I have had the pleasure/pain of working with some of these top basic e-commerce platforms in the past. Shopify – Volusion – E-commerce enabled WordPress blogs – EDirectHost Ecommerce – Ecrater – etc. Let me list my personal list of pros/cons of each.
Shopify -
- PROS – Cheap and easy, quick to setup and takes no real knowledge of programming. Have a number of low cost plugins to enhance your site. Starts around $29 a month for 100 skus to list.
- CONS – You have to use their shopping cart which is hosted by them to be PCI Compliant. The customer sees that the website goes to another website for checkout and make them uneasy.
Volusion -
- Can’t recommend. They recently had another massive site outage. It’s been one of many in the past. Don’t use them. – see more info here – http://www.internetretailer.com/2012/07/10/volusion-suffers-another-power-outage
WordPress
- WordPress is popular amongst developers of eCommerce websites for a number of different reasons. One of the major reasons is that it offers applications that are easy to learn and use. These applications are generally quite affordable, and some of them are even free. The majority of the plug-ins and themes supplied by WordPress are open source and light weight in terms of size in comparison to Magento and other famous e-commerce solutions. The only major disadvantage is that it can’t be used for sites with a lot of sales due to heaviness of database queries.This is not an enterprise solution long term.
eDirectHost
- These guys are new to the field with a package starting at $39.95 a month for 100 skus. I actually have never worked with them but if you have any experience using there ecommerce website builder let me know.
eCrater
- A 100% free online marketplace for sellers. Really…. it’s free. Nothing to do but setup your products and promote it your customers. Of course you have limited options but you can’t beat the price.
Hope this helps you out in the future!!





