The e-commerce market is characterised by continuous growth trends.Thanks to ready-made technological solutions, opening and running your own online shop is very easy!Nowadays, you do not need any specialist IT knowledge, as there are many automated, ready-made solutions to create your online dream shop with little effort.If you are thinking about this form of business, you are probably wondering: how do I set up an online shop?We will try to ensure that you find the answers to your questions below.

Platform for setting up an online shop

The tool you choose to set up your online shop will not only affect the process of setting it up, but also its operation. When choosing a platform, you should pay attention to several important things: whether there is access to help on it (preferably in your native language), what the shop’s capabilities are, what customisation options it has, whether it is SEO-friendly, i.e. the process of positioning the website in Google search. Ease of use, support and, of course, costs are also important.

Choosing Your E-commerce Engine: A Comparison of OpenCart, Magento, PrestaShop, and WooCommerce

Launching an online store is an exciting venture, but one of the most critical early decisions is selecting the right e-commerce platform. This foundation will impact everything from your store’s appearance and functionality to its scalability and your day-to-day management workload. Four popular contenders often rise to the top: OpenCart, Magento (now including Adobe Commerce), PrestaShop, and WooCommerce. Let’s break down each one to help you decide which is the best fit for your business needs.

1. WooCommerce (The WordPress Powerhouse)

  • What it is: WooCommerce isn’t a standalone platform but rather a free, open-source plugin for WordPress, the world’s most popular content management system (CMS).
  • Ease of Use: If you’re already familiar with WordPress, WooCommerce is generally considered the easiest to pick up. The interface integrates seamlessly, making setup and product management relatively straightforward.
  • Flexibility & Customization: Its biggest strength lies in the vast WordPress ecosystem. Thousands of themes and plugins (both free and paid) are available, allowing for extensive customization of design and functionality.
  • Scalability: While it can scale to handle large stores, performance heavily depends on your hosting environment and the number/quality of plugins used. It’s excellent for small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and can grow with you, but very large, high-traffic stores might need significant optimization or consider other platforms.
  • Cost: The core WooCommerce plugin is free. Costs arise from web hosting, domain name registration, premium themes, and potentially paid extensions for specific functionalities (e.g., advanced shipping, subscriptions).
  • Best For: Existing WordPress users, bloggers expanding into e-commerce, SMBs, startups, businesses prioritizing content marketing alongside sales, those seeking high flexibility with a moderate learning curve.

2. Magento (Now Adobe Commerce & Magento Open Source) (The Enterprise Titan)

  • What it is: Magento is a powerful, feature-rich, open-source platform primarily aimed at larger businesses with complex needs. It comes in two main versions: Magento Open Source (free) and Adobe Commerce (a premium, cloud-hosted version with more built-in features and support, formerly Magento Commerce).
  • Ease of Use: Magento has the steepest learning curve of the four. It’s complex and often requires technical expertise or professional developers for setup, customization, and ongoing maintenance. It’s not typically recommended for beginners without technical help.
  • Flexibility & Customization: Extremely flexible and powerful. It can handle vast product catalogs, multiple storefronts, complex product configurations, and international sales with ease. Customization possibilities are nearly limitless but often require coding.
  • Scalability: This is Magento’s forte. It’s built for high performance and scalability, capable of handling massive traffic volumes and large transaction numbers. It’s a go-to choice for large enterprises and rapidly growing businesses.
  • Cost: Magento Open Source is free software, but the total cost of ownership is high. You’ll need robust (and often expensive) hosting, significant development resources for customization and maintenance, and potentially paid extensions. Adobe Commerce has substantial subscription fees on top of this.
  • Best For: Large businesses, established enterprises, stores with complex requirements (multi-store, multi-language, B2B), businesses with dedicated development resources or a significant budget for implementation and maintenance.

