Laravel Ecommerce Packages or Ready-Made CMS: Which One to Choose for Online Store?

• By Devshi Bambhaniya
• 19-11-2024
• E-commerce

Creating an online store requires choosing the right platform that offers efficiency, a secure connection and a good user experience. Typically, the choice boils down to a content management system (CMS) or the power of an open-source framework like Laravel. Both meet different needs and goals. A CMS is ideal for quick, straightforward setup, while Laravel provides the flexibility and scalability needed for a complex and growing business. Let’s find the solution that best matches your eCommerce aspirations.

Why do most eCommerce businesses prefer a ready-made CMS?

Many leading brands rely on ready-made CMS platforms like WordPress, Drupal and Magento for their eCommerce stores. Ever wonder why they choose CMS over Laravel and other frameworks? Let’s dive into the key factors that led to the decision and understand the advantages that make CMS desirable.

Effortless content

One of the biggest advantages of using a CMS is the ease of content management. Whether you are running a simple online store or a complex AI-powered eCommerce platform, CMS offers built-in tools to manage everything without much technical knowledge Features like product enhancement, blog management, SEO tools, and order tracking can be handled effortlessly.

This feature eliminates reliance on manufacturers for routine tasks, allowing business owners to focus on scaling up their operations and improving customer experience

Lots of plugins and themes

Popular CMS platforms offer a treasure trove of plugins and design themes, both free and paid. These features significantly reduce development time and simplify operations, e.g.
Changing user experiences (UX) .

Creating and implementing communication forms

Automate processes such as invoice generation and shipping accounts
Using a CMS, store owners can quickly optimize their websites to meet customer needs, increase productivity, and maintain a visually appealing design. These changes are why many developers and businesses prefer CMS over coding-heavy frameworks.

Customized solutions for eCommerce needs

Ecommerce-focused CMS platforms like WooCommerce, Shopify, and Magento are specifically designed to meet the unique needs of online stores. Tools to simplify store management have come pre-installed, e.g.

• Inventory tracking
• Paymentgate integration
• Customer research

This platform ensures fast and efficient deployment, making it the go-to option for small businesses and startups that need fast yet professional solutions for their E-Commerce development stores

The Ongoing Relevance Of Laravel

Although there are myriad content management systems available today, Laravel remains an option for companies with advanced needs. The reason for this is the fact that it can provide solutions in a scalable manner. This makes Laravel a great option for businesses where a CSM is not enough. There are many benefits that come with using Laravel, as observed below:

• Defense against server-side attacks
• Development of custom applications
• No bloat, only functional code
• With the adoption of Laravel, a company can opt for different options and create a solution in line with its brand picture.
  Challenges Associated With Cart Software Applications

The advantages of utilizing prepared e-commerce systems such as conventional shopping cart software or Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, and so on are friendly user experiences. However, they have some limitations that these operations can be carried out on these software. Let’s delve into some of these solutions and detail why such solutions are not the best fit for large e-commerce business operations.

Monolithic Architecture: A Double-Edged Sword

Conventional e-commerce content management systems are constructed with monolithic structures, meaning that all features and components are interrelated and interdependent. Although its architecture has its benefits in the first phase of implementation, which makes it easy, it becomes a serious limitation as the business matures. This is how:

Page-Centric Design: Most pre-made CMS platforms generate page-centric web applications, which lack the flexibility to accommodate complex workflows or modern ecommerce requirements like dynamic interfaces and multi-channel interactions.

Technical Limitations: Updating or modifying components often requires significant technical expertise, making it harder to adapt the system to changing business needs.

Scalability Issues: As customer traffic increases and your online store scales, monolithic CMS platforms tend to struggle with performance, often resulting in failure-prone applications that cannot handle high traffic or large volumes of data effectively.

When catering to a large audience base, businesses need platforms that are easily extendable, modular, and highly manageable. Unfortunately, even the best Laravel CMS packages like PyroCMS or OctoberCMS cannot fully resolve scalability concerns, as their standard tools fall short of delivering highly customized scaling solutions.

