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Shopify or Oxatis

What is the most suitable solution for your e-commerce project?

Your goal this year: to launch your e-commerce site. You have already reviewed the possible alternatives among the SaaS, Open Source and other “family” solutions (by that I mean, your site created by your best friend’s second cousin who knows a little bit about IT).

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On one hand, you like Shopify.

The Canadian solution arrived in France in 2018. It has been very successful and has a community with substantial online presence. Its strengths? The easy-to-use interface, carefully designed sites and an ecosystem of ready-to-install apps (pay attention to compatibility between apps). You pay a commission on your sales so anticipate your performance margins.

On the other hand, Oxatis also appeals to you.

The French e-commerce platform was created in 2001. Its strengths? Its native wealth of features (in B2C but also B2B). The standard payment and delivery methods in France are already installed. The same is true for marketplaces, comparators, email campaigns etc. The teams are extremely experienced and work in all fields: marketing, design and SEO. As for the rates, they are clear and fixed (and, above all, commission-free!)

What is a SaaS solution?
SaaS means Software as a Service. In plain English, it is an all-in-one solution that offers access to software and related services, in exchange for a subscription. These services include facilities management (hosting, maintenance, security etc.) and user support (customer support/service, consulting etc.). SaaS solutions are often compared to Open Source solutions, such as PrestaShop or Magento. The main difference? Open Source solutions can be downloaded freely and free of charge, but do not offer any of the above services

View the ‘Prestashop or Oxatis‘ >> comparison

The 4 strengths of Oxatis (vs Shopify)

Transparent and fixed (commission-free) rates

You do not pay commission on your sales (fixed subscription, no commitment).

A functionally rich (native) solution

More than 650 features that can be activated directly from the back office (French payment and delivery solutions already installed).

An agency-like publisher

You have a site, a mobile version and you can request the intervention of the teams for your design, your SEO, your email campaigns etc.

Powerful tools for selling to businesses

Oxatis addresses both B2C and B2B business challenges using advanced features specifically for selling to businesses.

10 criteria for choosing the right e-commerce platform

Which solution will meet my ambitions and support me in growing my online business?

Filter the essential criteria for your e-commerceproject to succeed

Compare

Packages & Rates

Technical environment

Support

Design

Catalogue

Payment & delivery

Visibility

Selling to businesses (B2B)

International

Productivity

Packages & Rates

A comprehensive package and appropriate rate for my project

Shopify and Oxatis are 2 e-commerce solutions with SaaS technology. This means that their platforms include essential tools and services to launch your e-commerce site and manage your business. You only need internet access to start managing your business! Both of these platforms offer 3 monthly subscription packages, with no commitment. The first takes a commission on your sales and has an ecosystem of features and partners to deploy, the second just changes your subscription level when your revenue skyrockets and offers you more than 650 native, already-installed-features.

Shopify

The 3 subscription packages are made up of fixed fees and sales commissions. This is THE 1st major difference with the French solution. The fixed fee is $29, $79 or $299 depending on the functional scope you choose. To allow you to compare, the rates in Euros are around €24, €64 and €244 [Editor’s note, in January 2021]. Commissions start at 2% for the 1st Basic Shopify package, then 1% for the intermediate package and finally 0.5% for the Advanced Shopify package. A percentage to consider when setting your site budget! To get a more accurate idea of the monthly budget required for operating and developing your Shopify site (cf. estimated or actual sales volume), test one of the Shopify site price calculators available on Google.

Oxatis

The monthly subscription is made up of fixed fees only (3 subscription levels: €39, €99 and €299). No commission is recorded on your sales: which is a major difference when your sales skyrocket! The teams coach you to generate more revenue. And if your revenue/orders increase, you switch to a new subscription level. Simple.

Technical environment

A 100% secure, effective site, every day

Hosting, maintenance, security, updates etc. There are so many technical and essential elements for your website to perform, but they can very quickly prove to be complex to manage.

With Shopify and Oxatis, everything is simplified. You don’t worry about technical aspects. The same goes for functional updates. Each R&D team takes care of monitoring the web and e-commerce environment, and then implements the functional upgrades on your site in a way that is completely transparent to you and your customers.

Getting started with the back office
The administrative interface, known as the back office, is the cockpit of your site. You manage your entire business there: catalogue, customers, orders, marketing etc.

