When I was working as a freelance developer, I developed many e-commerce sites. Most of them were on WordPress using the famous WooCommerce plugin. But I made one with Mercado Shops for a friend. I have never used Shopify till now, and I’m fully converted.
10 years ago, WordPress was the king. It was right because WordPress.org was open source. You could download the code and customize it as you wanted. Of course, you needed to buy a hosting, upload all the code, and install it. Then, you needed a good template and some plugins: WooCommerce (for making WordPress a store in the first place), and a few others for security, contact forms, captchas, payment, etc. You could build it all for free, but you needed to know a little bit or be patient and learnt on your own.
Later, Hostings allows to install WordPress automatically, so you didn’t have to do much work to start your site. However, you will need to install templates, plugins, etc. But the most important thing is that your site need a maintenance. If you had an e-commerce, It would be your tool to earn money. It couldn’t fail because you would be losing sales. WordPress sites, especial e-commerce sites, are being hacked every day. So, the best you can do is to hire someone to secure and back up your site or pray.
Tienda Nube, Mercado Shops, Shopify and these modern tools are different, because they sell you a service. You are buying a hosting, security, and maintenance service, also a backup, per month. As a result, you have a tool to develop your own shop. You can do with no code or coding, but this is equal to WordPress; the main change is that you buy a service. Therefore, you only need to focus on selling, and they will take care of the tool itself.
What does it mean?
It means that you don’t need to worry about security, firewall, network, server, deploys or upgrades. If you work with no code, you don’t need to worry about functionality eighter. It is a turnkey service. You needn’t start from scratch; a simple store could be ready in a day. The simplest one, but it is all you need to start selling.
Nevertheless, if you really need something more advanced, you can still code and develop extra features.
Years ago, when I was THE FREELANCE DEVELOPER, I worked with WordPress. However, today, my advice to any client would be to use Shopify, Tienda Nube or Mercado Shops. Because they have whatever you need to start selling online. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel, do it as simple as you can. When your sales go up, and the commissions you pay are higher than the cost of having an IT department, then you can think of another option.
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