What are the best features of a top shopping cart solution? Our B2B software experts decided to find out the most popular shopping cart solution in the market today and discover what make it tick with users. They analyzed the performance of nearly 50 shopping cart solutions in real scenarios. Results from our research based on our proprietary Customer Satisfaction Rating, which reflects the software’s overall positive experience with users by aggregating its social mentions across the web, showed ShopSite to be the most popular among our top three shopping apps:
ShopSite – user satisfaction rating: 98%
Shopify – user satisfaction rating: 93%
Magento – user satisfaction rating: 90%
In this article, we’ll show you the pros and cons of each of these shopping apps to help you decide which software will work best for your company.
Overview of top 3 shopping cart software solutions
1. ShopSite – User Satisfaction 98%
Price: $5.99 per month
ShopSite won our 2015 Award for Great User Experience
ShopSite enjoys our highest customer satisfaction rating of 98% which makes it the most popular shopping cart solution among almost 50 services that we tested in our study. It also scored very high in our ranking with a total score of 9.4/10. ShopSite was also distinguished with our 2015 Award for Great User Experience that further show how positive its clients are about this software. If you’d like try out the key features of ShopSite to learn it will fit into your company’s needs you can easily sign up for ShopSite free trial here.
With a starter price at $5.99 per month you can get ShopSite up and running in fifteen minutes and enjoy mobile-optimized pages. A store wizard helps you across all the included steps. Instantly, you get SEO-compliant pages, over 50 themes and 25 payment gateways, plus coupons, gift certificates, and more.
Unlike more comprehensive shopping cart solutions, ShopSite lets you build the website or customize its part with no HTML skills required. If you need help, tech support is readily at hand with screen references that display answers specific to the page that baffles you.
If you need more information about the software, its features, pricing and available integrations you can also read our detailed review of ShopSite to see if this great e-commerce app answers your most pressing shopping cart needs.
2. Shopify – User Satisfaction 93%
Price: $29 per month
Shopify exemplifies how a shopping cart software can deliver both quality functions and beautiful interface. It’s one of the most popular e-commerce solutions used by over 150,000 stores worldwide. While its user satisfaction rating of 93% isn’t as high as that achieved by ShopSite it’s still one of the highest ones in our study.
Most of Shopify clients are small and medium businesses, but many large enterprises are known to use it because of its powerful analytics, extensible functions and 24/7 tech support. Plus, its native app for iOS gives you backend capabilities, not just storefront functions. However, its entry subscription at $14 per month isn’t exactly the lowest in the crowd, while adding more apps can easily jack up your monthly cost. For instance, you need an item display that doesn’t match any of the 100 product variations. It also focuses too much on North and UK merchants, which is okay for most online sellers but not if you have major customer bases elsewhere.
Lastly, it lacks a single page for checkout, which may hurt conversion rates. Notwithstanding these minor inconveniences, Shopify is a complete shopping cart software if you don’t plan to become a multibillion-dollar company. For more details about their service you can read our detailed review of Shopify.
3. Magento – User Satisfaction 90%
Price: available by quote only
Magento enjoys a high user rating of 90% which puts it at the third place in our popularity ranking. The main difference with the other two apps, however, is clear: it’s more complex with enterprise-class features. Expectedly so, since eBay acquired the company selling enterprise solutions, and now it wants to foray into the profitable small business game. It’s got hundreds of extensions, customizable backend processes, and a network of partners and developers to help you tweak Magento to your liking.
The drawback is you need to hone a bit of coding sense to maximize this app. Small and medium businesses may balk at the extra effort, but bigger companies will appreciate how Magento can easily fit into their suite of omnichannel commerce solutions, such as, retail management, store fulfillment, and retail associate platforms.
The app is a good choice for businesses with complex e-commerce needs, but not so if you manage a straightforward storefront. If you want to know if it fits your needs, you can also read our detailed review on Magento.
Comparison of ShopSite, Shopify, and Magento
Customer types
Both ShopSite and Shopify target the same core market of small and medium businesses, with the latter also aiming at large enterprises. This makes Shopify a tad more robust but more difficult to handle for small businesses with little tech knowledge or support. On the other hand, ShopSite prioritizes the shopping cart needs of small businesses both in ease of use, simplicity, and affordability.
Magento may have a Community Edition for small companies, but the solution is intended primarily for large enterprises. It has the most complex and difficult processes among the top three apps, but that’s because it’s targeting users with complex needs.
Pricing comparison
ShopSite has the most affordable plan among the three solutions. Entry subscription is only at less than $5.99 per month, while Shopify’s starter pack sells at $29 per month. Furthermore, ShopSite offers a freemium that lets you add 10 products, use the add order buttons, access PayPal gateway, and enjoy Secure/PCI certified-security. Magento, on the other hand, is by quote only.
