PrestaShop or WordPress with WooCommerce – Which Website is Right for Your Business?

With a global customer base at your disposal, selling products online offers huge potential for making lots of money, and you don’t really need to hire lots of employees to help you run the business. In fact, you can do it all by yourself. All you really need is the right e-commerce website, and for many there are really only two options to choose from: PrestaShop or WordPress with the WooCommerce plugin.

PrestaShop vs. WordPress with WooCommerce

Let’s take a closer look at each option to see which one best fits your needs. PrestaShop is expressly designed for building online stores. It’s a PHP/MySQL open source solution that’s free to download and use, and it’s currently used by at least 185,000 stores in more than 160 countries worldwide.

WordPress was initially built as a blogging platform but is now the most popular CMS in the world, and with the WooCommerce plugin, you can transform your WordPress website into an online store. About 260,000 websites (so far) are powered by WooCommerce.

Key Differences

Both platforms are popular and reputable and you can use either of them to create an online store. But how exactly are they different?

The main difference is that with PrestaShop you get more features already built into the software. It offers a complete store management system and you can run several stores under a single account. There are no limits for number of products, orders, and clients. You get tools for SEO, marketing, and analytics. And you have lots of options for shipping and payment. Besides the built-in features, you can also add more than 3,500 extensions on the official marketplace.

With WooCommerce, however, there are fewer built-in features, although you still get the full complement of ecommerce functions that allow you to build an online store. It’s just that you’ll need to manually add some features that are already featured on PrestaShop. But what’s great about WordPress is that customising your site is not as challenging as it is with PrestaShop. This means that it costs less for a design and development agency such as Harbour Studios to create a WordPress site than a PrestaShop site. With WordPress you can also spread your costs further by developing the site in stages to make it grow with your business; you can start by popularising the site and using it as a brand awareness tool, and then later develop it into an online store when you have cultivated a stronger customer base.

Recommendation

So which one should you go for? That, of course, depends on your particular needs. If you’re focused on selling only and you don’t want to bother with things like blogs, photography, and forums, then PrestaShop may be your best bet. It’s also much more appropriate if you’re a large ecommerce company with hundreds or even thousands of products to sell. You can really make full use of the PrestaShop built-in features.

On the other hand, if e-commerce is not the main goal of your website and you also focus on other aspects of your business utilizing regular brochure pages or a blog, then WordPress is a better choice. In fact, a lot of people just start with a blog at first, and then add WooCommerce when they realise that they can monetize their blog. WooCommerce offers all the basic requirements of an online store, and you can always add more capabilities from other plugins offered by the huge WordPress community.

To summarise, if you want to build a website specifically to sell products online then go with PrestaShop. If you’re building any other type of website, then choose WordPress. You can always install WooCommerce at a later date.