Magento vs OpenCart vs Wordpress vs Ticket Press
If you’re an event organizer and are looking for an online platform to manage your event and communicate with your attendees you’ll find there is a whole range of different content management, blog and ecommerce solutions…
We’re experienced web developers, and in addition to developing Ticket Press we also work with some of the most popular Open Source technologies. So, here are our truly honest and open opinions on some platforms (including our own)…
Please note: when we list the disadvantages below we’re by no means disrespecting other peoples work/solutions, we’re just listing our own findings based on past projects.
Magento is a highly configurable ecommerce system that suits most businesses’ online needs with often very little bespoke development required. However, if you want lots of editorial-style pages, then you may find the default feature list a little restrictive.
Fortunately, there are an abundance of third-party plug-ins that provide Blogs, Photo Galleries and other features that when combined, may match-up to your requirements list. There are also lots of developers ready to tackle any bespoke requirements (we can help here too!). So, advantages in short:
The only real disadvantages with Magento are:
So if you’re thinking of using Magento for online ticket sales you may find you can get ‘most’ of the way there without the need for many third-party plug-ins. However, if you get a huge spike in traffic and expect to have a flurry of orders when tickets are first released you may hit problems in regards to server-loads on hosting.
Contact us to discuss your Magento requirements or to talk about using Ticket Press as an ecommerce solution for ticket sales.
OpenCart is a relatively lightweight ecommerce solution that can be manipulated to support Ticket Sales. We have used OpenCart several times for a broad mix of projects and in a lot of different ways. If you’re thinking of using Open Cart for event ticket sales, then you’ll find the following advantages:
OpenCart is not as advanced as Magento in terms of it’s feature list or architecture, but, websites generally are not complicated pieces of software – they serve HTML documents that end-users can interact with… we generally like OpenCart. Developing bespoke additions or modules is relatively easy (though it can take some time depending on the requirements). We feel OpenCart has the following disadvantages when being used as a Ticket Sales platform:
If you wish to use OpenCart to create a ticket ecommerce solution or event information portal please contact us to discuss your needs.
Wordpress is loved by front-end web developers for its speed of deployment and easy to install themes, but is Wordpress the right solution for Ticket Sales or event management?
Out of the box and with a default theme Wordpress has very few features, in fact, after a clean install you can easily thing “Is this it?”. But, in the hands of an experienced developer you can tailor Wordpress with custom-post types, template pages and custom fields to build-up a purpose-built content management system for your specific requirements. Add-on a few third-party plug-ins and you can even start to bolt-on ecommerce functionality and custom enquiry forms. All really good stuff, but there are some advantages and disadvantages to using Wordpress as a event management/ticket sales platform. Advantages:
Disadvantages:
From a front-end developers point of view, it’s hard not to love Wordpress (really clean template system and fast to deploy). From a developers perspective there is lots of documentation and the ‘hooks’ make adding code relatively pain-free. But, to use Wordpress (cost effectively) as a ticket ecommerce system or event management system would typically require the use of, lets say, half a dozen plug-ins. Whilst the plug-ins we would use are trusted, it’s hard to say how long they would be supported for in future (and this could limit the shelf-life of the website’s platform going forward).
If you’re happy with the potential limitations of Wordpress and want to work with us to create a outstanding event management website/ticket sales ecommerce system please get in touch.
We created Ticket Press as we couldn’t find off-the-shelf ticket ecommerce solutions that are pre-configured with features typically needed for event management and ticket sales.
This website itself is powered using the Ticket Press ecommerce / content management system. You can read more about it here or click here to view the features list.
As with the other solutions we’ve listed, there are limitations but pound-for-pound (and without additional development work), Ticket Press may prove to be the most cost-effective solution – please contact us to discuss your needs.
And it wouldn’t be right to not list our own advantages and disadvantages (there’s some marketing guru shouting “STOP” somewhere!)…
Advantages:
Disadvantages:
Posted on Wednesday 25th May 2016, in Ecommerce Solutions