WordPress or Drupal: Which One is best for an eCommerce Shop?

“According to some reports, digital marketing has extended its dimensions across the nation and is continuously gaining popularity among entrepreneurs and web consumers.”

Over the last few years, E-commerce has emerged as a powerful industry across the nation. Many of the entrepreneurs and business organizations are adopting the online trading technique to sell their products and services to a large number of targeted customers quickly and effectively.

In fact, the vast majority of people are finding online shopping more convenient as they can buy all kinds of products right from their homes, offices, and any other place.

That’s why business owners are setting up an interactive and fully-functional e-commerce website where they can showcase, promote and sell out their goods and services to the web customers with ease.

However, creating an online store is not a simple job. There are various e-commerce development platforms in the web market, but to choose the best one is crucial. Since, every business has their unique needs, goals, and notions. Thus, it becomes quite difficult to say which platform is suitable for your online business.

Well, in the web industry, there are two most popular ecommerce solutions – WordPress and Drupal. Each platform has its own advantages and limitations.

In this blog post, we will try to throw a light on the advantages and limitations of WordPress and Drupal platforms to find out the best ecommerce development solution for your business.

Definition

WordPress and Drupal, both are the Content Management Systems that are developed in the PHP programming language.

WordPress

WordPress has commenced its journey as a blogging platform, but now it has become one of the robust platforms for developing highly-intuitive eCommerce websites. There are tons of powerful plugins on WordPress that can help you add extra functionality in your online store. It gives you the flexibility to integrate social media icons or ecommerce gateways into your website with ease.

Overall, WordPress is a great option that allows you to convert your simple website into a fully-fledged ecommerce website.

Drupal

Drupal is a developer-friendly Content Management System used for building robust and complex websites. It is a highly customizable platform that allows developers to build fully-functional eCommerce websites.

Advantages of Using WordPress as an eCommerce Platforms

1. Ease of Use:

WordPress is free and open source software. This means it is completely free to download and can be modified, and upgraded as per the requirement. It is a user-friendly platform that allows a novice website owner to create and develop a beautiful and intuitive website.

But if you want to create a professional looking ecommerce website, then you can hire a WordPress web developer who can customize and extend your online store according to your requirement.

2. Millions of Useful Plugins

WordPress offers a vast collection of robust plugins (both free and premium) that can help you add extra functionality to your Ecommerce website. You can pick WordPress as your ecommerce platform by integrating WooCommerce plugin (for e-commerce), and then you can easily use the free and paid plugins, developed especially for ecommerce websites.

3. Huge collection of Visually-Appealing Themes

There are tons of beautiful and engaging themes on WordPress that can help you create an eye-catching and user-friendly eCommerce website. As we all know, the design of a website represents your business, and also increases your brand recognition. In fact, you can also customize your theme and make it unique that can enhance the beauty of your online store.

Advantages of Using Drupal as an eCommerce Platforms

1. Drupal offers thousands of Free Themes, Extensions, Modules and Plugins

Drupal is a powerful eCommerce development platform that offers hundreds and thousands of free extensions, themes, and modules that can help you build a highly-customizable ecommerce website.

2. SEO friendly Platform

It is quite difficult to find a single platform where you can fulfill all your organizational requirements. And, Drupal is a great platform that not only offers themes and extensions, but also comes with advanced SEO (Search engine optimization) features that can help you increase your online ranking on search engines quickly and easily.

3. Offers Flexibility

If you want to set up an eCommerce store, then you should try Drupal as it allows you to customize your product catalog easily. You can personalize and categorize your product catalog as per your requirement and showcase your merchandises in a well-organized manner.

Disadvantages of Using WordPress as an E-Commerce Platform

1. Issues related to Plugins

Undoubtedly, WordPress offers thousands of plugins that can enhance the productivity of your e-commerce site, but any new update may destroy the overall performance of that plugin. In fact, many plugins don’t work well when WordPress is updated. Therefore, it becomes important for you to keep a backup copy of your plugin before updating your installed plugins.

2. WordPress is not for large online stores

WordPress is a great platform for ecommerce sites, but it is not appropriate for maintaining large online stores. In order to set up a large online store, you may need to store more data. And, WordPress could take a lot of time and users stop spending more on customization and segregating the data.

Disadvantages of Using Drupal as an E-Commerce Platform

1. Less User-Friendly

Drupal gives a great flexibility to web developers, but if you are a novice website owner and want to customize your site, then you may require advanced coding knowledge. This means that Drupal is not for ideal for those who don’t have experience in web development.

2. Drupal doesn’t offer “too many” plugins

There are many CMS out there in the market like WordPress that offer a wide range of powerful plugins, but Drupal lacks in this section. It may not offer an ample collection of plugins.

Final Outcome

You can use a WordPress for your ecommerce site if you have less than 100 products. But, if you want a fully-customized website, along with robust SEO features within one framework, then you can opt for Drupal.