We put the most popular rental webshop services under the microscope, see what each offers and at what price. If you’re looking for your future online store’s home right now, study our article!
Nowadays everyone can have a webshop, it doesn’t cost much money, and you don’t need programming knowledge to have a basic, functional online commerce platform. However, since the offer is wide and it’s not so easy to navigate between them, it’s worth researching a bit to know which solution is the best for you.
The first dilemma: rental, free, custom-built, or open source?
When someone is about to open a webshop, first of all they need to decide what engine will run the site. Free marketplaces like Facebook Marketplace, Vatera, or Meska can only meet the needs of beginner traders, and in the end it turns out they’re not completely free either. Open source webshops (e.g. WooCommerce) can be a good choice for those who understand web development at some level. When choosing a custom-built shop, you need to come to terms with higher prices, but the end result will be a webshop with no compromises, tailored completely to your business.
The golden middle ground today is probably rental webshops, and it’s no wonder that the vast majority of online shops run on them. Why? Their main advantage is that they’re affordable, can be started immediately, a development team works on them continuously and they’re relatively easy to manage, even laypeople can handle them. If this is convincing enough for you to rent your webshop, now you just need to decide which company to sign with.
Although new webshop service providers pop up every day, it’s worth choosing from the 3 most popular ones. Since so many people use these, each of them has a community that you will join when you rent your webshop. The members of this community help each other, so you can find a solution to your problem for free if you get stuck. Currently UNAS and Shoprenter are market leaders among Hungarian companies. Shopify is a Canadian company serving more than one million webstores in more than 175 countries. Let’s see what each is good at:
Online Purchasing Payment E-commerce Banking
A review of leading rental webshops
Shopify
The world’s most popular webshop platform because everyone – both a completely beginner entrepreneur and a professionally operating ecommerce company – can find their advantage in the system, and moreover, the webshop is capable of growing and developing along with the business. Its operation is very similar to its Hungarian counterparts, but since it’s been around longer and has more users, there are tons of educational materials, videos available, and its community is also huge.
Super fast loading
What makes it different is that it’s not a server-based webshop, but everything is in the cloud. This is good because you can have unlimited products in the system and there’s less chance of downtime. The Shopify system works just as well during a busy Christmas or Black Friday period.
Connection to your physical store
Another big advantage of the system is that it’s also a POS point, so your online store running on Shopify can be connected to your physical store. It has excellent built-in automations and analytics.
Expensive and in English
However, there are also disadvantages and these are mainly due to the fact that we’re talking about a global company. Accordingly, you have to decide whether you can manage with the English-language admin interface and customer service, and whether it causes you difficulty that all educational materials are also only available in English. The other question to consider is the price, which is higher than Hungarian service providers. Shopify not only charges a monthly fee for your rented webshop, but also takes a success fee for your sold products, which in the basic package is 2%, and this percentage decreases in higher packages, down to 0.5%. The Shopify basic package covers basic needs, so it comes with two user accounts, free SSL certificate, abandoned cart identification, and blog functionality. The basic package costs about 9000 HUF/month, but if you get additional applications, they may be paid, and there are also applications that charge a monthly fee.
What else can be put on the negative side is that the integration of Hungarian service providers is quite limited. For payment, only PayPal and SimplePay work reliably, and for shipping, you either manually deal with every single order, or you outsource the entire logistics to Webshippy fulfillment service.
In summary
Shopify will be a good choice for those for whom English is not an obstacle, and who want to enter international markets in the near future, and also work with higher profit margins, so paying the success fee is not a problem for them.
You can learn about the individual packages and exact prices by clicking here.
UNAS
UNAS is a Hungarian company and the cheapest solution. From as little as 3000 HUF per month you can be the owner of a functional, profit-making webshop. Let’s see what packages it offers and what they provide:
Admin interface, knowledge base, technical background
You get an easy-to-use, secure admin interface where you can create unlimited users to separate permissions. Detailed help is available for every function, with a search function built in, so you can easily access useful information. Furthermore, if you need help, customer service is available to you by phone, chat, Skype and email. If you become a webshop owner, you can register to the UNAS Facebook group, which is a helpful community where you can quickly and for free find a solution to your problem if you get stuck.
What’s “free” and what’s extra cost?
The technical background operates with high availability, a geographically distributed redundant server park, which is designed to ensure that even during the busiest periods you don’t have to expect slowdowns or downtime.
So in the standard package all of these are included, and you can also get a free SSL certificate and the system sends automatic notifications if it detects anything unlawful in the webshop.
What is not included in the basic package is the built-in API for connecting any external program. This convenience solution is only available with premium or VIP subscriptions. For each package, a domain and email address can be ordered for the webshop for an additional fee.
Product-related functions
The standard package includes basic product management functions such as product registration, modification, database export, import, product descriptions, image uploads, documents, creating product categories, specifying statuses, variants, offering related, similar, complementary products. It’s also possible to set up simple and detailed search, so the customer can filter the product range according to their preference, and after typing the first few characters, the system also shows search suggestions to the visitor. Besides these, product reviews and Facebook comments functionality can be incorporated even when choosing the standard package.
What is only available with premium and VIP packages and is an important function is inventory management and shipment registration. With the help of the inventory management module, the webshop operation becomes much more efficient. Similarly, product comparison, selling products in bundles, custom product configuration options, property-based and complex product filtering, and printable price list functionality become available with higher subscription categories.
