Joomla,Magento, or Drupal - the best framework for your E-commerce store

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Joomla, Magento, and Drupal are three major frameworks. And these allow a small business owner to integrate E-commerce features in the existing CMS websites. Scaling your store through content marketing is a new trend. And many bloggers, small business owners, writers, and existing retailer shops are employing content marketing to sell their products or services.

And therefore, it becomes more important to select the right framework from the start. So that you can keep posting useful marketing content through CMS features, and your customer can purchase products or services through E-commerce features.

The E-commerce store has four different business models – business to business, business to customer, customer to the business, and customer to customer. And therefore, finding the right framework depending on your business model is a little tricky. Why?

Creating and scaling an E-commerce website is not easy, and if you have chosen the wrong framework, the chances of scaling failure are higher.

The question is how you can choose the right framework for your E-commerce website. In simple words, I can not give you the framework name without knowing anything about your business model. And, ultimately you have to find one framework and start the application development.

Based on my experience, the following are the summary of framework selection;

  1. Joomla framework if you have limited products to sell. You can install an open-source Virtuemart extension and enable Joomla into a full E-commerce store. But, it takes experience to set up a proper Virtuemart store and other extensions. Otherwise, you may find some trouble while using it.
  2. Magento framework if you have limited products and you don’t want to invest time in learning how E-commerce stores are set up. Magento is a mere E-commerce store framework, and therefore, you can not create marketing content for your products similar to Joomla and Drupal.
  3. Drupal framework if you have many products and require multi-vendor support. It is highly configurable, and therefore, it takes time and experience to set up a proper E-commerce store.

Joomla framework

It is the CMS framework and supports all the features you need in any content marketing. You can create a product blog post and explain its capabilities. And it automatically creates a proper SEO page for the product.

But, you can not start an E-commerce store right away. You need to install any third-party extensions to convert your blogging platform into an E-commerce store. Virtuemart is one of the mature extensions that supports almost all the features. If you have a special requirement, the Virtuemart community or developer team can create the feature for you.

And that’s the biggest benefit for the small business owner.

But, the setup comes with shortcomings;

  1. You should have technical experience otherwise you may find much trouble during installation and integration.
  2. If you have the specialized feature, you can not find the extension anywhere. You may need to hire a developer and create on your own. 

Magento framework

It is an E-commerce framework and is now acquired by Adobe. There are two editions – one is the community edition and the other is the Adobe edition. Both have similar features and therefore you can start with an option. However, you need to pay a high amount for using Adobe edition. It comes with preinstalled setup and you don’t any technical knowledge for creating your store.

On the other hand, you should have technical experience in setting up a community edition. The best part of the Magento framework is the highly active community. If you have a question, many experience people are waiting to answer it.

The one thing I miss is proper CMS features. You may need to install third-party extensions to integrate the CMS feature. It is opposite to the Joomla framework.

But, the setup has its own shortcoming;

  1. You need to integrate a third-party CMS extension. And many are lacking important features. If you don’t have technical experience, you may find it hard to integrate and use content marketing.
  2. You can all E-commerce features out of the box for the small store. But, you need to hire a technical team for integrating specialized features for scaling the store.

Drupal framework

It is a perfect combination of the above two. It comes with CMS features and by integrating Drupal commerce extension, you can convert it to a full E-commerce store.

You can all the features – for both CMS and E-commerce – out of the box. And with little technical knowledge, you can setup it properly.

Drupal has a big problem though. It is highly configurable and sometimes it creates a lot of problems. And you need the developer’s help for integrating any specialized feature.

But, you have access to a large active community.