Restrictions Imposed by CMS Core & Plugins

Another significant drawback of traditional CMS platforms lies in their reliance on core functionalities and plugins, which often limits flexibility.

Specific Use-Cases: Many popular CMS platforms were originally designed for niche use cases such as blogging (WordPress), community networking (Joomla), or content marketing (Drupal). While they offer some ecommerce functionalities through plugins, they are not inherently built for robust ecommerce operations.

• Dependence on Third-Party Extensions: To incorporate essential ecommerce features like shopping carts, inventory management, delivery tracking, and payment gateways, you must rely on third-party plugins or extensions. This dependency leads to several issues:
• Compatibility Challenges: Integrating plugins from various vendors can create compatibility issues, causing conflicts that affect website performance.

Maintenance Overhead: Managing hundreds of plugins and ensuring they are updated can become a logistical nightmare, especially if plugins are discontinued or poorly maintained.

Lack of Customization: Pre-made plugins often come with limited customization options, restricting your ability to create tailored functionalities that align with your unique business goals.

In the end, businesses using traditional CMS platforms often find themselves locked into an ecosystem of fragmented plugins and rigid core functionalities, which restrict their ability to innovate or scale effectively.

The Need for Custom Solutions

Given the limitations of traditional CMS platforms and their inability to meet the demands of modern e-commerce businesses, many companies are shifting towards custom solutions built on flexible frameworks like Laravel. Unlike traditional CMS, Laravel allows you to:

• Build Modular Applications: Create scalable, dynamic e-commerce platforms with features that grow alongside your business.
• Integrate Custom Functionalities: Implement advanced features like AI-driven recommendations, multi-vendor capabilities, and dynamic inventory management without the constraints of third-party plugins.
• Ensure Performance and Security: Custom-built Laravel solutions ensure optimized performance and robust security tailored to your business needs.

By moving away from monolithic CMS platforms and embracing modern frameworks, businesses can future-proof their online stores, ensuring they are prepared for both growth and innovation.

Why Choose an Ecommerce Package for Laravel?

The Laravel vs CMS debate for e-commerce app development has existed for ages in the PHP World. In the end, it all depends on your needs and tastes. In spite of this, clearly, there are factors which favor the use of Laravel for all who intend to build their own e-commerce sites. So, a strong argument will be put across on why there is no need of using child packages for e-commerce sites built with Laravel.

High Scalability

Online stores need to accommodate growth over time, as new products, suppliers, and inventories are continually added. Laravel’s e-commerce packages are designed to provide highly scalable solutions, enabling businesses to handle significant growth seamlessly. Whether your store serves hundreds or thousands of customers, Laravel’s scalability ensures your app performs reliably under increasing demand.

Moreover, Laravel’s flexibility allows you to customize your e-commerce solution at any level, adapting it to meet your unique requirements and providing a strong foundation for future expansion.

Independent Operation Without CMS Overheads

Traditional CMS platforms often introduce overheads during routine updates, which can disrupt operations or slow down your website. Laravel eliminates this dependency by offering a standalone e-commerce application that operates independently of frequent CMS updates.

This ensures greater stability, allowing store owners to focus on growing their business without worrying about unnecessary updates, downtime, or performance bottlenecks caused by CMS limitations.

Enhanced Flexibility in Shopping Cart Management

One of Laravel’s standout features is its shopping cart management. Ecommerce packages for Laravel come pre-configured with essential functionalities such as:

• Product management
• Inventory tracking
• Dynamic pricing
• Secure payment gateway integration

This robust foundation simplifies store management while allowing developers to design custom workflows tailored to your business needs. By leveraging Laravel's flexibility, you can efficiently handle your current operations while laying the groundwork for future innovations.

Seamless Omnichannel Support

With the help of Laravel, businesses are able to set up a seamless omnichannel experience combining brick-and-mortar stores, online platforms, as well as mobile in one enabled system. This is such thanks to the open-source e-commerce CMS in Laravel, businesses can achieve the same level of customer experience over all levels and platforms.

