You may only have a couple of unique products that you make, or maybe you just have your favorite products that you order from another company. So you could think “keep it simple” and only have a few products on your site. For some websites, this works. However, some customers are reluctant to buy simply because you do not have many products on your site. They are nervous about entering their credit card information when your site could just be a fake or flakey site. Having lots of products on your ecommerce website give you creditability. You do not have to actually carry all the products in your warehouse. Just arrange with a distributor, other ecommerce site or manufacturer to drop-ship certain items (ideally with your own return address and company name on the label).
Another problem with a few number of products is that search engines reward having lots of unique pages on your website. More products means more pages.
WordPress is an open-source, blog-based website platform. Its functionality has grown significantly over the years, especially though the use of “plug-ins” that add functionality. The WordPress e-Commerce Plugins add a shopping cart to a WordPress website, and allows programmers to use their own HTML and CSS to control the look-and-feel of the site. It works with many different payment gateways and has search engine friendly URLs.
The problem is that from a programmer’s point-of-view, a more complex WordPress site ends up looking like a patchwork quilt. Plug-ins can interfere with each other, sometimes only in certain browsers, making incompatibilities hard to detect. If you use a third-party theme, weird things can happen like the Checkout button failing (on certain browsers), or excessive empty indexing by the search engines due to bad pagination. Upgrading and maintaining a complex ecommerce website in WordPress can be like directing traffic on a battlefield. WordPress has its programming (PHP) in one file, but Magento is object-oriented, modern, and easier for a programmer to use.
The WordPress e-Commerce Plug-in works OK with a small number of products, and it could tide you over for a few months or a year. But when you realize “My ecommerce site will be profitable only if I add 100 more products,” you might have to start over in Magento. Magento is designed to “scale up” when you are ready to add more products for creditability and profitability.
It is difficult to patch together a large WordPress ecommerce site because WordPress was initially designed to handle pages of information and blog posts. Magento, on the other hand, is a robust ecommerce solution designed from the ground up to sell products. Like WordPress, Magento is open-source and free (except Magento has a paid option, for instant support and larger “enterprise” solutions).
Magento can easily handle a very small or very large online store. It’s filled with ecommerce features and gives you flexibility and total control over the content, design, and functionality of your ecommerce website. It has built-in inventory management and shipping labels. A community of Magento developers are continuously improving the system by adding extensions, new modules and new features.
Just because Magento is an ecommerce platform doesn’t mean blogging is impossible. On Almost every Magento website we’ve built a WordPress blog was added and styled to mach the overall branding of the website. Blogging is crucial to many search engine optimization plans. A blog also allows you to create landing pages and content for social media quickly. And of course, you will link to your products from your blog posts and you can assign a blog post to an individual products directly from the Magento admin.
It is easy to add products in the WordPress through an e-Commerce plug-in, but it allows just basic product information (product name, description, price, and image). Magento allows more detailed and additional descriptions, product comparisons and product suggestions, product tiers, invoicing, and a ton more functionality that WordPress doesn’t even come close.
Magento is more fully-featured than the WordPress e-Commerce plug-in when it comes to marketing, such as specials, cross-selling, discounts, and coupons. Some of these features are basically available in the WordPress plug-in, some require an additional plug-in, and some are absent.
All platforms claim to have superior search engine optimization (SEO) features but we know this: Magento beats most other platforms on SEO. More about this next week.
Gentian, CSO and co-founder of Shero Commerce, guides the company and client digital strategies. He's an expert in technical SEO, Inbound Marketing, and eCommerce strategy.
