If free ecommerce solution is what you are looking for the establishment of your online store, then you must have definitely heard about the two popular platforms – Magento and CS-Cart. Both Magento and CS-Cart offer free and efficient shopping cart solutions to the online stores, but each of them has got its own set of features and functionalities to support specific sort of online business needs. Hence, it’s good to check out the similarities and differences between both of them prior selecting one for the eCommerce Website Development.
Below are a few distinctions and similarities between Magento and CS-Cart in terms of their costs of installation, payment and shipping features, customizability, SEO features and much more.
Costs
Talking about the cost criteria, CS-Cart is no doubt available for free. But, this is only for a short period of 30 days, after which the user will have to pay certain amount to use it. Once the free use period gets lapsed, the user will have to pay an expensive amount for license for lifetime or yearly subscription and only then will be able to access the platform for use. Moreover, the free version also provides only limited capabilities and features. Hence, if a user wants to get the best out of this ecommerce platform, then will have to pay for its licensed version.
On the other hand, Magento is open source platform and hence, is all available for no costs at all. It gives a free license for its users for downloading and usage. The users are required to pay only in case they want to host their online store as this would require purchasing a Magento hosting package. So, Magento is a better platform to go with ecommerce development, if costs really bother you or yours is a start-up firm which could not afford to pay excessively for software use.
Backend Features
No doubt that CS-Cart is built with a simple and easy-to-use admin panel with good ecommerce management features, but, the limiting factor here is that with the free mode, the admin users will not be able to access the permission settings and various other advanced features. These features could be accessed only its paid licensed version.
Payment and Shipping Options
With CS-Cart, one can get easy access to more than 50 popular payment gateways like credit cards, Google checkout, PayPal etc. Even for shipping, the platform offers great ability to the admin users to leverage the power of the major shipping providers to their website so that customers can access for secure and reliable product shipping.
With Magento, a user is free to select from a huge variety of payment methods including not only the credit cards, PayPal and similar ones, but also the checks and money orders are also allowed as payment option. For shipping too, Magento has got lot of options for its users like real-time shipping from UPS, USPS, Fedex and many more. It allows order tracking, flat rating shipping, multiple shipments per order and so on.Hence, a huge variety with payment and shipping options is one of the most interesting facts about Magento.
Promotion Features
Talking about website promotion features, both CS-Cart and Magento provide interesting features to attract customers and increase sales for the online stores. But Magento provides something extraordinary as well for its users like multi-tier pricing, private selling features, up-selling and cross selling mechanisms and much more. Hence, Magento allows for unique promotions campaign management for the businesses desperate to get some leads and sales through innovative promotion tactics.
So, from the above comparisons, we may conclude that both CS-Cart and Magento are good platforms for ecommerce website development, but, compared to CS-Cart, Magento has a few extraordinary features which get it the extra attention from the businesses, entrepreneurs and users across the world.
So, if you are looking to develop ecommerce store for your business, consider Magento to be its very foundation in order to gain sure shot success.
