Looking for the top 10 e-commerce CMSs for 2024 ? Here's the official CMS ranking compiled by Pikka's team of e-commerce experts.
These recommendations are of course completely personal and must be challenged in relation to your project.
Regardless, all of these e-commerce CMSs made headlines last year and are top trends for 2024.
Top 10 E-commerce CMS 2024
For those who can't wait, here's our list of our top 10 e-commerce CMSs in 2024:
- Shopify
- Prestashop
- Sylius
- Magento 2
- BigCommerce
- Salesforce Commerce Cloud
- Mailchimp Open Commerce
- Wizishop
- Webflow E-commerce
- Proximis
Why is it important to choose a good e-commerce CMS for your business?
So first of all, before we start, what is a GOOD E-commerce CMS and how is this top 10 CMS made up?
Here are 5 criteria that allow us to define what a modern and reliable E-commerce CMS is and which, as such, allows it to appear in this top 10:
Ease of use : A good e-commerce CMS should be easy to use for merchants/e-tailers/employees, requiring minimal web development knowledge.
Flexibility : An e-commerce CMS in 2024 must be flexible and allow for easy customization of the company's e-commerce site, including features, design, and ordering processes.
Modern features : To be included in this top 10 e-commerce CMS, it must offer a comprehensive range of features to efficiently manage business activities, such as adding products, managing inventory, and integrating payment methods. These features can, of course, be added via plugins or add-ons, the key being that they are available in the web and e-commerce ecosystem.
Offer updates and security : extremely important! E-commerce CMSs must be constantly updated and offer robust security to protect company and customer data. You may come across some top 10 sites on the web that offer CMSs that haven't received any updates for 10 years! Unthinkable.
Price and associated costs : The cost of an e-commerce CMS can vary considerably, so it's important to find a solution that fits your budget while still providing the necessary features and flexibility.
What is an e-commerce CMS?
An e-commerce CMS is a tool, an e-commerce software , that allows a business to create and manage its own online sales website. It is a software that provides all the necessary features to put products online, accept payments and manage orders.
A good e-commerce CMS should be easy to use, flexible and offer a full range of features to efficiently manage your business activities.
Order taking, payment, product catalog management, and customer management are among the main features expected from a high-performance CMS in 2024.
Of course, the functional scope of most of the CMSs in this article exceeds 200 or 300 features. We will therefore not list them here, but they are all very robust for managing your e-commerce site.
Why choose an e-commerce CMS?Choosing an e-commerce CMS is an option that has become the norm for several years now. It is important to know that at the beginning, each e-commerce site had to create, via its e-commerce agency in most cases, each functionality of its site itself.
This was obviously very expensive and significantly slowed down the development and growth of e-commerce sites. E-commerce CMSs therefore emerged to offer ready-to-use features for functions that were frequently used on each site.
Everything has obviously expanded quite a bit since then, both in functionality and in services and quality.
Today, in 2024, it is becoming difficult to recommend anything other than a CMS or a framework to start in e-commerce or to redesign a site . The solution of building everything “in-house”, called “from scratch” development, is extremely rare and expensive.
Be careful, some projects lend themselves to this but they remain rare.
Choosing a CMS is a way to avoid reinventing the wheel, to be able to rely on solid foundations and, above all, to accelerate time to market while being less dependent on your e-commerce agency. A good win-win deal in most cases.
What main functions can you expect from an e-commerce CMS?To help you choose the right CMS for your e-commerce project, you can request demos from publishers or agencies. Here are some points of attention to consider for the main features of e-commerce CMS.
- Product Management: Add, modify, delete products with variation options (size, color).
- Inventory Management: Track stock levels, restocking alerts.
- Integrated Payment System: Support for multiple payment methods (credit cards, PayPal).
The 10 best e-commerce CMS in 2024
Now let's move on to the heart of our article, the famous top 10 e-commerce CMS in 2024. For your information, there are several hundred e-commerce CMS on the market and not all of them are suitable for use. You can read our article: "How to choose your e-commerce CMS in 5 minutes" if you want to know more. Here are the top 10.
