What Is OpenCart? How OpenCart Stands Out Against WordPress

Alongside WordPress, OpenCart is another CMS (content management system) well suited to e-commerce websites today, with more upgraded features. So what is OpenCart? What makes it different from WordPress? And should you go for website design with OpenCart or not? Let's find out with Mona Media.

1- What is OpenCart?

OpenCart is an open-source CMS built specifically for e-commerce websites, written in PHP on an MVC(L) architecture. With a history of nearly 20 years, OpenCart is considered a complete e-commerce solution for businesses thanks to its many features built for an online sales channel.

What is OpenCart? How does OpenCart stand out from WordPress?

OpenCart's standout features

OpenCart has all the core features of an open-source CMS, including easy customization so businesses can adapt it as they like. It offers a Multishop feature, which lets you create several e-stores on one website. It also covers other sales-related features for webmasters, such as promotions and discounts, product category management and a loyalty points model.

What many people like most about OpenCart is how far you can customize the storefront with the Build Theme tool, which lets you arrange product displays on your e-store however you want. For programmers, OpenCart uses the MVC(L) model, which makes writing modules and code very easy, helps them build special features and manage the store better.

2- Reviews of OpenCart

OpenCart is open source

As an open-source CMS written in PHP, OpenCart is now a e-commerce leading solution. It lets users set up their working interface freely with Build Theme, and adds many e-commerce features such as discounts and coupons.

OpenCart is a shopping cart system

OpenCart has a tightly built store management module system, so customers get an online shopping cart to buy with, and can pay in pay online unlimited currencies.

OpenCart has a rich feature set

Besides the strengths above, OpenCart has many other features, such as:

• A shopping cart function, so customers can buy several products at once and pay more easily (combined with discounts, if any).
• Loyalty points for returning customers.
• Gift coupons
• Clear product categories
• Support SEO Very good support for meta tags and product description tags.
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• Payment in multiple currencies.
• Clear display of agent and store information on the e-store.
• Backup and recovery
• An easy-to-use admin interface with modern features and room to expand.
• Daily activity statistics that help you plan better.

3- Pros and cons of OpenCart

OpenCart is a powerful CMS, but it has its own strengths and weaknesses, because every CMS is built to serve its own community. The pros and cons below will help you decide whether your website really suits this source code more than others, and whether you should build your website with OpenCart.

OpenCart's pros and cons, and when to use it.

Pros of OpenCart

+ Manages several stores at the same time

+ Selling is as easy as it gets, for both users and developers.

+ Supports the features many ready-made websites have, plus some functions built specifically for selling

+ Developers can easily customize the interface with a huge library of modules and themes

+ In an emergency, OpenCart can back up and restore your data right away.

+ Supports multiple languages, with affiliate marketing (recruiting partners to boost sales).

Cons of OpenCart

+ Using vqmod easily leads to errors.

+ The modules for Opencart are rigid and not very flexible

+ The feature library is broad but still not complete, and needs continued updates.

4- OpenCart vs WordPress

To compare OpenCart and WordPress, Mona Media will start with a short description of WordPress.

What is WordPress?

WordPress is also one of the most popular CMS platforms today.

It is a fairly ideal CMS for beginners and is used by most webmasters (roughly 40% of all websites in the world). Here are 4 reasons why so many people use WordPress.

• Easy setup: as an open-source CMS, WordPress lets you create a website quickly and easily.
• A huge plugin library: WordPress gives you more choice of themes and designs than other CMS platforms, so you can customize to your taste more flexibly.
• Completely free: you can use the library above entirely free of charge. Nice, isn't it?
• Quick community support: at the moment, WordPress has a large community that can answer almost any question about this CMS. You can run your website without worrying.

Besides its strengths, WordPress has some limits when it comes to future compatibility. When your website has heavy traffic and keeps growing, it will need a stronger server to store all user information and handle the growing visits. WordPress sites often struggle here, because they usually don't adapt well to change.

At that point you need a better CMS for your website, and OpenCart may be the right answer.

OpenCart or WordPress: which is better?

To choose between OpenCart and WordPress, let's Mona Media analyze them in depth and score them, so you can pick the right one for your website.

Should you choose WordPress with WooCommerce, or OpenCart?

CMS installation

• Opencart – 5/5

Setup is very simple. In just a few steps you have a complete management system for selling online, with nothing to worry about.

• WordPress – 4.5/5

To have a WordPress website, you need the WordPress source code and the WooCommerce plugin installed, plus a suitable theme so you can manage the site better. Overall, though, a WordPress site supports selling quite effectively.

E-store management

• Opencart – 5/5

OpenCart provides a full set of functions for selling, revenue statistics, sales lists and marketing reports for store owners. Its interface is also very friendly, which makes it easier for webmasters to work with.

• WordPress – 4.5/5

WordPress supports basic selling, with an admin panel full of features and modules. It isn't as easy to use as OpenCart, but the admin panel matches the standard WordPress interface, so it is easier to get used to.

Features and interface design

• Opencart – 4/5

OpenCart has a friendly interface built for e-commerce. It also Opencart has a free theme library that makes it easier to adjust to your liking. The downside is that installing modules in OpenCart is fairly difficult and takes more steps than in WordPress.

• WordPress – 4.5/5

WordPress used to be the CMS many webmasters chose for blogs and forums. So when moving to e-commerce websites, apart from the plugin WooCommerce everything is quite familiar and easy for website administrators to use. The weakness here is WordPress's limitation in its theme library and customizing the interface is difficult.

Support for digital marketing

• Opencart – 4/5

OpenCart supports website SEO services and Adwords reasonably well. But because this CMS is still fairly new, the support is not complete, and Google still has trouble recognizing some important elements on an OpenCart site.

• WordPress – 5/5

As one of the oldest CMS platforms, WordPress is long familiar to Google, and WordPress sites are easy for Google to read. That is why preparing a WordPress site WordPress website design for SEO and running Adwords is fairly simple, and Google reviews it more easily than an OpenCart site.

5- OpenCart conclusion

Is OpenCart really good? Should you use OpenCart?

We hope that by the end of this series we will have the best Vietnamese-language learning resource for OpenCart. If you have questions or suggestions while learning, please leave a comment. It is what motivates me to finish this series. Happy learning.

Mona Media hopes this article is a practical OpenCart reference for webmasters who run digital marketing for businesses. OpenCart is strong in its working interface and its huge free extension library, but you will have to put in more effort to do SEO and run Adwords for this kind of website.

The choice is yours. Mona Media trusts you to make the right strategic decision. Good luck!

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