WooCommerce

Light, stable and affordable

Comments: My experience with wordpress could not be better, it is light and can be easily run on cheaper hosting.

Pros:

The best quality of wordpress in front of its opponents is really the huge community that makes us find plugins for practically everything we want to do, and even when we don't find it we can find someone who is willing to do it for an affordable price.

Cons:

Plugins are constantly developing and can sometimes create some incompatibilities, which is normal, but the speed with which these problems are corrected is another strength of wordpress since all systems are subject to problems but quick solutions I find with wordpress.

For Ecommerce platforms, WooCommerce offers the best value for money by far.

Comments: I have been building and running many of my own Woocommerce stores over the past 15 years, personally designing, building and publishing the stores as well as sourcing the products, managing the logistics, order processing and customer care.
Over the past 5 years,, I have been doing the same for clients, including SEO and online marketing of the Woocommerce stores.

Pros:

The basic Woocommerce platform delivers all the features needed to run a successful e-commerce shop for most industries or niche services. The thousands of specialist plugins that expand on this basic platform make it suitable for any specialisation you can think of. On top of it all, the platform is free and most plugins have a free tier that is sufficient for most situations. All you need to add is hosting, a domain, some WordPress knowledge and time and you can build a powerful ecommmerce store withouot the high monthly rates of competing platforms.

Cons:

You need to invest some time in learning the basics of the platform if you want to build you own store. Alternatively, you can engage a WordPress developer at reasonable rates to build your site.

Too difficult for novices; not enough in-box customizations for the savvy

Pros:

I like that it is widely integrated into Wordpress themes. I like that it's connected to Stripe and PayPal. It's automated emails are nice, as well. Plug-ins are nice (but they are expensive and often are required for things you would expect out of the box). It can be customized to some degree, which was helpful for us...in some other ways, it is a bit rigid and not quite what you would want if you are trying to replicate a retail experience.

Cons:

I would never recommend this to anyone who wasn't very, very, very tech savvy. It is absolutely not an option for people who don't have a lot of web development experience. It tries to be a system on its own, but we have found you really have to simply take the purchase data out of Woocommerce and put it into your own CRM system. We have decided to stop using it for our purposes of registering students for classes. We may still use it for the sale of items, but probably not.

Easy to start, hard to optimise

Pros:

Is the 2nd fastest tool to create an ecommerce in less than 1 hour. You are in control of your checkout process and your money, and you are not forced to pay fees on every sell

Cons:

You need to pay a lot of plugins or have your coders in order to optimise everything. There is a lot of things you cannot do without coding

Best by far overall for small biz e-commerce

Comments: Our experience and mine overall are great. There are hundreds of third-party integrations running efferently along with this platform, which makes managing an e-commerce very simple out of the box. It is easy to add many products variations, different kind of inventories, pricing features, and so other.

Pros:

FreeEasy to use, understand, install and manage. Very customizable since runs on WordPress

Cons:

It supposedly might find hard to work along with thousands of items and tremendously visited websites. We haven't faced many issues so far.