No. 1: Shopify
The undisputed international star of this year remains Shopify, which pulverizes all its competitors in many cases. Be careful, it is important to challenge the e-commerce CMS according to your needs and to write a specification, but there is a good chance that in your call for tender, you will call on a Shopify agency.
Shopify is suitable for many types of projects such as DVNB, retailer sites, new entrants, migration and platform change, click and collect, omnichannel...
All powerful, efficient, and scalable to match your sales. Add to that low maintenance, more than 8,000 available apps, and CMS updates almost every other day, and you've got the star of 2024 and probably even the next few years.
Benefits of Shopify- Exemplary modularity
- Easy to use for teams
- An ecosystem of agencies and developers at your service
- Thousands of ready-to-use applications
It is indeed difficult to see who can compete in the same category as Shopify today given the lead taken by the North American solution.
If you want to get a more detailed and accurate idea of Shopify, you can read our Shopify review here
No. 2: Prestashop
And yes, Prestashop is proudly resisting and remains determined to regain the ground lost by Shopify in recent years. No one knows if Prestashop will succeed, but we hope they do their best. The more competition there is in e-commerce CMS, the better it is for e-commerce merchants!
Prestashop has many advantages: a well-established ecosystem of agencies that have mastered the solution, numerous plugins with French specificities, and a business model that will appeal to many merchants.
Prestashop, however, still has its drawbacks: updates that remain painful and costly, upgrades that are the same, and a somewhat outdated interface in terms of UX. This is why more and more users are migrating from Prestashop to Shopify.
Advantages of Prestashop- "Free" license to use
- Numerous operational agencies in France and Europe
- The ability to customize every line of code: you can do whatever you want with an unlimited budget
Sylius is an open source solution, much like Magento and Prestashop. It's actually the successor to Magento since Adobe bought it.
If you're looking for a large e-commerce CMS to power a high-volume site, the most credible alternative to Shopify Plus in 2024 will certainly be Sylius.
There are still few e-commerce agencies on the subject in France, but it is slowly increasing.
Therefore, consider it as soon as you have a preference for open source and/or SaaS solutions are not suited to your project.
Advantages of Sylius E-commerce- It is possible to customize everything to build a completely tailor-made e-commerce site in the back office and front office.
- Endless Possibilities
- requires good technical knowledge and an agency
- Everything has to be developed, nothing is available on the floor: the speed of the e-commerce site can be affected.
- Few agencies available
- Rather reserved for very web or very tailor-made projects
- Very expensive to maintain
Magento 2 remains a heavyweight among e-commerce CMSs in France, even though the acquisition by Adobe and the inflation of maintenance and licensing costs have caused this CMS to lose a few places in our ranking this year. Be careful not to confuse it with Magento 1.9, which is no longer supported at all !
Magento 2 remains a solid solution for e-commerce sites with a turnover of several million euros, so it once again competes with the lesser-known Sylius, but especially Shopify Plus!
It's a safe bet that the Shopify Plus VS Magento 2 battle will be in full swing in 2024 and that beautiful e-commerce sites will announce major changes in their CMS strategy.
Advantages of Magento 2
- Robust and flexible solution
- Numerous skill agencies in France and around the world
- International solution
- Attribute sets are a very powerful feature
Disadvantages of Magento 2
- It takes a competent agency to take advantage of it
- The price of the solution has become insane
- The speed of deploying updates or upgrades is disastrous
Bigcommerce is still relatively new in the e-commerce CMS ecosystem in France, but the dynamism of the team at its head makes the project entirely credible.
A direct competitor to Shopify, the functional scope even has the luxury of sometimes being more extensive on Bigcommerce for certain types of projects.
For example, a small B2B website will be more complicated to create on Shopify than on BigCommerce. In terms of pricing, a wide range of prices allows you to create the project of your choice without too many constraints.
The BigCommerce app store doesn't yet rival Shopify's, but given the many APIs it offers, it should expand in the coming years and perhaps help BigCommerce move up several places in our e-commerce CMS rankings.