Features of ShopSite
Sample store created using ShopSite
ShopSite allows you to host your store with a preferred hosting service. Some merchants see this as a half-empty glass, but it’s really half full. Think about the flexibility it affords you: you can host the store on a local server, which is a factor in local searches; you’re not tied to the shopping cart’s terms and you can shop around for the best hosting platforms of your choice.
There are really useful tools here also. For one, an order button that you can place in email newsletters, blog posts, affiliate sites, in fact, anywhere an “Add to Cart” makes sense. You also get a variety of payment options, notably, its cart integrates smoothly with Authorize Net, PayPal, and Visa, which are three preferred choices of merchants and shoppers alike. Likewise, it works with any web editing tools, so there’s no need to dump WordPress just because your shopping cart can’t integrate.
Furthermore, the first thing most satisfied users notice about ShopSite is that it’s built around ease of use. It’s SEO-friendly and mobile-optimized. It’s got automatic multiple page generation for both web and mobile platforms, and automatic thumb creation. The global navigation menus make browsing easy, while its global layout customization makes backend editing simple. These were the reasons why we decided to distinguish ShopSite with our 2015 Award for Great User Experience.
Tech support is reliable, too, if you need further help. In fact, you may find the answers without contacting a rep. Aside from the contextual reference to answers in each page, there’s the ShopSite user community. With a few keystrokes away, you get to access one of the most active SaaS forums, other users sharing their best tips and answers with newbies, while ShopSite oversees postings for accuracy.
On a different note, some users bewail the limited choices of themes in ShopSite, but they may be missing the point. ShopSite focuses on small business priorities, that is, an e-commerce site that is simple to set up and affordable to maintain, while enjoying reliable features to help entrepreneurs sell on the fly. It’s easy to see for yourself if this software fits your situation with their great free trial plan. You can get ShopSite free trial here.
Features of Shopify
Sample shop created using Shopify
Shopify is also user-friendly like ShopSite, but because it has a wider range of functionalities and integration options, a small business owner with simple e-commerce needs may get overwhelmed or blindsided by Shopify’s bells and whistles. It’s got 100+ professional themes, a full blogging platform, multiple language support, and automatic carrier shipping rates. It also features deep customization using HTML and CSS embeddable codes. Plus, its Ruby-based Liquid API allows for a deeper integration with third-party apps. If all these sound great, it’s because they are… for the right business: the rapidly expanding online stores.
On another note, Shopify’s mobile app for iOS has rich backend capabilities. You can remotely access the admin dashboard to check daily sales, track buying patterns, or keep tab of supplies. Moreover, the mobile app allows you to dig up customer data for each order. On the front end, you can look up products fast by using the phone camera to scan barcodes. The only drawback is, you need to import data from your web Shopify store to sync records. It’s an extra step that others might find cumbersome, if not increasing the risk of disparate product information between your web and mobile platforms.
As for payment, Shopify has around 100 third-party processors including PayPal, SagePay, and Stripe. Note, too, that because of its market dominance, many payment solutions want to integrate to it, which only increases your options. Shopify charges a minimum fixed transaction fee for all major cards.
What’s nice about Shopify is that you have a choice to outsource fulfillment. The solution integrates with three big shipping fulfillment providers, namely, Amazon, Shipwire, and Rakuten Super Logistics. And because it’s focused on North America, it’s got an automatic tax calculator based on US zipcodes.
Features of Magento
Sample shop created using Magento
Magento was originally developed as an enterprise-level shopping cart software; hence, expect more complex processes but fully adaptable open-source based functionalities. Plus, it enjoys a wide network of developers working on this platform as your resource.
Its Community Edition is Magento’s attempt to bundle its robust features with plug-and-play modules for small and medium business users. However, it has a steep learning curve. For example, there are plenty of steps to set up and customize settings. You need to choose an e-commerce platform and design template separately. Plus, its complicated source code to scale its architecture–say, to add a different product variable–means you’ll need a specialist to tinker with it, costing you an arm and a leg. Moreover, Magento has specific hosting demands and can get clunky with slow load time.
But for large companies with IT support, they get a fully customizable store with the enterprise edition that is also scalable and flexible. Magento also outperforms drag-and-drop shopping cart solutions when supporting numerous stores at once. Its high-performance architecture allows for handling tens of thousands of transactions every hour and it has the largest set of product catalogs. All these robust features make Magento a top but complex shopping cart solution, targeted at companies with complex e-commerce needs with large daily order sizes.
Conclusion
With an impressive score of 9.4/10 and an outstanding user satisfaction rating of 98% we found ShopSite to be the best solution for online sellers that want to kickstart their stores on the fly, with little learning curve involved, and at a rate that fits even the tightest cash flow. It’s designed to be the most practical solution for small and medium businesses focused. You can test their service on your own with a great free trial offer that will allow you to try out all the key features and decide if this solution meets the needs of your company. You can sign up for ShopSite free trial here.
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