3. PrestaShop (The Feature-Packed Contender)

  • What it is: PrestaShop is another open-source, standalone e-commerce platform, particularly popular in Europe. It offers a good range of built-in features.
  • Ease of Use: It sits somewhere between WooCommerce and Magento in terms of complexity. The back-end interface is relatively intuitive, but fully leveraging its capabilities and customization might require some technical understanding or learning.
  • Flexibility & Customization: Offers a good level of customization through themes and modules available in its official marketplace. While maybe not as extensive as WooCommerce’s ecosystem, there’s a solid selection for adding specific functionalities.
  • Scalability: Generally scales well for small to medium-sized businesses, and can handle larger stores too, though perhaps not quite reaching Magento’s enterprise level without significant optimization.
  • Cost: The core PrestaShop software is free. Costs involve hosting, domain, themes, and paid modules for extending functionality. The cost of modules can add up depending on your needs.
  • Best For: Small to medium-sized businesses, merchants (especially in Europe) looking for a dedicated e-commerce platform with a strong feature set out-of-the-box, users wanting something more e-commerce focused than WooCommerce but less complex/expensive than Magento.

4. OpenCart (The Lightweight Option)

  • What it is: OpenCart is a free, open-source, standalone e-commerce platform known for its relative simplicity and lightweight nature.
  • Ease of Use: Often considered one of the easier standalone platforms to get started with. Its admin interface is straightforward, making basic setup and product management manageable even for less technical users.
  • Flexibility & Customization: Offers customization through themes and extensions available via its marketplace. While a decent selection exists, the ecosystem is generally smaller than WooCommerce’s or Magento’s. You might find yourself needing extensions for features that are built-in on other platforms.
  • Scalability: Suitable for small to medium-sized stores. While it can be optimized, it’s not typically the first choice for businesses anticipating massive scale or extremely high traffic volumes compared to Magento. Its lightweight nature can be an advantage on less powerful hosting.
  • Cost: The OpenCart software itself is free. Costs include hosting, domain, themes, and necessary extensions. Like PrestaShop, relying on numerous paid extensions can increase the overall cost.
  • Best For: Small businesses, startups, users looking for a simple, dedicated e-commerce solution without the overhead of WordPress, those prioritizing ease of initial setup and basic management.

Which Platform Should You Choose? Key Considerations:

  • Your Technical Skill: If you’re comfortable with WordPress, WooCommerce is a natural fit. If you have development resources, Magento offers immense power. PrestaShop and OpenCart offer varying degrees of user-friendliness for standalone platforms.
  • Your Budget: Factor in hosting, themes, extensions, and potential development costs. WooCommerce and OpenCart can often be started most affordably, while Magento (especially Adobe Commerce) represents the highest investment.
  • Scalability Needs: How big do you expect your store to get? For massive scale, Magento is built for it. WooCommerce, PrestaShop, and OpenCart can scale but may require more optimization or robust hosting.
  • Required Features: List the essential features you need (e.g., multi-language, specific payment gateways, subscription models). See which platform offers them built-in versus requiring paid extensions.
  • Existing Website: If you already have a popular WordPress site, adding WooCommerce is often the path of least resistance.

There’s no single “best” e-commerce platform – the ideal choice depends entirely on your specific business goals, technical resources, budget, and growth expectations. WooCommerce offers incredible flexibility integrated with WordPress. Magento provides unparalleled power for large enterprises. PrestaShop strikes a balance with strong built-in features, while OpenCart offers simplicity and a lightweight approach. Carefully evaluate your needs against the strengths and weaknesses of each platform before making this crucial decision for your online business.

An example of a versatile, international studio from Poland that specialises in developing online shops on all key platforms – including OpenCart, Magento, PrestaShop and WooCommerce – is Design Cart. With experience working with a variety of e-commerce systems, such agencies can offer comprehensive services to clients from all over the world, tailoring technology solutions to the specific needs and scale of the online business.

How do you start setting up an online shop?

Since you’re thinking about this form of business, you probably already have an idea for it or are looking for inspiration. If you have an idea, it is easy. If you don’t have an idea, then it’s easy. If you don’t have an idea, then it might be something you are passionate about, something you feel good about and something you know how to do. Once you have made up your mind, ask yourself: is this for me? Is running an online shop a good idea? There are many reasons why it is a good idea to start one, and here are a few of them:

Online shop – on-page or external?

An online shop can be a separate tool that will be created on a dedicated platform, but it can also be an integral part of a website. We are then talking about an ‘on-page shop’.  This is a practical solution when you want to combine sales with a comprehensive presentation of your offer or product information.To create your own online shop on an e-commerce platform, you must choose one of the available ones on the market and set up your shop on it.There are limitations with this form of shop, as you will need coding knowledge or plug-ins, which are usually paid for, in order to extend the shop or change its graphics.

