Introduction
Today, building an online store to supply goods, products and services on the Internet has attracted the attention of businesses, and every small and large business unit is entering the field of online sales so that it can have good sales and focus on its branding. to be
The most important advantage of this work is to introduce the business on a wider level. If your business is traditional and you use a physical location, your customers will be limited to your neighborhood and city. But when this work is implemented on the internet platform, it is possible to attract customers from all over the world.
There are many ways to set up an online store, and first of all, you need to choose a suitable system for this. Open Cart store builder is another best online store building system that you can use to create a store site.
What is open cart?
Pankart or open cart is one of the best systems for creating an online store (E-commerce CMS), which is available in open source and free of charge. By using Open Cart, you can create your own store and by adding products to the sale of products through Iranian online payment gateways, you can review products and carefully study sales and user behavior. Then, with the help of this data, conduct studies on it and increase your sales by examining and optimizing the weak and strong points.
It doesn’t matter how big your business is in using this store builder system. Whether you have a small store in the heart of one of your villages or you are a company that operates through import and export with large companies in the world, using this system will meet your needs.
According to the statistics provided by the Builtwith site, the use of this system among one million reviewed sites is equal to 4.048 sites, which compared to other systems, it was able to take a share of 0.4%.
Using Open Cart to build an online store compared to WooCommerce has the advantage that the speed of processing information on the site can be better. But because of the features and functions that WooCommerce has with the help of external plugins and the large community of users, Open Cart is not paid much attention.
Capabilities that are required as a basic requirement for a store include the following, which OpenCart fulfills.
1- Simple and easy online store management
2- Support for different formats and patterns
3- Powerful and excellent SEO
4- Ability to sell in all countries or assign to a specific country
5- The possibility of using bank payment gateways
6- Ability to view complete purchase details
7- Can be used as a multi-vendor
8- The possibility of inserting a discount code and holding sales festivals in different ways
9- Ability to review products by buyers
10- Ability to make the online store multilingual
11- Possibility of B2B trade
12- The possibility of placing infinite products with the ability to insert images as a gallery
13- And…
What is required to use Open Cart?
Every site builder system needs a server or host, domain, template and plugins you need, with the help of which you can develop your store. Apart from these costs, other costs should be spent on supporting and developing the system, which is generally described below.
1- Buying a domain, which costs between 10 and 500,000 Tomans depending on the choice of domain extension.
2- Buying a host suitable for OpenCart costs between 300 and 2 million tomans per year.
3- The design of the mold costs between 600 and 1 million if you use an average mold and between 5 and 50 million tomans if you use a special mold.
4-Adding required features and customizing the system, which is generally created by the plugin. This option, like template design, will cost between 600 and 1 million if you use a ready-made plugin and between 1 and 5 million tomans if you use a dedicated plugin. Of course, the cost in exclusive mode depends on the facilities and size of the project.
5- Hiring a support person to solve the store’s problems will cost an average of 150 to 800,000 Tomans per month.
6- Hiring a developer to add facilities, depending on the amount of work, can cost between 1 and several million tomans per month.
The bigger the size of your store and the more products you have for sale, the more you will have to spend on the site. But in general, to have a standard online store, you need to pay between 5 and several tens of millions.
What are the advantages and disadvantages of Open Cart?
Simple and free to use
The most important advantage of Open Cart is that it was free. You can easily download and use it without paying. The fact that it is free has made Open Cart available for several languages in several countries, and various sites have been active in this system for training and providing support services.
Access to various formats
Open Cart has various free and paid templates. Free templates have a poorer look and fewer features compared to paid templates, but they will cover most of your store needs anyway.
With the help of more than thousands of optimized templates, you can build an online store with high loading speed and improve your ranking in search engines.
Regular updates and updates
This system is provided by a group of developers, the number of people working on the development of the project is increasing every year. This advantage has made it possible to continuously update the system compared to the dedicated store builder system.
New features are added to the system every time the update is made, and the problems that already existed and were reported with the help of users are also solved.
It has many plugins for store development
The plugin or module works like a side program in any system. By installing and placing the plugin next to the core of the system, it will be possible to add more features to the system. Open Cart also has thousands of plugins to add different features that are not available in the initial version, because many features are not needed for all sites.
It has excellent SEO and is suitable for an online store
One of the most important things in SEO is having a high speed. The higher the speed of your site, the more search engines will care about it and give your site more credibility.
OpenCart is programmed in such a way that it can process requests in a short time with optimal use of server resources and send the appropriate response.
Lack of specialized support
The main problem with all free site builder systems is that because they are offered for free, no one is responsible for fixing the problems for the sites. In addition to solving problems, this case is also considered to add facilities.
Open Cart is also part of this category, and if a problem occurs in your online store or if you intend to add a feature that you do not have the necessary knowledge for this, you will need a support, and you will have to pay a fee for each request. .
Security issues due to being free
The system being free has made access to the core of the system accessible to anyone. Therefore, whenever there is a problem or bug in the core of the system, the templates used, or the existing plugins, it will overshadow all user sites.
Therefore, the first thing you should have in using free systems is to download and install the system core, plugin and module from reliable sites. Pay attention to the security issues and existing tips and implement them on your store site.
Heavy templates and plugin problems
The main problem with ready-made site builder and store builder systems is that because you use multiple templates and plugins to use on each site, having a high speed on the site requires having technical knowledge. For this reason, you should use a dedicated template or, if you use a ready-made template, do a lot of customization on it to match the structure of your site.
For this reason, because people do not have the expertise and technical knowledge to use templates and plugins correctly and optimally, they use any plugin and template in an arbitrary way so that it can be displayed under any condition they want. This ultimately makes the site not optimal and the volume of pages increases, which results in a decrease in the speed of the site and, most importantly, the store’s SEO.
Conclusion
In this article, we talked about what OpenCart is and what its features are, as well as the advantages and disadvantages of OpenCart, and we saw that this new store content management system has many features that can be used. Of course, maybe this system has not evolved as much as its serious competitors, and the reason for this is that the age of this system is much younger than that, and it was released as open source and free. In general, if we want to say what the future view of OpenCart is and where it will reach, we must say that a bright future awaits this light system. If you have enough programming knowledge, OpenCart can provide you with an ideal store system.
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