Which approach to developing an e-commerce website: WordPress or Build from scratch?

Nowadays, selling online or e-commerce on the internet is very popular and growing moreover in the future and you want to begin your business in this domain. Choosing a platform to build a website is the first step, and you don’t know how to choose a platform to build your website? In this article, I will share some experiences and suggestions. Now, I will introduce and compare 2 ways to build a website:

• WordPress
• Build from scratch

1.  WordPress

Firstly, I will introduce “What is WordPress?”

WordPress is an open-source and free content management system (CMS). You can use it to create a blog, a simple website, or an e-commerce website, …

Advantages

• WordPress is the most popular platform to create a website nowadays when using it you don’t must care much knowledge about coding and you can create a website very easily and quickly.
• About the content management system, WordPress is the best, you can write/edit any article at any time easily.
• WordPress has a community very large so you can contact, exchange, support each other.
• Fee: very small. You only paid 50 -> 100$ to buy something such as theme, hosting, …
• Time to build a website: very short, you can build a simple website in 1 to 2 weeks. Especially, you can buy a theme or buy some plugins to build a beautiful website very fast. About the e-commerce domain, you can buy some themes such as kuteshop, flatsome, … at themeforest.net. You can see some demo UIs of kuteshop theme in some images below:

These themes are very beautiful and famous you can see and buy them on themeforest.net. You also can see other themes or plugins and select the suitable themes or plugins that you like.

Some limitations

• Hard to extend new features.
• Can’t handle many clients’ accesses in a time.
• When an issue happens, you don’t know how to fix them quickly.

Example: When your website is overloaded or when hackers attack your website…

Note: An issue that you must care about is “If you want to use a free theme/plugin or a cracked theme/plugin in your website”. These themes/plugins can contain viruses, therefore, you don’t should them but if you want to use them then you need to check very carefully before using them.

2.  Build from scratch

Today, with the fast growth of e-commerce and client using the internet and a website can have many clients access in a time so the website needs high performance. Moreover, it is important to ensure that these information systems are ensured. Security threats are constantly changing, and you can’t know any issues can happen. Therefore, hiring a team of developers to create, maintain and develop web applications (building your website from scratch), is a good solution if you want to build a website with high performance, security, and many other advanced features, … Currently, some big e-commerce websites such as Amazon, eBay, Agoda, Shopee, … apply this way.

If you want to choose this solution, you can design an UI as you want and then hire a team of developers to create and develop the system for you. You must discuss with the development team and other teams such as sales, marketing, accounting, … to define the features that you want then the development team will investigate after that they will select technologies, … and develop the features for you. You can select one or many languages programming such as Java, Python, C#, PHP, …, or some frameworks to develop the website. Choosing a framework, a language, or some technologies to build a website depends on the features of the website that you want.

Advantages

• Your website will have high performance & security, …
• You can collect, analyze and manage many data from clients, …
• Easy scale and extend new features for your website.

Example: In the future, you want to improve user experiences and increase customers and grow revenue so you need to develop some new features such as data analysis, big data, …

Some limitations

• High cost.
• Time to build a website: long term.
• Need many employees to manage and operate the system.

Regarding content management, you can require the developer team to integrate your website with a third-party library. Example: an editor in the admin dashboard as the image below:

Conclusions

As you see from my analytics above, both 2 ways also have advantages and limitations, if you are a new start-up company then choose “WordPress” is suitable otherwise if your company has a strong development team then go with the "build from scratch" option.

In this article, I have shared some pieces of information and this article is just my opinion so it can’t be right in all scenarios, therefore, please refer and choose a platform that is suitable for you. Choosing a platform to build your website is the first step to beginning your business.

Moreover, to succeed in this domain you can learn about many topics such as SEO (Search Engine Optimization), Marketing Online, CRM (Customer Relationship Management), BI (business intelligence), … If you want to know more about these topics, then you can see other articles on this blog or see them at any resource that you want.