E-commerce

An e-commerce platform has to do the same jobs whichever one you pick: keep a catalogue, price it, take a cart through a checkout, collect payment, calculate tax and shipping, record orders, and expose all of it to other systems. What differs is who runs the software, and that decides how much of the platform you can change.

Every platform in this section offers four kinds of customization surface, drawn side by side in the figure below. A theme controls how the storefront looks. An extension (an app, a module or a plugin) adds behaviour. An API lets other systems read and write the store’s data. A headless build replaces the platform’s storefront with your own front end and uses the platform only as a commerce back end. The platforms differ in how much each surface lets you do, and the subsection landing pages explain the details for each one.

All baselines below were checked on 2026-10-27. Shopify is a service whose behaviour changes without a download, so its pages are tied to dated API versions; the three other platforms are software, so their pages are tied to the release you run.

Shopify is a hosted platform sold as a subscription, with plans from entry level to Shopify Plus. The section is written against the Admin, Storefront, Customer Account and Functions API version 2026-10, Shopify CLI 5.0.0, Hydrogen 2026-10, the React Router app template and Polaris web components 2.0. You build on it with Liquid themes, apps, checkout extensions, Shopify Functions and the GraphQL APIs, or you go headless with Hydrogen. Account-bound parts, for which this section needed a store, are documented from the official sources and are said to be not executed on the pages concerned.

PrestaShop is an open source PHP application on Symfony. The section is written against PrestaShop 9.2.0 (released 2026-09-30) with the Hummingbird 2.1.2 theme; the 8.2 line (8.2.8) is in security-only extended support and is mentioned where it behaves differently. You build on it with modules and hooks, Smarty themes, the legacy Webservice and the new Admin API, and the console commands of the Symfony application.

Magento is the PHP platform that exists as the free Magento Open Source and as the licensed Adobe Commerce editions. The section is written against Magento 2.4.9 (generally available 2026-05-12) and the community distribution Mage-OS 3.6.0 (2026-10-14, based on 2.4.9) on which the examples were run; the 2.4.10 line is in alpha. You build on it with modules (dependency injection, plugins, events, declarative schema), Luma or Hyvä themes, REST and GraphQL, and out-of-process extensions with App Builder.

WooCommerce is the e-commerce plugin for WordPress. The section is written against WooCommerce 11.2.1 (2026-10-09) on WordPress 7.1.3, with the 11.3 line in beta. You build on it with WordPress plugins and the hooks, CRUD objects and blocks of WooCommerce, block or classic themes, the REST API and the Store API, and WC-CLI.

All four subsections use one running example, Pocket Coffee, an invented specialty-coffee shop with a configurable product (origin, grind and size), a Coffee Club customer group, shipping zones for Spain and the rest of the European Union, two languages and a small custom extension, so the same shop can be compared as it is built four ways.

Each subsection landing page ends with a learning path that orders its pages for a newcomer and lists what could not be run while writing it.

The section reuses the existing guides instead of repeating them; each of the pages below is linked from the e-commerce pages that need it.

The WooCommerce pages explain the WordPress concepts they need (plugins, hooks, blocks, block themes and WP-CLI) briefly and link to the matching pages of the WordPress section for depth.

Every source below is the official site, repository or documentation page of the platform, tool, standard or service it supports, except for a few secondary sources (third-party articles, Wikipedia and a book distributor page), which are marked as such; each entry links to its source. Each group starts with the main entry points, followed by every page that the subsection and comparison pages cite under their own == References headings, so a claim on any page can be traced to the page it came from. Links were opened on 2026-10-27 from the authoring environment. Entries marked (unverified) could not be opened from it (the site refused automated requests, answered with a bot challenge or returned an error status), so open them and confirm the content, version and status before you rely on them. Where a page of the official documentation is only reachable with or without a trailing slash, the form that works is the one listed.