The Shopify and Oxatis solutions are designed for e-merchants, including those who are starting out. The interfaces are designed for a quick start-up and intuitive use.

There is a major difference between the 2 solutions:

Shopify

The solution is widely established in the United States. Although it extends around the world, its current environment and developments are now very much centred on North America. Many Shopify products are not available in France (Shopify Payment, Shopify POS, Shopify Capital, Shopify Fulfilment etc.).

Oxatis

It’s a 100% French solution: teams located in France, a hosting infrastructure also located in France to ensure data security and reliability of service (no matter what traffic peaks are recorded on your site, you continue to generate orders). And finally, all essential French delivery and payment methods can be activated directly in the back office.

Support

Complete support (SEO, design, marketing etc.)

When you think about your e-commerce strategy, you plan. How will you develop, design or list your site’s pages? Let us support you, it’s really essential to achieve your business goals.

You need to be able to get answers about your site management quickly and easily. One of the many benefits of SaaS solutions is ‘user support’. Technical teams help you set up a new feature, optimise your product sheets, add a slide show to your home page etc.

Remember: your site will grow (if everything goes well). You will develop it, test email campaigns or Google, Facebook campaigns etc. To do this, ask yourself now: would you like to call on another digital partner?

Shopify

You have online documentation, access to the platform’s (large) e-merchant community forum, and technical support by phone, email and Live Chat. What if you would like to ask a professional to take care of managing your Google Shopping campaigns or your new design? The solution doesn’t offer this support. You will have to call on a Shopify certified external service provider, agency or freelancer.

Oxatis

Here you also have free online documentation and FAQs, and technical support by email (and by phone depending on your subscription level) for all your questions related to the day-to-day use of the platform’s features. The differences with Shopify? An account manager, an e-commerce expert, is available to reflect on and discuss the development areas of your business. Discussions allow you to set the outline of your project and discover all the features that can help you convert. No need to use another partner, the solution makes its design studio, SEO teams, ERP etc. available to its e-merchants. You can manage your entire e-commerce business on your own, calling on the skills you need if necessary. There is a reason why customers say the solution is the Swiss army knife of the web, as it can do everything!

Design

A professional and scalable design

First impressions are always right online. A neat design reflects your professionalism and your company’s values. On the contrary, a deceptive image loses you a new customer in a few seconds.

Think about searching on Google for examples of sites that are built with each solution you are considering. You’ll be able to measure the level of design quality, and at the same time find ideas to inspire you.

Shopify and Oxatis offer quality design libraries to enable their users to discover their site’s identity based on their industry, target or company colours. But to achieve a design that 1) matches your image, and 2) is effective, you need to be able to customise it easily and regularly. A site’s design has a lifespan of about 2 years, you must be able to update and rejuvenate it freely.

Shopify

The solution offers more than 70 design themes. You choose your design depending on your industry, the included features and price etc. It should be noted that you pay for the majority of Shopify themes – starting from $140, or approximately €115. Once you have selected your design template, you customise your site’s visual settings through a simple interface. (!) Note, Shopify uses its own language (not CSS, the most widely used design language on the web). It’s called Liquid language which allows you to modify Shopify templates in depth. Graphic designers who understand this language are rare, and the cost per hour for working on your site will be higher than the average, typically observed rate. This is a negative point for those who would like to customise their site further.

Oxatis

You choose your design template depending on criteria such as dominant colour or industry (the design library is included for all subscriptions). Once you have selected your template, you can easily customise it thanks to an intuitive interface. No need for design knowledge to update your site during the important moments of the year.
(!) To customise your site even further, you or your designer (in-house or Oxatis) can work on the solution’s CSS source code freely as well as on the HTML and JavaScript insertion points. A big advantage!

M-commerce

Providing a good mobile experience is a must have. My tip: opt for simplicity and avoid constraints!

Shopify

All themes are built with a responsive format, i.e. they adapt to all screen sizes. The content of your site remains the same whether it is viewed on a computer, tablet or smartphone.

Oxatis

You have a computer version of your site and a mobile version. The mobile version is customisable, can be directly activated from the back office and has the same features as your site. The advantage? It is 100% designed for smartphone browsing. You tailor your content to mobile users’ expectations. The mobile browsing and buying experience is truly optimal. And finally, you manage the 2 versions of your site from your administrative interface. It gives you more time which is always good to have!

