Over the years, I have been fortunate enough to work with some really great business owners, entrepreneurs, marketers, and developers. Ten years ago, only a handful of small business owners were selling online, or had global ecommerce shops. Fast forward 10 years and most small business retailers are selling online, many on several channels in hopes of one day being on the Top 500 INC Retail list. While great business acumen, a thorough understanding of your market and business proposition are absolutely crucial to success, there is no denying that Ecommerce technology platforms have played a vital role in allowing smaller companies, the underdog, to rise above and compete with better funded competitors. With so many ecommerce platforms in the market, the choices for both large and small companies can be challenging. Disclaimer: We have several partnerships with some of the companies mentioned in this post. In one of our previous post we compared different Hosted vs Non- Hosted ecommerce systems. While the article was a great overview of the different systems, it did not dive into what I believe to be the most important component for a business owner or merchant making a decision about an ecommerce platform; COST. Cost is a pretty easy metric to quantify as this is how budgets are created. The cost of something is X, and I either have enough money to get X or I do not. With that being said, let’s dive in: In our opinion there are only three Wordpress Ecommerce vendors worth talking about. Those are Marketpress, Alpha Beta Commerce and Woocommerce. When clients come to us wanting to use our Alpha Beta Commerce system, nearly 100% of the time they want three things: 1). Software that accommodates to their business needs, 2) Value and Affordability 3) Someone to Walk them through the process as they may or may not have the internal resources to do so on their own. For this article, while there are other platforms like Cart66, Lemond Stand, WP-Ecommerce, Jigshopp on the market, we have found that these platforms do not service the needs of the clients we support and so we will not be mentioning them here. *Disclaimer – we have a relationship with the Marketpress Platform. Woocommerce Woocommerce started as a fork from JiggShop, another Wordpress based Ecommerce platform and has grown to tremendously over the past couple of years. Known as a DIY (Do It Yourself) Solution, Woocomerce is a toolkit that with its over 231 extensions, allowing your website to become a full ecommerce website. What makes Woocommerce special is that every possible option is available via an extension. When we initially did a cost analysis for Woocommerce, we realized that most of our clients would need each an every extension to get the same capabilities that a system like Magento or Mozu can offer. The main issue with WooCommerce is that when you add all of the extensions, it equates to a price tag of $14,000 annually - Here’s a copy of the excel - if you want to check. To put things into perspective, up until a few years ago, I ran a fashion company with three different warehouses located around the world. At the time, I was also an Interspire developer (Before Bigcommerce) and used a custom developed system for the company to improve operations, efficiency, and overall Ecommerce logistics. The total cost for the system with customizations was about $8000 with full support. Because our clients would need to utilize nearly all of the WooCommece extensions for their shop to get that same functionality, that $14,000 price tag is far too great. You are better off going with Magento Enterprise. Marketpress Marketpress is a great robust Ecommerce solution for Wordpress and is usually the second Wordpress Ecommerce platform merchants review when looking at different systems. One of the main advantages of the Marketpress Platform is that they include all of their plugins in one price instead of a la carte. This allows merchants to budget for their technology needs more accurately, without having to worry about additional cost or hidden fees. Like Woocommerce, Marketpress is a DIY (Do It Yourself) self-hosted platform that merchants must setup and manage. Marketpress does have some of the best plugins we have seen and we always preferred it over Woocommerce. For merchants that want a self-hosted system, this is the system we still recommend as it’s an all in one solution that can take care of many issues for the smaller merchant. Alpha Beta Commerce When we started Alpha Beta Commerce, little did we know that Magento Go (Ebay’s owned platform) would be closing on February 2015, leaving 100,000 merchants stranded. What we did know is how powerful Wordpress as a CMS had become over the last few years. We knew that Ecommerce merchants were looking for more flexibility in their ecommerce platform. We also knew that customers who could not afford the Magento Enterprise price tag still wanted the power and flexibility the system provided. They also wanted a dedicated support team who they could rely on should any issues/problems arose. With over 25% of websites being powered by Wordpress, we felt it was time to take Wordpress Ecommerce to the next level. The pricing is simple and will NOT cost you $14,000/year. In fact we have three convenient pricing options starting at $1800/year or $215 a/month.
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