On the other hand, you can change the web shop on your own website at will. This is especially true if you choose a good website builder. Contrary to what you might think, this is an important topic, because making a distinctive web shop can help you to attract customers, which is what we want after all.That’s why it’s worth thinking more deeply about it – before you start selling online.Of course, you need to measure your strengths and choose a platform that suits your needs and capabilities.

Photos and product descriptions

The photos you include in your shop should be real and depict specific products. Importantly – the photos must be your own. Sneaking photos from other sites is a bad idea!

Each of the shop’s products should be described as accurately as possible.It is a good idea to divide the description into several parts, e.g. what the product is made of, what makes it special, what it is used for, etc. You can also elaborate on what the product is made of. You can also write about each product, describe the history of its creation, where it came from, what it is like, how it was made.If you have user reviews about it – this is also a great stickler for future customers.

Payment and clear pricing

Being able to pay from an order is a basic feature of an online shop.Users should have at least a few payment options in your shop, such as bank transfer, credit card payment or PayPal, Strip.

It is also worth ensuring that the shop’s pricing policy is clear, as customers like to know how much a particular product costs, how much it is shipped and what the delivery time is. This is important information and it is better to inform users of this right away rather than only at the order summary.

Contact

The minimum for this topic is to provide an email address and telephone number. If you have the option, add a chat feature to the website.

This will make it easy for customers to ask questions about products and get a response efficiently, which scores you points as a retailer.Additionally, customer contact will help you to improve your product descriptions and find out what they need, which is important when it comes to growing your shop.

How do you promote your online shop and its offerings?

Potential customers are looking for reliable information on a topic they are interested in. If you have a lot of knowledge about what you want to sell, it is worth sharing. There are many local portals, business incubators or organisations for local creators of particular products or brands. Many of them are keen to promote new initiatives – so it’s worth looking for such an organisation in your area and promoting your products there.

A good way to promote your shop is also to maintain a blog on your website, a so-called company blog.We must remember that, in order for it to have the intended effect, the posts must be regular and head-on, so that customers are interested in the topics you upload. A blog has several advantages:

  1. engages users
  2. provides opportunities for contact with customers
  3. helps your website’s positioning
  4. can attract new customers

In every industry, you will find some ‘hot’ topics. You can gain the attention of people looking for answers on specific topics in this way by publishing interesting and comprehensive texts for your company blog. A small hint – if you want to put a large amount of content on your shop page and leave it there – then put this content on the following pages.

Web shop regulations

Having rules and regulations for your online shop is one of your most important obligations. It must be tailored to the type of business you are running and comply with the formal requirements of the Consumer Rights Act. You should therefore:

  • fulfil your information obligations towards consumers
  • declare your customers’ personal data bases to the Inspector General for Personal Data Protection
  • place specimen documents such as withdrawal from the contract and complaints
  • include information on privacy and cookie policy

Privacy policy

When you own a shop, you need to ensure that no one can steal your customers’ personal data. It needs to be secure – and the procedures for handling it clear and appropriate for users. Payments will also pass through your shop. This site security is ensured by an SSL certificate. This is an essential element that you need to implement to create a fully secure and legally functioning online shop.

The same goes for RODO. If you collect users’ data, their email addresses, phone numbers or whatever, you need to ensure their security, and so RODO, is another in terms of paperwork, an essential element of your online shop “equipment”.

Time for a summary

As you can see, all the activities you need to perform when setting up an online shop focus on the responsibilities of running the business and the sales itself, as well as establishing partnerships with external companies. This is the bare minimum you need to be aware of. The advantages of running an online shop are numerous. The popularity of online shopping continues to grow. You therefore have huge scope to make your dreams come true and start selling online. However, you need to prepare yourself for this in terms of content. Willingness alone is not enough.

Read up on what e-commerce is. Lay yourself a factual foundation for your e-store. Some of you may ask yourself at this point, ‘But why do I need this knowledge?’ Everything will turn out in the so-called ‘wash’! Yes, it is true, man learns best from his mistakes , however, remember that knowledge is your best weapon. Being well-prepared for the business you are planning is the basis for dealing with the difficulties that will stand in your way when running your online shop. If you’re ready – get to it! We hope this text has helped you clear up any doubts and illuminated the path towards how to set up your own online shop.