Catalogue

A product catalogue showcased by my site

The product catalogue is the heart of your online business. And it is also the heart of e-commerce solutions. With Shopify and NewOxatis you have all the essential tools to manage and present your catalogue.
Organise your categories and brands,
Present your products and their features,
Insert images and videos,
Manage stock,
Set your prices and promotions,
Offer cross-selling or upselling,
Send promotional newsletters or emails to visitors who have abandoned their shopping cart,
Display your customers’ reviews on your site and your products,
etc.
To go beyond this, both solutions offer more advanced catalogue and marketing features, in the form of free or paid apps.

Shopify

More than 2,500 apps developed internally by the Shopify teams or externally by agencies or freelancers. There’s a large word of warning here on the lack of a compatibility process between apps! In simple terms, “one app can break another!” And that is not one of the solution’s concerns at this time. So pay attention to comments.
There are several apps on offer for the same feature.
Example: for the Wishlist function, you get 75 results. It’s up to you to review the different apps and decide which one is compatible with your subscription and meets your business and functional needs.
The majority of apps are paid for, sold by subscription, starting from $5 up to several tens or hundreds of dollars per month (include these costs in your monthly budget).
Loyalty programme or sponsorship system? These types of tools are only available as apps. Free plans are available if your site generates limited sales. On the other hand, expect several tens of dollars per month (or commission on your revenue) for the following plans.

Oxatis

We add more than 150 apps, developed by the Oxatis teams and its partners, to the 650 features already available in the solution.
The choice is simple: 1 need = 1 app. If you take the example used above of Wishlist, you have a single app dedicated to adding products to your customers’ ‘wish lists’. You have a 15-day free trial to make sure the app meets your needs.
Many of the apps are free or included in monthly subscriptions. Others are paid for – invoiced once (from €5 to €39 depending on the app) or sold by subscription (from €5 to €19 per month).

Payment & delivery

A wide range of payment and delivery methods

Payment and delivery choices: decisive levers for converting a single visit into a purchase. To meet your visitors’ expectations and encourage them to buy, you must offer their preferred delivery methods as soon as the results are displayed in the search engine: home or office delivery, at a collection point, click-and-collect, fixed delivery time, express delivery etc. Please note: Oxatis includes collection points at the delivery method selection stage. Shopify does it at the end of the order.
Same thing in terms of the payment method: card, cheque, PayPal, mobile, instalments etc.

Shopify

Natively provides services from international payment providers such as Amazon Pay or PayPal. The platform provides its own “Shopify Payments” payment solution, but it is not currently available in France. Would you prefer to use your bank’s payment solution? Not possible: French banks’ TPEVs are not available on Shopify. For your delivery methods, look at paid apps. To give you some idea, expect $10 per month for Mondial Relay or $15 per month for Colissimo.

Oxatis

The French solution is compatible with leading carriers, banks and payment solutions in France and internationally. For information, it is the benchmark e-commerce solution for most major French banks (Crédit Agricole, Crédit du Nord etc.). PayPal, e-transactions (Crédit Agricole), Monetico Paiement (Crédit Mutuel & CIC), Amazon Pay, Colissimo, Chronopost, Colis Privé, Boxtal, Mondial Relay, UPS etc. 40 payment solutions and 20 delivery methods are already pre-installed: you activate them directly from your back office.

Visibility

An SEO-friendly e-commerce platform

Is your design beautiful and your catalogue attractive? That’s good, but you shouldn’t stop there. Your site pages must be visible on search engines (Google & Bing) to attract potential customers.

Visibility of your site in organic search engine results (SEO)

On Shopify as well as on Oxatis, you can set up your pages while optimising your organic SEO on Google. You define your tags (title, meta description and Hn), customise URLs, manage your sitemap etc.
Do you have the same product listed in two different categories? Be aware of the duplicate content risk which is penalised by Google. To avoid this risk on Shopify, make sure you manually add canonical URLs to each of your pages. With NewOxatis, don’t worry: the solution automatically manages them. ! Watch out, this is not a small problem!

Visibility of your products on customer acquisition channels

Marketplaces: Amazon, eBay etc.
Price comparators: Google Shopping etc.
Social Media: Facebook, Instagram etc.
Email campaigns and SMS
Blog

Leverage each of these channels to increase your catalogue’s visibility and generate more sales. Shopify and Oxatis provide access to each of these acquisition sources via directly integrated features that can be activated in your back office. Do you need to target additional channels? Depending on your needs, draw from the additional apps which can be downloaded from their respective app library.

