When hiring an online store, there are several factors to consider, the most important are the money that will be allocated to the project and computer skills of the user who will manage the store.
The money is important because the difference of develop the site with CMS or develop it with custom programming is not much on a regular website, but it is very large on an online store, since online stores are very complicated to develop with custom programming. Therefore, the most common option is to use a CMS, the most popular are Prestashop, Magento and Wordpress + Woocommerce.
CMS
When choosing the most appropriate CMS, we must see if we are going to give more importance to the contents or the products.
For example, a store that only sell a few products, but have many content pages, categorized, content explaining the use or the excellence of these products. In this case, more content than products, I recommend Wordpress + Woocommerce. But if the products are the most important, and we only have a few pages of contents with instructions or whatever, a better option is Prestashop or Magento. Of these two, which one to choose?
Prestashop is the most popular, it has the largest community of users, it needs fewer hosting resources, and its plugins are somewhat cheaper. Developed in France, it has a more European philosophy than Magento. Even so, there are people who prefer Magento, since it has a greater number of options, although it is more difficult to use and needs a more generous hosting. Both CMS have evolved a lot and choosing one or the other is almost a matter of taste, although I recommend Prestashop.
Custom programming
If there is enough budget, and you want to have a very personal store that does not look like the others, or because it has features that no CMS can provide, the option is custom programming, where a project will be developed exactly as the client wants, both at the frontend level and the administration panel. I develop the online store projects with custom programming with PHP - Symfony 4.
Source of data
When starting an online store project, it is very important to have all the categories, products, prices, images, etc ... in digital format, that is, the data in Excel, CSV or another importable format, and the images in JPG. If this is not available, it must be ordered before starting the development of the online store.
Also this can happen: The data is already in digital format, but it is in an inappropriate format; either because they are in non-importable formats such as Word or others, or because they are in the database of an older online store that you want to migrate, for example, to Prestashop. All this process of generating importable data, would have to be budgeted separately.
It is also true that if the store has few products, there are customers who prefer create them one by one from the administration panel; but the ideal is to be able to import them all at once.
To see my rates on this type of project, go to the rates page.