E-commerce has been growing exceptionally fast for several years now, making an online store one of the most important sales channels for businesses trading online.
One of the biggest challenges when creating or updating an online store is choosing the right platform. Currently, there are many excellent platforms on the market that can be used to create a modern online store.
However, even with the wide range of existing solutions available, often none of them are suitable, which is why the option of developing a custom platform is chosen.
If your business needs an online store with standard functionality, the choice of platform depends more on the partners you want to implement the project with, as both platforms can usually achieve equally good results when the work is performed by a professional and experienced development team.
However, if your business has non-standard requirements for functionality, design, or integrations, we recommend considering the development of a custom platform tailored specifically to your needs.
Advantages of developing a custom online store platform
• Unlimited possibilities
One of the main arguments for choosing custom platform development is unlimited possibilities. Almost all existing options for creating an online store have many standard features, as well as a multitude of various plugins and extensions that can be installed for additional fees or free of charge. However, businesses often have needs that usually cannot be implemented with existing market solutions. When developing a custom e-commerce platform, there are no limits to possibilities and implementing requirements.
• Extensive scalability opportunities
If a company has a clear vision for the future and ambitious growth plans, it is very important to consider whether the desired existing online store platform will meet needs in the future and will not create additional problems when implementing complex solutions.
• Functionality
The majority of existing e-commerce platforms are universal and designed to meet broad needs. Practice shows that in most cases only 30-40% of all available features are actually used, while some features are still missing and require additional development work.
In existing platforms, implementing complex functionalities is often significantly more difficult and expensive than in a custom platform.
• Performance
Particularly large quantities of products or visitors in an online store are also among the most common factors influencing platform choice. When development work is performed properly, most existing platforms can handle both large product quantities and visitor traffic perfectly well, but performing optimization work on these platforms is also more complex.
A custom solution offers numerous opportunities for optimizing the database and the entire system's operational logic, so as product quantities and traffic grow, dealing with these challenges with a custom platform is usually much simpler and faster.
Disadvantages of developing a custom e-commerce platform
• Costs
Initial development costs for a custom platform are usually higher than building an online store with an existing market solution.
• Time
Developing a custom platform typically takes somewhat more time.
• Plugins
In certain cases, development work is required, whereas when choosing an existing e-commerce platform solution, it's often enough to simply install the necessary plugin.
Choosing an e-commerce platform is a crucial step that can determine a large part of your e-commerce success, making it essential to properly understand your needs and find a competent development team that will help you make the right decisions and deliver quality programming work.
Building a custom e-commerce platform is not a good choice if you have a small number of products and no distinctive or highly complex features or integrations with external systems.
We build online stores that don't have particularly complex functionality requirements using the world's most popular content management system WordPress (with the WooCommerce e-commerce module). We develop custom e-commerce platforms using the Laravel framework.