Shopify vs BigCommerce vs Lemonstand vs Yahoo

[yatesandcojewelers]

Have any of you moz folks recently had experience deciding where to build a small ecommerce site and had considered the following:

• Shopify
• Big Commerce
• Lemonstand
• Yahoo

Our site has been on Yahoo for 12 years.  And I've seen designers the last several really complain about the limitations of customizing Yahoo stores and the checkout pages.  Going to be creating a new ecommerce site for jewelry and thinking we should consider another platform.

Things like built in responsive design, ability to customize checkout, customize store easily without RTML (Yahoo proprietary language - not many developers use it), ability to scale up if needed, but affordable for entry, conversion optimization best practices built in, ability for good seo built in without having to use 3rd party.  (Another crappy limitation of Yahoo stores is that they do NOT support a blog as part of the domain, ie, www.domain.com/blog.html which is much better for seo than their way - blog.domain.com)

I read on Rich Page's blog that he likes BigCommerce.  I've spoken with Lemonstand and they have a lot of fashion sites using their new platform, and I'm seeing lots of new sites spring up using Shopify.

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated!  I'm sure there are a bunch of folks like me that have similar decisions to make now.

Thanks!

Ron

[LesleyPaone]

This falls out of the bound of which platforms you mentioned, but you should give Prestashop a shake. It is on the level with the other platforms you mentioned and more than likely ahead of them. It is OSS so it is free, all you have to pay for is your hosting.

I have a couple of jewelry store clients running Prestashop and it does very well with them. One of them has features such as 3d product rotation and where you can design pieces with what ever stone you choose and metal.

As far as SEO most all newer platforms are on the same level, which means the SEO of the platform means little to nothing. You have to do the SEO yourself with every platform.

[yatesandcojewelers]

Thanks Leslie.  I'll check out Prestashop, I am not familiar with them.  I'll reach out to you for more info on this.

Appreciate your help!

[LesleyPaone]

No problem, I am one of their community moderators for their forum, so if you have any questions like if something can be done with it; you can send me at http://dh42.com/contact/ ( I hope this is ok, I don't want to put my main email address out to get scraped). I can let you know if something is a stock feature or not. Because with the hosted platforms like Shopify, Lemonstand, and BigCommerce the features are limited because you do not have access to the core application. With something like Prestashop or Magento for that matter since you have access, you can really do anything your budget allows.