+virtualmart, magento).
Great premium themes available @ themeforest with average pricetag $25.

70% out of +2k commercial sites hosted with us are operating under opencart.

For less than 50 products you could go with WordPress+Woocommerce
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Juneja said:
I would say OpenCart
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Gogol said:
With magento, it's easily achieved using custom options. No extra configuration needed!! :)
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RightFootFanatic said:
Managing Shops with Magento was pain in the ass for me. User and support base is huge no doubt.
But thats experience from 2 or 3 years ago with the community edition.
The inheritance on several levels was sometimes a bit stressy.
Performance out of the box sucked, and I had to do multiple things to optimize that at that time.
Also magento optimized hosting was strongly recommended :(
But that may have changed.

I switched some shops with around 10 - 50K products to Shopware.
Most German inventory management systems work out of the box with it.
That's a huge selling point for us. Performance with out activated cache is nice and after it's impressive, on a medium VPS.
Click to expand...

InstaWrite said:
Magento or Open Cart will be your best bet. They are the better choices for long term.
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I wish to thank everybody about they opinion and advices given. I decided to try OpenCart and I hope that it's the right platform for my business! Would you suggest any mandatory plugins or stuff that could be useful?
 
Yes, I would like to suggest you a handful of plugins/extensions for Opencart.
First of all, NitroPack - it's like the JetPack plugin for Wordpress. It optimizes and speeds up your OpenCart website.
AbandonedCarts - sends a follow-up email with a discount hook to your customers who have products left at their carts waiting to be checked out.
Price Change with option change - self-explanatory extension name.-
You can also install the FacebookLogin and X-Shipping Pro plugin if you want. Also install a live support chat option to your website.
 
InstaWrite said:
Yes, I would like to suggest you a handful of plugins/extensions for Opencart.
First of all, NitroPack - it's like the JetPack plugin for Wordpress. It optimizes and speeds up your OpenCart website.
AbandonedCarts - sends a follow-up email with a discount hook to your customers who have products left at their carts waiting to be checked out.
Price Change with option change - self-explanatory extension name.-
You can also install the FacebookLogin and X-Shipping Pro plugin if you want. Also install a live support chat option to your website.
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Aah, thank you very much for the proposed plugins mate! I just noted them down and i'll check them one by one when I start the creation of my website by the end of the week! Would love to hear more opinions and recommendations.
 
Eternal1912 said:
Aah, thank you very much for the proposed plugins mate! I just noted them down and i'll check them one by one when I start the creation of my website by the end of the week! Would love to hear more opinions and recommendations.
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Glad that you liked my suggestion. If you can please make a journey thread to share how well your business goes when you launch it.
 
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