On the subject matter of OpenCart Vs Shopify, both of them are well-known and widely used and trusted solutions for eCommerce. Both of the platforms have their advantages and disadvantages. They serve different goals.
OpenCart Vs Shopify, which of them is an appropriate choice for you depends on various factors. Like the budget, ease of use, mobile, community, support, store management, apps, and extensions.
There are two types of the shopping carts to serve the online business, they are open-source and hosted. The hosted type is quite user-friendly and easy, to begin with.
The open-source requires basic technical skills and with more features and modification possibilities. The final verdict is up to you, as it depends on your personal and business requirements.
Here we’ll provide you with some tips on both platforms. If you wish to grab detailed insights about Shopify, then Shopify development company can be your best help.
So let’s grab more insights about the two best eCommerce platforms, OpenCart Vs Shopify.
Overview of Shopify and OpenCart
1. Shopify Overview
Shopify is a hosted platform that enables business owners to establish an online store in a few clicks. In simple words, with Shopify, your online store will be ready to do business right after installation.
All you need to execute is to add your products and services, and you are all ready to get started. Once you settle your online store on Shopify, you’ll get free access to various advantages.
Like 99.9% uptime, entire data security, compatible hosting, professional support, and has one of the most natural admin panels in the industry.
Take the help of the best free shopify apps to observe their features and enhance your shopify store.
Shopify has limited capabilities for modifications as a SaaS solution, but it does not impact the templates. Business owners can choose from the 70+ professional default templates from the admin panel.
One can also purchase the templates. With this, one gets access to both a user-friendly design editor and access to HTML and CSS files. It provides everything one would require to make your online store get an edge over others.
2. OpenCart Overview
OpenCart enterprise is a free open source solution well-known for extreme simplicity and its strong range of features. As it is a self-hosted solution, it needs to go through the platform’s installation procedure.
Users also need to search for a decent hosting provider, but this procedure can also be carried out effortlessly. Unlike most of the other open-source platforms, OpenCart is quite easy to customize.
With the help of an advanced template system, users can change the look of the OpenCart online store effectively and efficiently.
Yet, ensuring that with the online store, customizations would require effort and hard work. That could be much more complex than Shopify.
The research and studies of Builtwith state that OpenCart tends to hold approx 4% of the eCommerce usage distribution on the internet, which counts to 418,331 live online sites. It is also ranked in the 5th position among other open-source website builders.
Detailed Comparison: OpenCart vs Shopify:
1. OpenCart Vs Shopify: Pricing
Due to the open-source nature, OpenCart is free to download and install. Despite that, users need to face some additional costs to get an entire store running. Some of the additional costs are hosting, domain name, add-on extensions, and SSL certificate.
On the contrary, Shopify provides three types of pricing plans for their users. These plans include:
- Shopify basic (for startups and beginners)
- Shopify plan (for developing business)
- Advanced Shopify (for large-scale businesses)
Further users can also save up to 10% on all Shopify plans if they signup/register for an annual plan and 20% if someone registers for two years.
Besides this, additional costs may be added with these 4 plans for the domain name or add-on transaction fees.
2. Shopify vs OpenCart – Ease of Use
The major difference between Shopify Vs OpenCart is regarding the ease of use of technical skills. Under the Shopify overview, users don’t need a line of code to manage and develop your store.
You can initiate the development of your new Shopify store by offering some of your personal information like address, email, store name, and many more.
Users don’t have to fill in any of the payment-related information directly. With the help of a dashboard, users can control various activities.
They can organize, manage, and customize the color, layout, text, and many more things for their online store.
They also offer their users with 14-days free trial for every plan available. These free trials provide a good chance for you to test how the system works and know if it is an appropriate eCommerce platform.
On the contrary, it also requires some basic coding skills to build an entirely new OpenCart store. Which one needs to follow these steps:
- Buy a new domain and hosting for your store.
- Develop a database using open-source administration like Dbeaver, DataGrip, Phpmyadmin.
- Complete your online store.
With the help of a natural and user-friendly interface, one can easily navigate and customize any part of your website.
3. OpenCart Vs Shopify: SEO
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of boosting your website’s ranking on the Google search engines. Undoubtedly the top position on search engine result pages gathers more traffic to the site and helps users to boost their sales.
Thus choosing your eCommerce development company that can provide great support for your SEO is crucial. Therefore, let’s continue the comparison of Shopify Vs OpenCart by reviewing the SEO aspects.
Shopify’s apps and extensions’ primary purpose is to cater to the online store’s owners. If you are focusing on eCommerce, then Shopify is the best option to choose. By learning on how to optimize Shopify SEO, you can optimize your eCommerce store.
