In this article, you will learn how to pick up the best tools for an ecommerce website.
I am assuming here, that you have already taken a domain name for your ecommerce website and also shortlisted your ecommerce hosting provider. If not you can read the other articles in my blog here.

ECommerce Website Creation

You choose the platform based on the standard features it offers, availability of themes and plugins, ease of customization, and finally ease of use.
A few platforms most commonly used include:

  • Magento
  • Zen Cart
  • Virtuemart -Joomla
  • WP-Woocommerce
  • Prestashop
  • Open Cart
  • OS Commerce
  • Drupal

    Talking about platforms, you must know that all the platforms listed above use PHP at the backend. PHP is a scripting language suitable for web development. PHP can be used on a Apache or IIS servers. PHP can be used with Windows, Linux, MacOS, Unix operating systems. And if you have been undermining PHP as a second grade language, you will be amazed to know that websites that get mind boggling traffic, like Facebook and WordPress, are powered by PHP. We’ve heard of HTML, so why PHP? A very valid question. Before I answer this question, you need to understand about Static websites and Dynamic websites.

Static & Dynamic Websites

A website can have both static as well as dynamic web pages. So, instead of understanding Static websites or dynamic websites, we should understand the difference between static web pages and dynamic webpages. Let us say that we need an ecommerce website for a business that sells 7 different products. We will need the following pages

  • Home page
  • About Us page
  • Contact Us
  • Product pages (one for each product)
  • Checkout page
  • Link to the Payment gateway.

Generally, product pages use a common layout, which once created, can be duplicated for each of the products.
Websites are all about hyperlinking, so linking these 10 pages is not so much of a Herculean task. Hyperlink these 10 pages to each other, and your website is ready.
On the other hand, if you need a website to sell 500 products; you’ll get furrow lines on your forehead considering the amount of repetitive product pages you’ll have to change and hyperlink. But if I give you a Spreadsheet which looks something like this
and then you write a few lines of code which takes values from this spreadsheet as
Start new page
For product_id=1, write the corresponding
product_name
product_size
product_weight
product_price
End

Of course, you need to improvise on the code as well as the page look, but the purpose it would serve, remains the same. Now pages like these are not created before hand and stored on the web server, but generated when required. There is a database (a more elaborate version of the spreadsheet we used) and a product template page. When you visit an ecommerce website with hundreds and thousands of products, and you click on a product called Pillow Cover, you get to see its size, weight and price. The query generated at the backend will look something like our code above, but the product_id will correspond to the product details we have requested (2 for Pillow Cover). So, it makes sense to have a dynamic website for even 5+ products, but defintely for a website whose product count ranges in hundreds. You can add any number of products to the webste, just by adding their details to the database. We will have to balance the effort involved in creating a product template and a database vis-a-vis static web pages.

Database for an ECommerce Website

Something about the database. The ideal combination is PHP with MySQL. Most hosting companies give you 2 or 3 databases in their starter plan, which should be enough to host a big ecommerce website. The spreadsheet we discussed above would be just a table in the database. And a database for an ecommerce website has hundreds of such tables.
The ecommerce platforms we are discussing, have thousands of files and hundreds of tables when they have installed. Installation is user-friendly, and if you follow the on-screen instructions properly, you can install the platform within a few minutes.

ECommerce Website Creation

Next comes configuration. This installed platform needs to be configured to suit user requirements. You have to define the site name, logo, favicon, address, e-mail, store locations, telephone numbers etc. Not all platforms are created equal, and each one offers a considerable level of ease or difficulty to configure these parameters. A help file is usually available, but it is only as helpful as the menu itself. Based on my experience, I prefer using Prestashop. Why Prestashop?

Why Prestashop is the best ECommerce Platform

We used ZenCart earlier. Though it is a very secure and sturdy platform, it has refused to modernise. Though the forum support is one of the best in industry, many features that are considered a necessity today are not available on Zen Cart.
PrestaShop comes with more extensions and themes, allows for better optimization possibilities.
PrestaShop has several commercial features like layered navigation, coupons, cross-selling etc. that come in the default installation. You may need to buy plugins or extensions on other platforms to use these features.
PrestaShop has awesome documentation and some amazing functionalities that will make your work faster.
Prestashop shows a higher popularity on Google Trends.