Benefits of BigCommerce
- Quite aggressive in terms of pricing
- Many B2B features
Disadvantages of BigCommerce
- A rapid and fleeting presence in France
- A company more economically fragile than Shopify
- Few agencies in France really master the solution
It's hard to ignore the old Demandware, which has been called Salesforce Commerce Cloud (SFC for short) for a few years now. Reserved for the largest e-commerce sites in France, the Salesforce Commerce Cloud Ecommerce CMS is nonetheless an essential solution for merchants already generating tens of millions of euros in turnover and/or wishing to expand internationally.
If you want to get into e-commerce, this solution is obviously not for you.
Benefits of Salesforce Commerce Cloud
- A solid investment for stores that already generate millions in turnover
- Native elements to connect PIM, CRM, OMS and other elements essential to any IT department of an SME or large group
- Successful agencies in France
Disadvantages of Salesforce Commerce Cloud
- A significant technological delay
- A very high total cost of ownership (TCO)
- A "reserved" list of agencies and service providers that increases prices
So yes, it may seem strange to see Mailchimp in the list of E-commerce CMS, but you should know that they bought and then renamed "Reaction Commerce", which is an E-commerce CMS in React, as its name suggests, and which is very efficient.
Mailchimp's idea is to offer its millions of customers a turnkey e-commerce solution. Unfortunately, it's not yet available in France, but we're expecting its arrival in 2024 to further shake up the CMS market and bring a bit of freshness.
No. 8: WizishopIt's difficult to rank the top 10 e-commerce CMSs in France without mentioning Wizishop. While the solution remains very French for the moment, it allows many merchants to sell online by offering everything they need.
We're still using SaaS that can be modified compared to solutions like BigCommerce or Shopify, but the little Frenchie is holding its own.
The lack of partner agencies and/or external applications is of course hampering the growth of this solution, hence its place in the top 10.
No. 9: Webflow E-commerceIt's a safe bet that Webflow E-commerce will rank much higher in this ranking next year. Webflow is a huge hit among static and e-commerce website builders.
There are still many limitations and I would not recommend it for a "pure" e-commerce project yet, but if you are already familiar with the Webflow interface and want to add some products to sell, then this is the best solution to start with.
This is the one on the list that has the most potential to reach the top 3 in the coming years.
No. 10: ProximisAnd yes, let's not forget Proximis, which is slowly but surely making its way into the world of e-commerce CMS. Its advantage? It is extremely multichannel and omnichannel oriented.
So, there's no point if you don't have a store network. But if your plan is to offer click and collect, ship from store, or other modern omnichannel e-commerce services, then you'll certainly be happy to add it to the list of solutions to test in 2024.
E-commerce CMSs not to use in 2024
We will write an article to explain why these CMS do not seem suitable for us in 2024, but it is time to stop with OS Commerce, Magento 1.9 , WooCommerce and other e-commerce WordPress plugins.
You will be penalizing yourself for nothing and even if it seems convenient or even “cheap” or “free” at first glance, the resulting costs of lack of performance and/or obsolescence will cost you dearly.
Also forget solutions like Oxatis which will no longer be viable in 2024
Choose a reliable, modern solution made for e-commerce and you will thank yourself in a few years.
Conclusion: Which E-commerce CMS should you choose in 2024?
Obviously, our ranking of E-commerce CMS is quite heterogeneous, but it allows us to highlight and highlight the different solutions that are making news and shaking up the world of e-commerce.
Today, choosing your E-commerce CMS remains a real decision because the choice is wide but the quality is often there.
Summary of key pointsChoosing a CMS depends as much on your needs as on the agency or publisher who will be working with you. Here are a few points to summarize the search for a CMS suited to your project:
- Choose a CMS that fits your business model
- Choose a scalable and easy-to-work-with CMS
- The goal of CMS is to sell effectively, not to offer millions of useless things for your project
- A trusted provider is more important than the perfect CMS
- You must be able to leave the E-commerce CMS easily with all your data
Find out about the advantages and disadvantages of each solution and, above all, what their target is.
To choose the right tool, you can also call on an e-commerce consultant to advise you if necessary!
And above all, good sales to all e-retailers in 2024!
