When you choose an ecommerce platform for your online store, you need to consider many factors. Here we look at two of the best ecommerce platform, one that’s long established and another that’s a new entrant – Shopify and Yo!kart.
Shopify Or Yo!kart – Which Is Best Ecommerce Platform For You?
Shopify is a highly popular ecommerce platform hosting hundreds of thousands of online stores. It provides several powerful features combined with ease of use that make it ideal for both beginners and well-established merchants.
Yo!Kart is a relatively new platform which provides many features to power your store and is a multi-vendor solution. Which should you choose? Let’s compare to find out which is the Best Ecommerce Platform!
Yo!Kart
Yo!kart is a platform for multi-vendor marketplace just like Etsy. You can set up an ecommerce website and let vendors list their products on it. You earn commissions for providing the marketplace.
Yo!Kart offers all the necessary features needed to manage and run an online business.
- Setup and Costs
- You can buy rights to a license for $999 or you can get an annual license for $250
- Both license types provide the same features – startups may favor the yearly model
- The Linux-based system needs to be deployed on-premise
- You need to have all the resources and infrastructure installed on-premise to run this ecommerce platform
- One year of free technical support is provided
- You need some technical knowledge and coding experience for true customization
- Interface
- Yo!Kart is highly customizable, secure, and has an easy-to-use interface
- It has separate interface systems for the marketplace creator (admin), vendor, and the buyers
- Vendors can create their own unique stores
- Has one single template with all needed functionality
- This template has to be customized for different needs
- Functionalities
- Real-time tracking of sales, real-time inventory updates, and shipping cost calculation
- Most SEO tasks are automated
- Vendors can check orders and sales through their own dashboards
- Single cart can hold products from multiple vendors
- Orders from a single checkout can be split among multiple vendors
- Good reporting system
- Marketing and SEO
- The system is Google-friendly: Pages and meta tags are optimized for listing by search engines
- Automatic sitemap generation and submission each time you change the content
- You also have the ability to customize SEO settings
- Security
- Proprietary software with many security implementations, so there are fewer chances of hacking
- Three-level security implemented for both the frontend and backend software
- Support
- Knowledge base, documentation, blog
- Support through phone, email, and Skype
- Payments
- Default gateways – PayPal, Authorize.net
- Call support team for help with integration of other payment gateways
Shopify
Shopify provides a platform to create and run all kinds of online stores, from a small store selling just a few products to huge chain stores.
Shopify offers smart business solutions to retailers
Setup and Costs
- Deployed on the cloud
- Backend resources and maintenance provided by Shopify
- Choose from different plans, beginning from $29/month
- A transaction fee is charged which comes down as you upgrade to higher plans
- Minimal in-house infrastructure requirements
- Interface
- Intuitive, easy-to-use website builder
- Over a hundred templates to choose from, with many built-in functionalities
- Quick and easy setup and management
- Functionalities
- Sell through multiple channels – online store, facebook store, sell on Instagram, Pinterest etc. You can also integrate all these channels with your physical store
- Seamless inventory tracking and updates across channels
- Track orders, sales, customer profiles, and buying patterns
- Easy creation of product catalogs
- Customizable easy checkout system setup
- Setup flexible shipping options and automatically calculate shipping rates for different carriers
- Automatic tax calculations
- Simple to advanced reporting features
- Marketing and SEO
- Shopify provides marketing and SEO tools to make your task easier
- Analytical tools to assess the performance of different marketing strategies
- Automatic generation of sitemaps for submission to search engines
- Security
- Secure Socket Layers Integration, free SSL certificate
- Robust security implementation
- Maintenance, upgrades, and patches are handled by Shopify
- Support
- Comprehensive 24/7 support
- Easily contact support through phone, chat, tickets, email
- Payments
- PCI DSS Compliant Payment Processing
- Shopify Payment gateway option that helps avoid transaction fees
- Easy integration with more than a hundred other payment gateways
- PayPal is supported
- Setup custom payment options
- POS System
- Shopify also provides a POS system to help you automate checkout process in-stores.
- Shopify POS integrates smoothly with the Shopify ecommerce solution providing a single dashboard for managing multiple channels
Yo!Kart and Shopify both allow you to create an online store and enable smooth inventory tracking, provide marketing and SEO contest, integrated payment gateways, and other facilities. Yo!Kart can be the best ecommerce platform if you want to create a multi-vendor marketplace and if you have a good on-premise infrastructure to deploy the system.
Shopify is the best ecommerce platform for ease of use, features, and scalability. It’s a cloud-based solution that lets you easily set up an online store and sell across multiple channels including retail stores. It’s a proven platform with robust features and good customer support.
