How to build an ecommerce solution and a shopping cart. WordPress plugin vs. Shopify vs. Magento

March 10, 2015

In this video tutorial I explain what software tools you can use to build a shopping cart for your website, or basic ecommerce functionality that you can use to sell products from your website.

If you have only one or two products to sell from your website, you don’t really need to create a full shopping cart. You can get away with using various ecommerce plugins for WordPress. Using WordPress plugins is simple and fast. And your ecommerce solution can be up and running in often less than a day. Here is a list of hosting providers which can get your simple ecommerce website online within minutes.

If you have multiple products that you are selling from your website, you might need full shopping cart software which will have many features of a real online ecommerce store. These features are things like bulk product upload, managing discounts, mailing promotions and keeping in touch with past buyers to get them to spend more money.

There are many fully featured ecommerce solutions you can use. They range from very new and modern ones like Shopify to older ones like Magento. Let’s go over some of the differences between Magento, Shopify, and other shopping cart solutions like 1ShoppingCart and BigCommerce.

Magento is the only (as far as I know) open source fully featured ecommerce solution. They have been around for quite a long time. Traditionally, if you had wanted to set up a shopping cart, you would probably look into Magento as one of your top options. It had quality, good pricing, and a great community which you could ask questions if you got stuck.

In recent years, Shopify has taken the lead in shopping cart software solution, and if I needed a full service solution, I would strongly consider them. But don’t take my word for it. I recommend that you do additional research to make sure that the solution you choose will ultimately work for your unique business situation.

For more on this topic, check out another article on Magento vs. Shopify.

Learn To Build A Website From Scratch

Here is a link to a tutorial on how to build your WordPress website from scratch in one day. And here is a video tutorial explaining the difference between using WordPress, SquareSpace or other solutions like Weebly.

And here is a video tutorial on how to get a free domain name for your website when you buy hosting that your website will need anyway.