Why is SEO Important for Ecommerce? Well, 44% of every online purchase begins with an online search (IPSOS 2012). Making sure that your products can be found easily on search engines such as Google can be the difference between an ecommerce business that fails or succeeds. A large part of effective Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is to ensure that the pages of your site appear as relevant as possible to a search engine for the search terms (keywords) that your prospective customers are using.
There are two major categories with e-commerce platforms: hosted and self-hosted. Hosted simply means that the company will host your store, while self-hosted means they will provide you with software, but you have to get your own Web hosting.
Shopify is quickly becoming favorite e-commerce platform. The user interface of the admin panel is simply gorgeous. Although it has its limitations, there aren’t many things I wasn’t able to accomplish with it. The biggest downside is the limited ability to change the checkout page. Although you have some control over it, it is minor. So if you’re trying to design the checkout page to be exactly how you want, Shopify is probably not for you.
Volusion is a similar platform to Shopify, except it is about a hundred times less customizable. It is quite locked down, so you cannot do much with it.
BigCommerce is similar to Shopify and Volusion. Although you can customize it slightly, it still lacks the total control of Shopify. It seems like you can implement Google Trusted Stores and Product Feed with their built-in functionalities, but trying to implement a different system would most likely be out of the question.
Magento, This is an e-commerce platform that has been around for ages. The platform is like a giant complex dinosaur that just won’t quit. Yes, it has plenty of features and then some, but the user interface is not friendly at all.
Comparing WooCommerce to Magento is difficult because WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin so it depends very much on WordPress. You cannot use WooCommerce without WordPress. WooCommerce is great because it offers ultimate customizability. Anything you can do with WordPress, you can do with WooCommerce. Only WordPress developers will understand what I mean, but using actions, hooks, and filters to make enhancements or changes to functionality is pretty sweet and efficient.
So who are the ultimate winners here? I would say it is between Shopify and WooCommerce. If you are a big company with lots of products, clients, and traffic, then Shopify is a safer choice to go with because you will have better and more dedicated support.
WooCommerce is perfect for average and smaller stores that just need a store to sell a few things and sell them right!