Shopify Vs BigCommerce Vs Magento Vs NetSuite- Ecommerce Review

The Goods on the best shopping cart:

I know you are all here for one primary reason: to find out what the best shopping cart is!  Well without further delay, here is the list as it stands now:

  1. BigCommerce – Extremely easy setup, full design customization, rapid dev, best SEO, great support in Austin
  2. Magento CE – Fully programming access, stable core, good plugins
  3. Shopify – Overpriced, lesser version of BigCommerce
  4. Volusion – Getting better, but important features are still lacking
  5. ZenCart – Full of security holes, but you can custom program anything
  6. NetSuite – Massively overpriced
  7. Magento Go – New platform.  You can’t custom design it very well yet.
  8. 3D Cart – Hokey at best
  9. Yahoo Merchant – Bad solution that locks you into their platform
  10. X-Cart – Overpriced, underdelivers on features & integrations
  11. Prostores – who? 😉 Don’t waste your time even clicking that link.
  12. WordPress plugins/ customizations

Who am I to recommend a shopping cart platform?

Shopping carts & ecommerceI am a web designer & developer who owns a company of 16 full time designers & programmers who focus almost exclusively on ecommerce shopping cart development and marketing.  In the last six months my company, Coalition Technologies, has built over 140 ecommerce shopping carts on a wide variety of platforms.  We have built sites on BigCommerce, Magento, ZenCart, Magento Go, Shopify, NOPCommerce, NetSuite, OSCommerce, OpenCart, Amazon Webstore, Yahoo Store, WordPress as well as completely custom programmed shopping carts.Shopify web designer

Coalition is a certified Google partner, certified Magento Go Partner, certified Shopify partner, and certified BigCommerce partner.

Coalition does high end web design & search engine optimization work for ecommerce sites ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies with tens of millions of dollars in monthly revenue.

Why did I choose to publish a full ecommerce review?

My primary goal is to help save everyone out there researching what platform they want to use a LOT of HEARTACHE & PAIN that I have had to go through.  In order to accomulate the knowledge and experience you see below in this post, I had to build dozens of websites on shoddy platforms that made my life not very fun.  My own ecommerce website, Digital Auto Gauges, has languished on ZenCart, OScommerce, and Shopify before I brought it to BigCommerce.

I also want to encourage weak shopping cart platforms to get better quickly.  We primarily develop on BigCommerce and Magento, but it would be great if some new competitors came along or other players stepped up their game.

Shopify Vs BigCommerce Vs Magento

Bigcommerce Shopping CartI will start my analysis with a direct comparison of the three best shopping cart competitors.  BigCommerce and Shopify are hosted solutions, meaning that they provide hosting & SSL certificates themselves.  Magento CE is just a software download that you can install on any hosting environment of your choice.

Shopify Competitors in shopping cartsShopify uses its own programming language called Liquid, which is one of its biggest drawbacks.  Why in the world would Shopify write it’s own programming language when there are so many great programming language they could have put out there already?  Doesn’t make much sense to me.  BigCommerce has the huge benefit of simply using HTML/CSS/Javascript along with their local & global variables that can be called with a Magento CE Shopping Cart Competitorssimple tag like %%GLOBAL_EMAIL%%.  Much simpler, right?  Magento CE is great because it is built for developers & designers to customize in any way that they please.  Magento CE is much slower running than BigCommerce or Shopify because most developers don’t know how to set up the hosting environment for maximum speeds and it’s PHP code is a bit slower than what Shopify & BigCommerce have been able to figure out for themselves anyways.

What is the best shopping cart? BIGCOMMERCE

Do you need a great web designer/developer for your shopping cart?

Call my team and I at Coalition Technologies at 888.800.9101. We have a 90 day guarantee after your website goes live that anything that is broken (and within scope) will be fixed by us for free.  Our team has extensive experience in driving traffic to ecommerce sites through SEO, PR and other online marketing work and can make sure that not only is your website built extremely well, but it will drive traffic & convert visitors into sales.

A few of Coalition’s recent ecommerce website designs:

Volusion competitors review

Yahoo Merchant Cart Competitors Review

Prostores Competitors Review

BigCommerce vs Magneto vs Volusion

Published by

Joel Gross

Joel Gross is the CEO of Coalition Technologies.

13 thoughts on “Shopify Vs BigCommerce Vs Magento Vs NetSuite- Ecommerce Review”

  1. Hi Joel, I’m the Chief Marketing Officer at 3dcart and I’ve noticed that you feel our solution is “hokey at best”. Our goal is to develop the best shopping cart possible, and I’m open to any suggestions you have as to how you feel we can improve. Please feel free to contact me. It would be greatly appreciated.

  2. Joel

    I’m a start-up building a B2C subscription ecomm biz with low # skus (hundreds). Someone is recommending NopCommerce which I see dropped from this review vs the last. Where do you think they rank and why these days? Thxs much for your insights.

  3. I don’t have an idea what is cloud hosting all about until i found this. Thanks for tutoring me about this.Mika Castro’s recent post ..חנוכה

  4. Thank you for the write up on shopping carts. You have probably just saved me tons of time.

  5. Thank you for your reviews. I have been researching the big three and there is a lot on conflicting information on the web. I began my research with the intent of perusing Volusion. Now, leaning towards Shopify but not quite sure if either of the big three is the right move for me. My web designer is about 90% completed with my site but I don’t like the cart that is installed. It’s basically Paypal driven. It takes the customer away from my sight to Paypal and I do not want that to happen…My initial products are books (2). The line will be expanded to include other items including t-shirts but will never reach 100 items/products. I just need to be able to add a cart to my existing site that has great marketing tools, is compatible with QuickBooks, has live order tracking, allows mobile access and is extremely secure. Being able to sell on Facebook is a welcomed lagniappe but not a deal breaker. Also, I have my own merchant account and want to use my current host. Maybe I need software in a box?

  6. I need a shopping cart for our site that not only generates invoices and AP ageing follow up (for vendors with terms) but can give me a ton of data of visitors to our site. Anyone have experience with a good cart? We looked at Volusion but it has limitations to data mine and interface with accounting. Any thoughts?

  7. Concerning your comment on “liquid” and shopify. Liquid is not a programming language but a templating system and it makes a hell lot of sense. That fact that you don’t seem to know what you are talking about but still trashing the thing you don’t understand leaves a bitter taste for me

  8. Hi I’m wondering why OpenCart isn’t included in this comparison, does it not match up to the rest? And if so how? Thanks!

  9. Magento ecommerce solution has become the most demanding open source platform of today’s online retail store businesses since it provides a tremendous advantage. With Magento Ecommerce Platform, online store owners are being given the capability of handling multiple stores and facilitate a more systematized browsing of items for sale. Improved management of customer’s orders and having more developed promotional or advertising tools also comes possible with Magento Ecommerce.

    Thanks
    Monty
    iLoveMage

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