Ecommerce Platforms 2018 Part 2
Received some great feedback after last week’s video, with many viewers asking about the virtues of WordPress and WooCommerce that I had deliberately omitted. It was a deliberate oversight on my part, especially when comparing its weaknesses against the rising star of eCommerce platforms.
What I learned
- Magento’s decline is gathering pace
- Is WooCommerce the platform for you?
- WooCommerce’s biggest fault in today’s eCommerce world
- Why Shopify is the new eCommerce platform superstar
- If you’re a dropshipper, this is the platform for you
Transcript
Hey, welcome back Rankers. How are you doing? Thank you for all the feedback and questions from last week’s show. It was a bit of an eye-opener for me as well. I had no idea that Magento was declining in popularity. We’ve had a few people mention that since Adobe’s taken over, what is going to happen to those community editions of Magento. I don’t think anyone has any insight on that yet. If you have, please let us know, but one of the other questions that I got asked most commonly last week was, “Jim, what about WordPress and WooCommerce?”
Tough Competition
Now, the reason I didn’t include that in our breakup of the eCommerce sites and their popularity was because as far as I know, and please someone correct me, there might be a plugin out there, WooCommerce didn’t certainly allow you to manage inventory across, say all the different marketplaces like eBay, Amazon, all these different things. That’s why I excluded it last week. As far as WooCommerce goes, yes, it’s great for WordPress. You want to turn your WordPress into an eCommerce site. Awesome, but look at these numbers here. Have a look at these numbers now, and last week looking at the growth of Shopify, which absolutely shocked and stunned me.
What I’ve got in here is Squarespace, WooCommerce, WordPress, and Shopify. Now, WordPress has declined year-on-year by about seven or eight per cent in search volume globally, and you can see it’s trending down. That surprises me as well. If you’re making a decision on an eCommerce project, tell you what, Shopify is looking like a really good option because if you are going to go and set up an eCommerce project, you just want to test and see how it goes, whatever, setting up a WordPress site, you’ve got to find a hosting company. You’ve got to get all that done. You’re going to integrate WooCommerce, make all that work, make all the shopping carts work, make sure the catalogue works across everything.
The Shopify Advantage
With Shopify, it’s kind of already there. It’s turnkey, and I think that’s where people are going. That was said last week. Someone on YouTube, I’ve forgotten who, sorry, did make the comment that a lot of the self-marketing gurus, the work from home gurus, those sorts of people, they are promoting Shopify a lot apparently because of its drop shipping ability. There’s a service that Shopify own called Oberlo that will allow you to quickly find drop ship products you can just add into your store. When you look at that and the downsides of course, longer term, is that with Shopify you’re always going to be tied into some sort of transactional fee as far as their pricing model goes at the moment.
Certainly, in answer to those questions about WooCommerce and WordPress, certainly in our experience from an SEO perspective, WooCommerce can be É Well, it has its own set of problems and includes URLs, changing URL structures, all these sorts of things, but once you get into large catalogues, it tends to become a little bit unusable from an SEO perspective. It can create a lot of different issues with large catalogues, but as far as É because I’m getting a lot of questions about eCommerce sites recently and platforms to get on.
The problem with Magento is, and we don’t know whether Adobe’s going to solve this, is that you’ve got companies out there charging $100,000 for a Magento site whereas you can kind of set up on Shopify for 40 bucks. Now, they’re not going to be the same site. They’re not going to be anywhere near the same functionality or any of those sorts of things, but if you are trying a new brand out, if you are setting up a new store for something, then I’d be advising you to go and have a look at Shopify, maybe able to get WooCommerce and WordPress, but I’m kind of moving away from Magento unless you’re an established business with a record and you can justify moving to Magento 2.0, all those sorts of things, but Magento 2.0 has got some serious competition when it comes to Shopify. We’ll just have a look in, so that’s worldwide, so still trending down. Shopify is trending up. We worked out this was sort of 2.0 announcements coming along, which is why it spiked back then, but it certainly hasn’t been the thing that’s seen a take-off and go to another level. In fact, the opposite is true.
Hopefully, that’s helpful. If you have any questions, any comments, please leave them, any theories or maybe you’re using an eCommerce system that is new and you really, really like it, we should hear about it. Let us know, and we’ll see you next week. Thanks very much. Bye.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
