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Magento Go is a CMS system with the purpose of allowing users to build their own online stores completely free. Magento Go was aimed at small businesses and as such had a relatively simple builder allowing people to setup shop – fast.

Owned by Google, Magento has been frequently used by successful eBay users. Giving them an impression of a more reputable and established store.

However, now that Magento Go is closing down we thought we’d recommend the best online stores to replace your Magento Go Store with:

Magento Community Edition

NikeMagento

Magento allows a business to scale up quickly if you already have the groundworks in place and know your business will be a success. However the development costs are high and can take some time. We would not recommend Magento on a small budget.

Pros:

  • Premier Store Management – Magento is a feature rich online store solution, allowing users to manage multiple store front as well as simple multi-language and currency support.
  • Intuitive back-end – Navigation for store management features. Meaning that site owners have flexibility with their store.
  • Plugins Galore – Magento is a very successful ecommerce CMS and with over 240,000 merchants comes a lot of extensions and plugins. This makes Magento a very versatile theme.
  • Highly Customisable Design – Magento’s template allows a lot of customisable features meaning your store is limited only by the skill of your developers and designers.
  • Scalable – Magento is just as competent for enterprises as it is for startups, meaning your website can grow with you.

Cons:

  • Lack of Developers – As a web developer Magento can be a challenging prospect – If your looking to really make the most of Magento you’re going to need an experienced Magento developer which can be expensive.
  • Hosting – Unless hosted on a dedicated server Magento can create a slow and frustrating experience for users.
  • Time – Magento has a lot more options and flexibility than most other CMS systems however this means that development can be relatively complex. Expect Magento websites to take more time than other CMS solutions.

OpenCart

MultiStoreOpenCart

OpenCart is a free and open source software which allows you to create your own online store you can select from free and premium themes from which to design your store generally premium themes will give you a lot more versatility and features to customise your website with.

Pros:

  • Lightweight – OpenCart is a easy to download and silky smooth for customers to use. Whereas Magento is very demanding for both developers and hosting.
  • Simple customisation – OpenCart in comparison with other eCommerce solutions, is less complicated and does not require technical skills.
  • Short Development Time – OpenCart is perfect for startups as it requires minimal investment and will allow you to open your store in a short amount of time.
  • Support – OpenCart’s support team and community are very helpful with any issues you may have and

Cons:

  • Relative Lack of Extensions and Plugins – OpenCart does not have as large a userbase as some other eCommerce solutions and therefore doesn’t have the same amount of support in terms of addons.
  • Poor SEO – OpenCart does not generate SEO friendly URLs.
  • Weaker Store Management – OpenCart has less features with the purpose of improving the customer experience. Features like order history, recently reviewed products and tagging items are not available in OpenCart.

Shopify

GreatsShopify

Choose one of three monthly packages from 29$ a month to $179.

Whereas Magento provides the opportunity to scale up into a large enterprise sized business, Shopify focuses on the small to medium sized business.

Shopify will effectively handle everything for you; hosting, design, analytics, SSL certificates etc. While this is useful in the sense that you won’t have to worry about setup it also means that Shopify is incredibly limiting in any actual choices you want to make for your store.

Plus, with the rolling monthly costs, it’s not cheap either. That said, Shopify is still a strong solution for creating your online store.

WordPress WooCommerce

NicHarry

The most obvious benefit of WooCommerce is that it’s not only open source and free to attain, but the CMS you’ll be running it on is also open source. This means that when you choose to use WooCommerce you’ll gain access to the wealth of features, themes, plugins etc. Which come with WordPress.

That’s a really strong pro, because WordPress is already a highly tuned and powerful system, while having the bonus of being easy to use. However with that benefit also comes the cons, WooCommerce is only available through WordPress so if for whatever reason you don’t want to go in this direction it won’t be available to you. The other flaw is that while WordPress has an almost unlimited amount of options available some of them are premium, and if you want a highly polished, professional site you’re going to need them.

If you’re looking to replace your Magento Go ecommerce website, hopefully you’ve found some interesting information which you can use to make the change.

If you’re still not sure what kind of CMS you’d like to use for your website, don’t hesitate to give us a call on 01273 328877