Whether it’s managing inventory across multiple sales channels or providing real-time customer support, Laravel’s omnichannel

capabilities help optimize operations and deliver an elevated shopping experience to customers.
Pre-Ready Baseline for Development

Laravel ecommerce packages provide developers with a pre-built framework, significantly reducing the time and effort needed to create a functional online store. These packages include ready-to-use modules for:

• Shopping carts
• Order processing
• Payment gateway setup
• Product management

This pre-configured baseline not only accelerates development but also ensures a reliable and high-quality foundation. It allows developers to focus on customization and scalability rather than building basic functionalities from scratch.

Boosted Development Efficiency

It is not a surprise that one needs to have a certain level of proficiency in Laravel custom coding. In contrast, the e-commerce packages, especially its e-commerce packages, make coding in Laravel easier as they provide a ready-made framework. With this packages, developers are able to optimize their work; hence, Performing the same tasks over and over again is minimized, enhancing productivity. This is important for the companies that wish to set up their e-commerce portal with speed within the set quality standards.

Furthermore, with the help of advanced functionality like customer segments, tailored product suggestions, and AI-powered analytics, it is possible to stay one step ahead of all competitors since the modular structure of Laravel provides ease in incorporating such complex functionalities.

Customizable for Advanced Ecommerce Needs

Unlike traditional CMS platforms, Laravel offers unparalleled customization options. Businesses can adapt every aspect of their e-commerce platform to align with their unique branding, customer preferences, and operational workflows. Laravel's flexibility ensures that even the most complex e-commerce requirements can be met without compromise.

Optimized Security and Performance

Critical to the success of any e-commerce platform is security greatly, and Laravel has proven competence in this area. The ready-made instruments available protect your e-commerce store from SQL Injection, Cross-site Scripting (XSS) and other types of attacks.
The use of Laravel e-commerce competitions also helps in performance optimization and thus your store can perform effectively optimally even at peak traffic moments. Emphasis on this aspect is imperative in winning customers’ confidence and giving them the best shopping experience possible.

Why Laravel is the Right Choice

Using Laravel for ecommerce development is more than just a technical decision—it’s a strategic move that aligns with your business growth. Laravel’s ability to deliver scalable, flexible, and secure e-commerce platforms makes it an ideal choice for businesses seeking to establish a strong online presence.

By leveraging Laravel’s ecommerce packages, you not only save time and resources but also gain the ability to create a platform tailored to your vision. Whether you’re building a simple store or an advanced omnichannel e-commerce network, Laravel empowers you to achieve your goals with precision and efficiency.

Tools That Optimize Laravel-Based Ecommerce Stores

When it comes to optimizing the performance of Laravel-based e-commerce stores, several powerful tools can enhance speed, reduce latency, and ensure smoother user experiences. Below, we’ve outlined some of the key tools that help optimize the performance of these stores and ensure a high-quality browsing experience for users.

PHP-FPM

PHP-FPM (Process Manager FastCGI) is a common enhancement tool for all applications written in PHP. Its integration with Laravel applications enables software developers to optimize even further the execution of PHP scripts, thereby improving overall performance. Thanks to the fast and effective request handling of the web server, this tool enhances application performance by speeding up the processing of requests, making it easier for e-commerce stores to load.

Laravel stores are interfaced with PHP-FPM, and hence there are reduced execution times, which in turn offers a better feel for the end-users. Furthermore, Cloudways has a Thunderstick, which is already set up with PHP-FPM and therefore does not require much effort for installation or hardware upgrading engineering, as it is designed for developers who want to improve the Laravel stores.

Redis

Redis is an in-memory data store commonly used for caching and optimizing web applications. In Laravel-based e-commerce stores, Redis minimizes the time it takes to load cached data by storing frequently accessed information in memory rather than querying the database every time. This significantly reduces the response time and accelerates the performance of the store.

Cloudways offers pre-installed Redis on their Thunderstack, allowing users to enable or disable it with just one click, providing effortless optimization. By using Redis, e-commerce sites can handle more traffic and provide faster access to content, which is essential for delivering a high-performance online store.

