E-commerce: Template or Custom made?
A guide to choose what is best for your online business between template or custom made
Choosing the best platform for the online sale of your products or services is extremely important, because the success of your business will depend mostly on it. Therefore, If your goal is to increase your sales by entering the world of the web, it is important that you make the right choice. The first step will be to choose between a template or custom made e-commerce.
If you’re undecided about which platform is best suited for your e-commerce, it’s important to start by understanding the differences between the various types on the market.
Custom Sites: platforms built from “zero”. Meaning that, every line of code that will make up the site must be written by your developer without relying on a pre-existing template.
Open Source platforms: (Magento, WooCommerce, etc.) whose code is downloadable for free (at least in the standard version), and is the basic template on which to develop the customizations you need. Often, open source sites need to be hosted, so it is necessary that the owner has a server. The cost of an open source platform can be high: after installing the code on the server, you will have to customize the graphic theme (or create a new one) and program specific features that go beyond the standard ones provided in the core.
S.a.S. platforms: (Shopify, BigCommerce, etc.) in this case the site is already ready, you’ll have to upload the products, apply some settings, enter your data and choose a graphic theme to customize. The cost of an S.a.S. solution is on average lower as it doesn’t require excessive development work, but you’ll have to make sure that the features provided by the platform are in line with your goals.
The choice is not easy! You’ll need to thoroughly analyze multiple aspects of your business, such as considering the volume of business and your ability to sustain an investment.
Usually, custom platforms are chosen by companies that have high budgets and often they have an entire dedicated technical team able to develop and to maintain the website evolutions.
On the other hand, Open Source Platforms can represent a good, solid and reliable solution for small businesses but even for bigger ones, supported by a strong worldwide community that uses those platforms and contributes to their continuous improvement. However, even with a S.a.a.S website, it is possible to reach big results, generally with a smaller time of realization. Nowadays, several international brands that sell online, use platforms such as Shopify.
Recently, especially after the 2020-21 events related to the pandemic, there has been a relevant purchasing behaviour change.
For a lot of owners it has been necessary to resort quickly to other selling forms, setting up online shops.