Brick-and-mortar businesses, stressed by the rising cost of rent, and staff costs, are consistently turning towards e-commerce. The open-source nature of e-commerce platforms is a lucrative reason for businesses to embrace the world of online sales. Using an e-commerce platform, businesses can scale up easily and acquire new customers. There are many e-commerce platforms around like Joomla, Woocommerce, Magento, and OpenCart.
OpenCart is an open-source, e-commerce platform that allows business owners to self-host and upgrade their e-store without any difficulty. Multiple advantages of using OpenCart as an e-commerce platform, never cease to surprise business owners. We bring across five things that we believe you did not know about the platform:
1# OpenCart is a Great Fit for Cost-Conscious Businesses
Choose OpenCart as your preferred e-store platform if you intend to keep your costs in check. First of all, it is easy to integrate your products with the OpenCart store, without any specialized technical know-how required. The platform does not incur any additional charges such as download fees or upgrade fees.
OpenCart provides excellent customer support without having to pay anything extra. Only the basic expenses like hosting, an SSL certificate, and a domain name are required by store owners, to run an e-commerce business with OpenCart. The only exceptions are the extensions because some are listed for free while many others come with price tags. OpenCart also offers a cloud-based solution for a fixed monthly fee.
2# OpenCart Hosts Customised Shopping Experiences Depending on the Needs of the Business
After you sign up for the core OpenCart platform, you can expand it, with the help of various extensions that are available. Many business owners have realized the benefits of customization features that OpenCart offers. They can choose which extensions are most suitable for their e-commerce store. Using these extensions with code access allows users to customize their online stores to make them even more attractive.
The collection of themes and extensions available for OpenCart is huge. Moreover, most of the extensions used with the OpenCart marketplace are designed specifically for e-commerce stores and thus help improve the e-store front significantly. Online stores built with OpenCart vary in terms of product feeds, reports, shipping methods, and the payment gateway, all thanks to these extensions. These themes and extensions also allow a business to scale up their store easily. This means that you can create an online e-commerce store of your dreams, without any limitations with OpenCart.
3# OpenCart is Solely E-commerce Centric
OpenCart is developed on PHP and features a simple dashboard that is easily navigable for most sellers. The platform adequately captures the productivity of your business with its e-commerce focused functionalities. We know that a smoothly functioning e-commerce website increases customer retention rates. OpenCart allows your business website to incorporate distinct business-centric functionalities thanks to its modules and themes.
The platform offers readymade themes for online storefront design and it can be translated to any language in the world. There is also multiple currency support to aid businesses in international transactions. Unlimited product displays, backups, digital selling support, e-shop filters, shipping calculator, guest checkout and multiple payment gateway support, all contribute towards making better business websites.
E-business friendly functionalities that OpenCart platform offers make it a hit among e-store owners. Thus, most businesses today prefer OpenCart Website development to leverage conversion and sales volume of their e-store. OpenCart is reasonably easy to install and use; however, you can also hire a software developer to do it for you.
4# OpenCart is SEO Friendly
Search Engine Optimization is the magic potion that leads to the success of an e-store. Regardless of its nature, every online business can benefit from the use of SEO strategies to boost search engine rankings. Ecommerce platform OpenCart comes equipped with powerful SEO properties that boost an e-store’s rankings on search engines.
Being SEO optimized, the e-store you build with OpenCart has all its pages indexed on all major search engines. The platform allows you to choose the plug-ins needed for online store’s on-page SEO. Various built-in SEO enhancements allow store owners to modify their title, meta description and insert keywords.
5# OpenCart offers Well-Researched Sales Reports for Businesses
A foresighted business always keeps a check on sales figures to steer itself in the right direction. Tracking sales functions and other activities becomes all the more important in the case of online businesses. By default, the Opencart e-commerce platform offers sales reports enlisting total sales that take place on per day, week or month basis. You can also check out a product view report that showcases the performance of products in the e-store.
When you determine which are the most-visited products in your store, you can create powerful conversion strategies around those products to boost their sales. The platform also churns out reports that give you details on sales of each product as well as aggregate sales. These report-generating tools are built into the OpenCart dashboard and are easy to access for sellers.
Conclusion
We hope these five things you didn’t know about OpenCart will show how this platform is the perfect fit for businesses of all sizes. Not only it is cost-effective for small businesses but it also offers easily scalable business-centric solutions for expansion.
