Why Create Marketplace on Craft Commerce?

Introduction

Which CMS or ecommerce platform to pick to build your ecommerce website?

Well, you are not the only one who is asking the question – there are hundreds of brands and individuals looking for the right platform. The only solution is proper research before finalizing a platform because the survival and growth of your business depend on the right choice.

There are names like Shopify and BigCommerce that offer their own platform to build a marketplace without the hassle or worry of buying a hosting server and then managing it. The problem with such a platform is that they do not provide freedom to go beyond the platform presets to scale or customize the store as per the business requirements.

On the other hand, you have platforms and plugins like WooCommerce and Craft Commerce that offer freedom to develop and customize stores as per the business requirements. You have the liberty to choose the look and feel of the store that attracts the target audience.

In this article, I’ll walk you through the reasons why you should consider developing your next marketplace on Craft Commerce. I’ll help you understand how Craft Commerce can ease your life as a developer and as a business owner.

What is Craft Commerce?

Craft Commerce is powered by the growing Craft CMS, an extremely user-friendly platform for all your projects. The interface is a basic, more stripped back WordPress version, designed and customized to business needs and specifications.

Craft commerce aims to provide a powerful yet user-friendly and attractive ecommerce store. For developers, Craft Commerce has plenty to offer from customizable back-end to offering quality front-end development features. The ecommerce store managers get easy to use the dashboard to ensure a highly functioning store.

Craft commerce is plug-in friendly to improve the robust ecommerce experience for the craft cms developers, store owners, and customers alike. You can easily integrate popular payment gateways, CRMs, and order fulfillment services.

Craft Commerce Statistics

Craft Commerce was released on 1st December 2015 and since then it has slow but steady product development and user growth. It is not among the list of top ecommerce platforms but it offers a wide set of powerful features that put Craft commerce in comparison with the big names.

According to builtwith.com, Craft Commerce is used by around nearly 1300 websites on the internet and the reviews of the platform are positive and encouraging.

Why Craft Commerce?

Craft commerce offers a wide range of features that allows seamless development and high converting websites. Let’s talk about them one by one;

Customizable

Craft Commerce is customizable and flexible for developers to build the store as per the requirements and business needs. You can choose from the list of features you need to integrate with your website and remove the ones that add extra load on the website. The sites built with Craft Commerce are 100% customized and bespoke in terms of functionality and design, and this puts the developers in complete control over the website that helps in scaling when there’s a need.

Easy to Use for Developers and Store Managers

Craft Commerce has a simple dev process and doesn’t require unnecessary effort to get the result you need. The CMS offers a user-friendly and customizable interface for the store managers to make their day-to-day tasks management easy. Craft commerce fits the project requirements and contains only what is necessary, nothing more and nothing less.

Craft Plugin Store

Craft commerce is plugin-friendly CMS and allows integrations of all famous payment gateways, CRMs, and order management add-ons that make the ecommerce experience more robust.

Scalable

Since Craft commerce is a newcomer in the market as compared to WooCommerce and others, users usually have concerns regarding the scalability of Craft commerce but despite being a new entrant in the market, Craft commerce is strong, scalable, strong as compared to its competitors and is capable of developing complex and large online store.

Fast and Lightweight

Craft sites are lightweight because developers build the site from scratch and only include what is necessary for the website, and the site is fast due to the lean code. In comparison, WooCommerce and others offer users many options that are not required by the client at all which can result in a heavy coded and slow website.

Secure

The developers of Craft CMS take security as one of the primary features to ensure on their platform and according to the official website, Craft CMS is trusted by big names like Microsoft, Apple, Netflix, Reddit, Dell, and more. The codebase and dependencies of Craft CMS undergo a security process where third-party security researchers ensure that the platform doesn’t have a security flaw or backdoor that can be used for exploitation. Learn more about the security measures of Craft CMS.

How to Choose the Right Ecommerce Platform?