Content Delivery Network (CDN)

In order to optimize e-commerce websites based on the Laravel framework, it is imperative to use a Content Delivery Network (CDN). This is achieved through the replication of the content in several servers around the different geographical locations around the world. A CDN has one major significance: it minimizes the effect of distance, particularly in the delivery of static contents such as images, stylesheets, scripts, et cetera, to the users irrespective of their distance from the server.

Users of the Cloudways managerial platform can apply CloudwaysCDN, which is an integrated CDN solution with the platform itself, if they use Cloudways. This CDN enhances the delivery of content and therefore the loading speeds are shorter, leading to better haling. A CDN is not optional but a necessity when increasing the reach of e-commerce stores without compromising on efficiency.

Performance Evaluation with Thunderstack

Thunderstack refers to a certain stack that is exclusive to Cloudways and it serves to enhance the performance of Laravel applications. It packs several tools, such as Memcached, Varnish, Nginx, and Redis, into one package, allowing the optimal performance of your application. With Thunderstack, Laravel-based e-commerce stores enjoy the following:

• Decreased load times
• Enhanced cache management
• More efficient runtime performance

The fact that Thunderstack is able to bring different performance-enhancing tools under one roof is one of the many reasons why it beats most tools in enhancing site speed and user experience. What’s more, Cloudways facilitates the one-click integration of Varnish and Redis services, making it easy for a developer to optimize an application with little or no configurations.

Client Per Test (A/B Testing)

Once a client’s test, A/B Testing... It means not any research work but, in layman’s terms, experimenting on the different guided designs of web pages or app interfaces on the users’ direct browsers.

For instance, in this case, if several versions of a certain page were used but each at a different time for each user, the store administrators will take note of which version produced more user engagement or conversion rates.

In the case of e-commerce stores running on Laravel, A/B testing helps such businesses enhance their designs, content and overall user experience using actual customers ratings and statistics. [email protected] mentions that these tools, such as Google Optimize and VWO, where e-commerce proprietors carry out this exercise to determine the winning aspects of their site for the benefit of the users and in turn increase sales.

Client Per Second (Requests Per Second)

More often referred to as Requests Per Second (RPS), Client Per Second (CPS) is an important performance measure which evaluates the number of requests the server can handle in a given second. It is a direct measure of the traffic handling capacity of the application. For Laravel e-commerce shops, a high RPS indicates that the website is able to cater to a number of users at the same time without the risk of hanging.

Measuring and improving CPS/RPS assists developers in recognizing performance pressure points and resizing the servers to meet higher levels of expected traffic. A new expansion of the service, New Relic and Blackfire, have also emerged, allowing the e-commerce industry to assess their throughput levels and optimize them for better performance.

Maintain Client Load (Load Testing)

Load testing means portraying a high volume of traffic so as to test the website or an application in its ability to withstand heavy user demands. In considering vihire.com, which is based on the Laravel framework, and other similar e-commerce stores, load testing is very important, as it will guarantee that your website will load appropriately and maintain responsiveness when there is high traffic, for example during Black Friday, Cyber Monday or any Christmas sales.

For instance, by employing testing applications such as Apache JMeter, Loader.io or Artillery, a developer can examine and determine the extent of real-life traffic on the site and how it performs at that traffic load. traditional load test provides answers to the following questions:

• How much of a load can the framework sustain as was intended?
• Will the system collapse or slow down whenever customer surges are experienced?

For any e-commerce site, it is very important to maintain a satisfactory level of service during peak loads, and load testing helps ensure that this level can be maintained on the site even if it performs poorly.

Final Words

The issue of whether it is better to develop an e-commerce application on the Laravel framework as opposed to CMSs is what is hotly contested at the moment amongst the PHP developer community. In the end, it all comes down to many factors, among them the scope of work in the project and the goals of the business in question. Both have their pros and cons, but more importantly, it is important to know what performance and other aspects would be expected out of each in order to come to the right conclusion.

In this article, we have discussed the performance UL rates of a Laravel e-commerce application and suggested the advantages and disadvantages of both the Laravel Development Services platform and CMS systems. Still, the last point of choosing to apply Laravel for a new e-commerce website or refreshing the existing one to a great extent depends on certain factors—personal inclinations and functional requirements for the project.