Only VIP subscribers have access to detailed product performance statistics functionality and the ability to upload retina product images and set inventory level intervals.
Customer-related functions
Even in the basic package, customers can purchase with or without registration. The system automatically sends email notifications to customers upon registration, password change, newsletter subscription, or purchase, successful payment. Convenient functions are also available such as “favorites”, where the customer can save products they’re still thinking about. Or cart storage and quick order based on previous purchases functions also make the webshop quite attractive.
Premium and VIP subscribers only have the ability to set up customer groups, which allows you to define different discounts, payment and shipping methods for each group, or send newsletters. Another useful feature, which is only available in higher categories, is automatic customer notification SMS, the ability to connect customers’ social accounts, or abandoned carts listing, which allows you to remind the customer about certain products they left in their cart.
Order-related functions
The shopping cart system, where the customer goes through an intelligent shopping process, meaning a progress indicator shows them where they are, comes standard with standard package subscribers as well. The setting of payment and shipping methods functionality is also available, where you can create bands for the different options, which you can assign costs to. You can manage orders, search them back, group them, and manage order statuses. The customer can print the order and shipping note. You can export orders so you can extract data from this list in another program and you can also manually register individual orders.
However, merging, splitting and copying orders is only possible with premium or VIP subscriptions. Convenience features such as integrated shipping solutions and integrated payment solutions are also only available to subscribers in the higher category.
With a VIP subscription, you can create statistics on orders to see emerging trends and manage your strategy accordingly. As a VIP subscriber, you can also manage purchases and display the purchase process in the webshop, so the customer will also see what status the merchandise they ordered is in.
Built-in marketing functions
In the basic package, UNAS doesn’t offer much in this area, but the essentials yes: the webshop is fully customizable from an SEO perspective. However, extras such as discount system, points collection system, coupon system, cross-selling, upselling, intelligent suggestions, gift products, built-in newsletter functionality, follow-up newsletters are only available to premium and VIP subscribers. And only premium webshop owners can set up functions such as price drop alerts, stock alerts, quantity-dependent promotions, follow-up offers, seasonal price changes.
External marketing functions
The ability to integrate chat programs and various rating systems is already included in the basic package. However, useful functions such as social media connections (product sharing on Facebook, product likes, Pinterest integration) are only available in higher packages. Affiliate and cashback systems can only be set up by premium and VIP customers.
Appearance-related functions
UNAS offers numerous base templates that you can choose from. You can customize their homepage banners, footers, design elements, product suggestion boxes to your liking. The selected templates are responsive, optimized for every smart device. If you’re not satisfied with these options, with a VIP subscription you have the opportunity to give your webshop a completely unique look, and you can also set up custom filter systems.
A great advantage of UNAS is that you can try it for free for 21 days. Browse through the individual packages in detail by clicking here.
Shoprenter
The other Hungarian company is Shoprenter, which is a bit like Shopify, it’s also a cloud-based system. It works with slightly higher prices than UNAS, but if you choose annual payment, you can save up to two months of fees. You can choose from 4 packages. Only the Bronze, Silver and Gold packages have a fixed fee, the Platinum package falls under custom pricing. The prices are as follows in case of annual payment:
Let’s look at the feature list for Shoprenter:
Marketing support functions
All functions visible in the image are available in all packages at Shoprenter. Compared to the UNAS offering, we see such a difference that the coupon system and intelligent product recommendations are already available in the basic package here.
As with UNAS, at Shoprenter too, only higher-tier subscriptions allow the incorporation of the functions listed above.
Choice support functions
The following functions help the customer’s choice, which are very similar to what UNAS offers. At UNAS, the Wish List function and the Last Viewed Products module are already included in the basic package, but for example there’s no “People who bought this product” module.
Persuasion / desire-building functions
It should be noted here that Customer Groups and the Editable CSS module are not included in UNAS’s basic package.
Average transaction value increasing functions
These marketing functions are practically the same at both service providers, and features such as “Buy One Get One Free” type promotions or Gift with Purchase functionality are only available to higher subscription tiers at both.
Other webshop functions
Shoprenter has already included pick-up point shipping method integration in its basic package, which is very useful. At UNAS, this can only be integrated in higher categories. Another plus point for Shoprenter is that the basic package includes the Template file editor module, with which you can customize the individual free designs to be completely unique if you understand HTML and CSS.
Administration-facilitating functions
It greatly facilitates the owner’s work if the webshop has a built-in invoicing function and you don’t have to manually enter the data into the invoicing program after each order. Both service providers only provide the built-in invoicing option to owners of higher subscription packages. Shoprenter has a built-in invoicing program and Számlázz.hu integration is also available, while at UNAS, any external invoicing program can be connected to the system with the help of a built-in API.
UNAS already gives you the opportunity in its basic package to create unlimited users and assign them different permissions. Shoprenter only makes this possible for higher subscribers.
You can browse Shoprenter’s detailed feature list by clicking here.
Summary
So we can see that there’s really no big difference between the two Hungarian service providers. Fortunately, both of them give you the opportunity to try them for free. At UNAS for 21 days, at Shoprenter for 14 days you can have your store for free. Try them both, test both and decide which one suits you better.
If you need help, or would like to customize your rental webshop template, or perhaps open a completely custom-built store, contact us with confidence!