Taking this into consideration, Shopify’s SEO is an excellent option for your developed eCommerce store. Ahead with basic features & SEO like meta description, meta titles, responsive capabilities, and many more.
One of the major advantages Shopify provides you is the ability to self-arrange your site’s services/product category.
Thus it provides an opportunity to make a reasonable, easy-to-navigate website’s structure. It will help users to gain many SEO points and also boost the customer experience.
At the same time, OpenCart is built to enhance eCommerce businesses as a whole. The OpenCart development company provides its users with a lot of SEO support.
But, OpenCart only provides its users with basic SEO features like modifying the meta tags, adding 301 referrals, and rel-canonical with PHP coding.
Looking at the brighter side with more than 14,000 extensions available on OpenCart apps and extensions store. The installment of extra SEO plugins will turn out as an amazing solution to boost your online store rankings position.
4. OpenCart Vs Shopify: Apps and Extensions
Various tools and extensions add huge value to your eCommerce store. These advantages and disadvantages make your online store very convenient and take a lot of work off of responsibility. Comparing Shopify Vs OpenCart, let’s find out which wins the battle for apps and extensions.
Shopify is quite well-known for a wide range of about 3,000 apps available. The Shopify apps not only contribute to a special purpose to your store. But also connects your apps with other distinct tools like Zendesk or Xero.
Thus, this wide range of Shopify apps is one of the significant reasons that make Shopify a powerful eCommerce platform.
These massive app stores help provide many options for adding features and functionalities to your online store. They can also integrate it in-store with various tools.
Despite that, Shopify is inclined to provide apps and extensions to integrate simple and well-known functionalities.
Like drag and drop page builders, AMP rather they can integrate them into your built-in feature. Thus it may charge you much more money to get extensions.
OpenCart enterprise can be proved as an amazing option for apps and extensions (over 14,000 extensions).
Besides, various OpenCart extensions are available in the store, like product feeds, shipping methods, reports, and various payment gateway options.
Moreover, these customizations can be done at a low cost with the help of the OpenCart development company.
A major advantage of OpenCart over Shopify is that most extensions are designed for eCommerce. Suppose you opt for OpenCart for your eCommerce store.
It may lead to loads of benefits as the apps would support your work. Furthermore, users can also use their coding skills to develop custom fields that would unite with extensions.
These would provide you with unlimited customization opportunities to build a strong website.
5. OpenCart vs Shopify – Support
Most of the customers prefer to choose a hosted cart over an open cart for its customer support. Thus it appears that customer service is missing out on most of the open-source solutions.
OpenCart has two types of customer support. These types include a community forum that lets everyone divide their knowledge and experience operating an online business.
Users can also opt to choose the customer service, which may charge about $99 and more. And users will get their accurate answers within 24 hours.
As Shopify is a hosted eCommerce platform, thus it provides users with complete customer support.
Additionally, one can also hire a dedicated support team for your online store. At present, Shopify provides its customers with the following support channels:
- Advanced specialist support
6. Shopify Vs OpenCart: Store Management
Talking about the tools to operate and manage your store. It is worth remarking that both Shopify and OpenCart help users to list an infinite number of products and services.
Thus, it may not be offered by all eCommerce platforms. Besides this, OpenCart has an in-built affiliate system. It also includes all the capabilities for coupons, specials, and discounts.
Apart from these, OpenCart also has integrated product reviews and rating modules. Along with a built-in rewards point system, and also has a wide range of shipping methods from around the globe.
Shopify has similar features and tools which are not part of the basic version of the OpenCart.
That also includes various instinctive tools for operating and managing inventory, dropshipping integrations, email templates, fulfillment center connections, and abandoned cart recovery.
Shopify gets integrated with Shopify POS, which allows users to sell in-person as well as online.
Analyzing all these statements, we have concluded that Shopify and OpenCart are quite similar in their core management systems. And also, both of these platforms can boost functionality with apps and extensions.
There are few differences between Shopify and OpenCart. And Shopify is much easier in managing processes across other eCommerce platforms, especially while about multi-channel selling and creating sales leads.
Conclusion
To conclude, without any second thought, both OpenCart and Shopify are functional eCommerce solutions. Both of the platforms also have the potential to serve your online business as well.
However, most of the customers believe that Shopify is a better-suited platform for startups. And it is also the best option for those looking to set up an online store and operate and manage everything.
On the other hand, OpenCart can be proved as best suited for businesses that require more flexibility and customizations with their eCommerce website builder.
It is also best suited for those who are looking to avoid costing a monthly subscription fee. With this being said, users can only decide which platform is best suited for their requirements.
At last, if you still need any extra information to make your final call between OpenCart Vs Shopify, then it would be best to reach out to the top eCommerce development company as they can help you out.
