Magento and Pro Stores Alternatives

eBay recently announced the discontinuation of two of its popular e-commerce software properties: Magento Go and Pro Stores.  These services have been a popular resource for thousands of merchants to build a shopping cart-enabled website and sell their products online.  With the phase-out, small business owners are forced to look for a new solution, and there are a variety of alternative e-commerce systems to choose from.  Here are just a few possible choices that our e-commerce web developers have experience with.

Magento Community Edition

This could be an easier transition for many of the affected merchants since the same Magento features are behind this version of the software. Magento Go was a hosted application, meaning that your online store was stored on a server operated by the Magento team, and you paid a subscription price to use the tools.  When you download Magento from the web, you are getting open-source software that you can install directly to your own website.  This makes the features of Magento more portable since you can host it on a variety of web hosting servers.  Even better, your web developer can customize the features and design theme much more than was possible with Magento Go.  For example, the web development team at WEBii has created some nifty custom modules for Magento that allow organizations to sell e-books and special events.

Zen Cart

Zen Cart is an established shopping cart program, with an extensive community of developers and users and an active support forum.  The Zen Cart program is simpler than the robust Magento framework, but it offers many features and a solid catalog that is easy for merchants to update.  Category and product management are fairly intuitive out of the box.  While Zen Cart does not include as many fun bells and whistles as some programs, it is very modular and easy for web developers to customize.  There is a large volume of community-contributed modules already available, and custom web developers can also design a module from the ground up and integrate it into your Zen Cart store to give your own site a very unique flow.  Web designers love Zen Cart because the template structure is easy to use and provides a simple custom template organization that prevents problems from future upgrades.  It is possible to change the entire look of the online store with style sheets alone.  Similar to Magento, this is open-source software available for download.

WordPress with WooCommerce

WordPress is a highly popular platform for website content management, so many businesses already have a marketing website powered by WordPress.  WooCommerce is a well-known plugin available for WordPress.  The basic plugin is a free download.  The standard plugin supports a few basic products adding features and simple settings to get the process started.  For better features and design, the WordPress theme may need to be further customized to properly style the shopping pages and additional paid modules may be required to integrate certain payment systems, shipping services, or other needs.  WooCommerce is backed by a small software company that offers paid customer support options as well.

A Custom Shopping Cart

Sometimes it just makes more sense to create a custom website with a unique experience.  While we love to work with open-source software, we appreciate the need to design a customer experience that is unique to a certain business need.  In online learning, for example, the registration process may be more intensive and particular to the industry; the customizations needed for the user registration might take more time and effort if you are trying to retrofit an existing software.  Many businesses may start out with a simple shopping cart to kick off business development and build a pipeline of leads, but the management of the orders could be cumbersome if the standard shopping cart flow is not efficient for them.  In these cases, it may be time to move away from products like Magento and Pro Store anyway, so the timing might be right to start a conversation with a custom web development company.