Choosing the Right E-Commerce Framework: WooCommerce or PrestaShop?
If you’ve thought about considering your own online shop as a practical side business, then it’s certainly not surprising if you’ve decided on a solution that is both easy to administer and based on a well-known platform like WordPress. WooCommerce is a popular choice, but before you completely dive into the world of online sales, there are some things you should consider.
WooCommerce: A Simple Solution with Some Drawbacks
WooCommerce is a first-class option for getting started in the online shop space. It’s easy to install and you can completely administer it yourself and also have it hosted by a trusted provider. However, this doesn’t mean that all common guidelines are covered. One important aspect to welcome is certainly that no data needs to flow to a third party in order to make sales. But that still doesn’t cover everything.
When you start with WooCommerce, you may initially only use the free platform and the WooCommerce plugin. Although options for compliance with data protection regulations have now been considered, in my opinion these are not yet sufficient. On the other hand, you might want to expand your market potential and offer your products in multiple languages. For this, you often need several plugins at once, and this is not only associated with significant costs, but these recurring fees increasingly often have to be paid annually.
There is another disadvantage. The entire cascade of required plugins is often not well coordinated. To add translations and payment processing, you will need at least two more plugins, and these are often not very well coordinated with each other. In the case of updates, there can repeatedly be breaks in the functionality of your online shop.
Possible Alternatives
Here is a possible alternative: PrestaShop. This shop software is much more like a software from a single source when compared to WooCommerce, and the requirements from GDPR can be better represented here. For example, multilingualism is implemented from the start and is much easier to implement.
Therefore, you should include not only the technical advantages but also the long-term costs and potential disadvantages in your decision. If you value simplicity and flexibility but at the same time want to operate a data protection-compliant online shop, then it may be worth considering alternatives like PrestaShop. Instead of WooCommerce, it feels more like an e-commerce solution from a single source, and important functionalities, such as multilingualism, are integrated from the beginning.
PrestaShop is free; I have no advantage in mentioning it here, but it has saved me a lot of work and headaches in the past.