Selling to businesses (B2B)

Selling my products to businesses (B2B)

Are you targeting business customers? In B2B sales, the needs and expectations of business customers are sometimes not the same as those of individuals. For this target, you must be able to:
Manage quotes,
Set up your multi-price catalogue,
Apply specific price rules for each of your customers,
Set up specific delivery conditions,
Offer pre-ordering of products,
etc.

Shopify

You will find some apps for B2B sales on the App Store, but if you need B2B features, there’s only one solution: switch to Shopify Plus. Note, Shopify Plus is not yet a B2B solution, it simply manages a few cases of marginal use. And the budget is no longer the same (see sidebar below).

Shopify Plus
Shopify Plus is for high-volume, high-growth businesses. Its users benefit from a complete and customisable platform. It includes advanced multi-store, multilingual and multi-currency management, a (functionally limited) B2B setting, task automation modules… the cost for Shopify Plus? Starting from $2,000 per month (approximately €1,645).

Oxatis

All the B2B e-commerce features which are required to implement your sales strategy to businesses are included. The entire ecosystem (with Sage, Lundi Matin, EBP connectors etc.) attracts many B2B e-merchants, eager for features that are both specific to their industry and for sales to consumers (for an optimum shopping experience).

International

Selling my products internationally

Do you sell your products internationally? International sales require specific features and above all specific partners. Make sure you find out about the possibilities offered by each of the solutions based on the countries they cover.

Shopify

Contrary to what is commonly believed, there is no need for a Shopify Plus subscription to sell internationally. The platform handles international development challenges very well (currencies, payment, languages, digital ecosystem etc.). This is in fact the solution’s main strength.

Oxatis

Allows you to activate a multilingual (up to 8 languages) and multi-currency (26 currencies available) site, directly from your back office. The advantage: you can manage your business from a single administrative interface. You can have a site available for each area covered, with a specific language, currency, pricing policy and communication.

Productivity

A definite increase in productivity

How can you optimise the management of your e-commerce business to increase productivity? Answers from both solutions: Data update tool: to be used to manage updates of your goods, order & customer databases, simply and automatically. The benefits? Saves time and drastically reduces the risk of errors. Please note: NewOxatis has just released the Dataplug Online. This extremely versatile tool “talks” to Excel files, as well as text files or native Google Sheets, which it can search directly on Google Drive. Powerful! ERP Connectors: to be used to consolidate the management of your business between your business management software and your site. The benefits: • Real-time synchronisation of your goods, customer, invoice databases etc. • Time savings • Secure data transfers

Shopify

Apps are available to connect your site to your ERP: Sage, in particular and other tools used in the US and Canada. A piece of advice before downloading a Shopify app: look at its rating and reviews. Better yet: contact users directly. Another alternative for connecting your e-commerce to your ERP: use a third-party e-commerce flow manager, there are many providers in this area.

Oxatis

The platform provides connectors which are 100% compatible with the largest French management software publishers (Sage, Cegid, Wavesoft, Lundi Matin Business, EBP). With these connectors, you can manage your e-commerce business from your ERP. Your goods, customer, order, and stock data are synchronised and updated in real time on each tool.
Are you using another ERP software? The Oxatis ERP teams develop custom connection solutions to increase your productivity.

All you have to do is choose!

Shopify

Shopify is an effective e-commerce solution which provides all the features you need to launch your e-commerce business. And if you want to develop your business through a dropshipping system (selling and shipping products through an intermediary), it’s worth noting that the solution has developed a business tool which allows you to select the products you wish to sell online from a supplier and import them into your store with one click.
The key advice to remember: analyse the Shopify pricing template and your additional requirements to accurately set your site budget.

Oxatis

Oxatis is also an effective and comprehensive platform, created for e-merchants and which addresses each of their problems. The solution is natively rich and there is no need to integrate new features. Are you aiming to expand your business by selling to businesses or by putting your products on marketplaces or price comparators? Remember that the solution includes these features in its subscriptions.
Oxatis adapts to your needs and challenges, whether you decide to grow your business independently or be guided by experts, from the start or later down the line.

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