Reasons Not To Use Your Ecommerce Platform of Choice

If you are trying to weigh up PrestaShop, WooCommerce, Magento, ZenCart, and thirty bees for your ecommerce website..

What  could be the reasons not to use your ecommerce platform of choice?

A lot of article on the internet have been written in support of using these ecommerce platforms, and I would agree to all of them. If you take a look at the individual websites of these platforms, you will come away impressed and would probably decide to use the platform, whichever it is you are looking at.

Each of these platforms have their own strength as well as weaknesses. And not one of them is a perfect platform. My take on this is, you trade one for the other, maximize the strength, and make do with the weaknesses. That approach has worked for us, I am sure it will work for anyone.

All of these ecommerce platforms probably offer a ton of free themes to use and tens of thousands of community forum members.

With that said, we will not be dealing today about the features of any one ecommerce platforms. What we will do instead is to site reasons why you should not use your ecommerce platform for your ecommerce website. The reasons we will list here, are taken from our interactions with website owners as well as developers of ecommerce websites on at least the five platforms mentioned above.

Why is it important for you to know the reasons not to use an ecommerce platform?

Well, for one reason. That is to give you, the reader and user the needed knowledge on both side of the fence, to better judge for yourself if this platform or that platform is right for you or not.

At least, if you happen to choose one platform over the other, knowing that there is a risk on choosing your preferred ecommerce platform, and in spite of that, you still choose that platform, you will have a better understanding of the risk you are going into. Again, we cannot emphasize this enough:

There is no perfect ecommerce platform!

So, everything being equal,

What are the Reasons Not To Use Your Ecommerce Platform of choice?

Reason #1. This is taken from a comment over at r/prestashop reddit.

The one thing that frustrates us with_____________  is the support for bug fixes never came…

For us, support for bug fixes is so important that it takes the #1 reason for not using an ecommerce platform.

If your ecommerce platform support people cannot fix or is not offering the fixes to the bugs of the script, then it is pointless to use that platform.

Reason #2. Not to Use your e-commerce platform of choise

_________ is without a doubt the worst CMS I’ve ever used in terms of customization and ease of use. It is a hard system to use even for a developer like myself.

If your ecommerce is hard to use and customize to suit your own style and need. Think twice! Using it might bite you later.

Reason #3. Not to use your e-commerce of choise.

___________ claim to be open source but I’d class it as much more of a “freemium” product in the sense that if you want something done / added then you’re probably going to have to pay for it or pay someone else to do it for you because the ability to easily modify things doesn’t really exist when compared with ___________________.

All these five ecommerce platform mentioned above have free and premium extensions. But if your ecommerce platform of choice tells you to pay or buy an extensions for basic functionality you wanted on your ecommerce website, every time, then it is probably a good idea to look for another platform.

Open-source does not mean FREE however. But in our opinion, an open-source ecommerce platform should come with a the basic functionalities a 2019 website requirements should have. A blog for example should come in handy and free for any ecommerce website. A functional payment system should come free. These two basic functionality of a modern ecommerce website should come in free and dandy. If your ecommerce platform does not have one, it would probably a loss for you.

Reason #4. Not to use your ecommerce platform of choice.

_______________ worked pretty well in localhost. Everything works dandy, but once uploaded to shared hosting – a nightmare, every click results in an error, errors without log file to check what happens.

Your ecommerce of choice should work across servers, local or otherwise, as long as it runs with PHP/MySql, specially if it has CPanel, your ecommerce platform should not have a problem running. If it is not working for you across servers, and you find a lot of issues making it work, and especially if the support people cannot help you fix the bugs. It probably is not a good platform for you to use.

Reason #5. Not to use your ecommerce platform of choice

________________ is taking too long to load on my standard server. It is taking too much resource. I only have a few products to sell, and there are not a lot of contents in the database. Why is it taking so much to load?

This one is not so much of a concern for ecommerce websites hosted on a dedicated server. But even so, if your ecommerce is taking so much resource off your server, it is probably not an efficient system to run. Today’s websites are penalized by search engines for being slow. A lot of your potential sales will go to waste when your ecommerce of choice is slow to load.

If this is the case for you, perhaps it is a good time to discard your ecommerce platform of choice in favor of a fast loading, light and efficient system. If your platform demands an entire server to itself and for bigger installations, several with a load balancer to boot, then it is really not a good idea to use it when you are looking at selling under a hundred products, much more a couple hundred.

In conclusion:

There are probably other reasons not to use an ecommerce platform I am sure of that. But for this purposes, I listed here 5 reasons not to use your ecommerce platform of choice. These reason were based on my interaction with website owners and developers on at least 4 forums. They are not exhaustive  to be taken as gospel truth. But they are valid points and concern when choosing the right ecommerce platform to use for your ecommerce website.

Let me know what you think in the comment section. Do you agree on the reasons not to use your ecommerce platform of choice? Do you have other reason you want to share? What is your ecommerce platform of choice?