It is vital to have clarity about the factor you must consider while deciding the platform for your ecommerce business. The major factors include;

1. Price
2. Easy to Use
3. Security
4. Integrations
5. SEO-Friendly
6. Mobile Friendly
7. Analytics
8. Tech Support
9. Hosting Support
10. Payment Gateways Support

Price

Why does price matter? Because the success of your business relies on making smart financial decisions, both short- and long-term. The initial price of a platform might attract you but it can have a bad impact on your finances in the long run when you might need to scale and the price starts to go beyond the planned budget.

Note that the cost of the platform also includes management, maintenance, upgrades, and backups. A lot of businesses only see the starting price and end up paying a lot of money because they overlook other important factors on this list.

Easy to Use

You must consider a platform that is easy to use especially if you are a beginner and doesn’t have prior experience. It will save precious time and lets you focus on important business matters.

Security

Imagine running an ecommerce store being vulnerable to security threats, and running a business being in constant worry. You need to have complete peace of mind when it comes to the security of your online store so that you can focus on the business at hand.

Integrations

No platform will be complete enough to cater to your needs without additional add-ons or plugins. That is why you need to choose a platform that offers a good set of plugins for an ecommerce store and allows third-party integrations to make your ecommerce store more user friendly and help with better conversions.

SEO-Friendly

Running ads for your online ecommerce store can help with quick conversions but you should aim to make your online store SEO-friendly to help with organic conversions. You must consider SEO-friendliness as a must-have factor while deciding on the ecommerce platform to go with.

Mobile Friendly

According to Simicart.com, 79% of smartphone users have made a purchase online using mobile. A mobile-friendly platform will help you reach more people and make online shopping convenient through your website.

Analytics

It is essential to be able to keep track of your ecommerce store i.e. number of people visiting your website, the conversion and bounce rate, and the monthly sales to name a few matrices. A platform that offers quality analytics can help make you make smart decisions to grow your business.

Tech Support

Even if you have hired a developer for the development of your ecommerce store, the person might get stuck at some point and require technical assistance from the platform support. Quality technical support can make your website development process a breeze.

Hosting Support

If you are using a self-hosted platform, then you must choose a hosting platform that offers 24/7/365 expert support to help deploy your website on the server.

Not to get confused here; there are two types of ecommerce platforms out there.

• Self-Hosted Platforms – Ones that require you to buy a hosting server to deploy your ecommerce website.
• Hosted Platforms – Ones that don’t require you to buy a hosting server and use the platform’s hosting.

Payment Gateways Support

This goes without saying but you must consider a platform that offers a wide range of payment gateways integrations and support. Offering multiple payment options to the customers’ links directly to better conversions.

Hosting for Craft Commerce Websites

Craft Commerce is a self-hosted platform, hence you will need a reliable platform to host your website. Cloudways offers a secure, reliable, scalable, and managed hosting platform to deploy your Craft Commerce website with zero downtime. The support for the installation of Craft Commerce is available 24/7/365. Cloudways Craft CMS hosting platform is easy-to-use with minimum effort required to set up a server and hosting your craft commerce website. You have the option to choose from the top 5 cloud infrastructure providers to choose from, Google Cloud, AWS, Vultr, Linode, and DigitalOcean.

Features of Cloudways Hosting for Craft Commerce

• Easy to use/manage
• Pay-per-use
• Secure
• 24/7/365 Technical Support
• Scalable
• Automated backups
• Real-time monitoring

Conclusion

Craft Commerce may not be for every customer or project but it provides several highly compelling advantages that should be considered when deciding which platform is best for your ecommerce project. If you’d like to share your experience with Craft CMS or Craft Commerce, share it in the comments section below.

Salman Siddique

Salman is a content marketer with a CS background, so he is (very) good at creating and marketing technical content. When not working as a Digital Content Producer at Cloudways, he enjoys reading interesting stuff and learning new skills.

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