In these tumultuous times, how do you reach your customers when you can't - easily - meet them?
While e-commerce platforms have been in vogue for quite some time now, the situation we are experiencing shows the importance of welcoming your customers in person, but also "digitally". Now the question that often comes up, which tool(s) to choose?
What is the "ideal" platform?
In the absolute, it obviously does not exist. You should rather ask yourself which platforms will be more or less adapted to your project: visual and functional customizations, available budget, integration to your digital ecosystem or to your stores, your business model. From the multitude of existing platforms, we can already create 2 main groups:
- Software as a Service (SaaS) platforms are ready to use.
- Open-source CMS to be installed and configured at a hosting company.
But before going further into these 2 groups, let's look at one more point, concerning the Swiss market, which can influence the choice of a platform.
Among the specificities of Switzerland
Each market being different, Switzerland has some specificities which will be taken into account:
- Potential presence in several language regions: Multilingual
- The means of payment specific to our country: Postfinance, Twint, etc..
- Payments against invoice.
Saas
SaaS platforms allow you to get started quickly and on a small budget. No installation, no hosting, you pay a subscription fee and/or a commission on sales and you have a set of tools and visual themes to deploy very quickly.
Among the most used platforms:
Ecwid, Shopify, Squarespace add to cart, Wix Store
You follow an established framework, the visual codes are known and you "only" take care of the content. Then everything happens more or less by itself. As long as you stay within the framework, everything is fine. But as soon as you have a need specific to your business, things start to get complicated.
Open source CMS
A different philosophy applies here. You have free access to solutions that you must install, configure and often program yourself or through an agency. Everything (or almost everything) is now imaginable or conceivable both visually and functionally.
Each CMS has a (very) large quantity of extensions, plugins, visual themes that allow you to build your store more or less easily and harmoniously. If you know them well, they can save time, but the quantity and quality of these can make their choice complicated and the result uncertain ...
The most popular products in this market are:
Magento, Prestashop, Woocommerce
We will come back to these below.
Market share in Switzerland
Below are the market shares of these solutions in Switzerland. We could refine the analysis by looking at the most frequented sites or those with the highest sales volume.
Magento
Magento is the most advanced tool, but also the most complex. Impossible to implement without specific knowledge and prior experience. It also requires specific and expensive hosting. It is therefore reserved for a large-scale project that will justify the significant investment costs.
Prestashop
CMS developed in our French neighbors, it is a fairly popular solution in Europe. It is really an "e-commerce ready" CMS that has many basic features. Because of its architecture, it can potentially accommodate more products than Woocommerce for example. But here we are talking about catalogs of 100'000 products and more. Multilingualism is also integrated in its heart.
The downside of its e-commerce orientation is that often for other web functionalities, it is often necessary to add another CMS which may be ... Wordpress.
Woocommerce
Swiss and world leader in the number of sites, WooCommerce is an extension of Wordpress which is itself the most widespread CMS in the world. Its ease of use for customers, coupled with a great ability to adapt and an almost infinite number of extensions can explain its popularity.
Literally it is possible to configure your own store without any programming knowledge. This is both its strong and weak point. The stacking of themes and extensions can make the whole thing unruly, hard to maintain and extremely slow.
Fortunately WooCommerce has developed a lot in the last few years and it is possible to create very large websites (more than 100'000 products), with a totally customized design and functionalities with very good performances and integration with CRM or ERP. Moreover it benefits from excellent premium plugins that allow to extend the functionalities in a very professional way.
At Talk to me, we favor a custom WooCommerce integration for the majority of our projects.
Payment gateways
Another essential foundation is the payment gateway or PSP (Payment Service Provider). There are several international solutions that are easy and convenient to integrate, but they do not offer the payment methods specific to Switzerland (Postcard or Twint.)
We will come back with a comparison, but Stripe is still the easiest and fastest solution to integrate and maintain. Moreover, it works without fixed costs. On the other hand, it "only" offers international credit cards.
In conclusion
It is obviously impossible to cover the whole subject in a short article. Each agency will often have its own preferences based on its experience and skills. At Talk to me we are happy to advise you on the approaches to take for your project. Do not hesitate to contact us.
