Magento vs. Shopify: Choosing The Right E-Commerce Platform
By Sonaksh Singh Rawat on
In today's world, there is no dearth of e-commerce platforms for individuals to start their own online business. Shopify and Magento are two of the biggest players in The E-Commerce industry and they have helped thousands of prospective merchants start their own online business.
These solutions have helped online businesses around the world and in addition to that, these ecommerce platforms can be customized to suit the needs of every business out there. Moreover, both these platforms cater to businesses of all sizes and can be quite affordable depending on your business needs.
Both of these can be referred to as the best e-commerce platform USA, but choosing the right eCommerce platform always depends on what you need and what your business needs as well as the audience that the business will cater to. It is quite important that you choose the right eCommerce platform for your business, it could either make or break your online store. Choosing the most optimal platform can help you sell your products, market your brand, and garner more attention towards your online store. In this Magento vs Shopify comparison, we’ll take a closer look at the differences between these two ecommerce platforms.
Overview of Magento
Magento was launched in 2007 by Roy Rubin and Yoav Kutner. This PHP-based software is an open source ecommerce platform that is known for its flexibility, scalability as well as the number of features it offers online store owners. Let's take a closer look at the features that Magento has to offer:
- Order management
- Upselling and cross-selling
- Coupon monitoring Multi-tier pricing
- Product Discovery features and tools
- Wishlist
- Persistent shopping cart
- Bundled products
- SEO tools
- Full control along with URL rewriting option
- Search Engine-friendly URL
- Metadata creation
- Google Content API integration
- Customization options
- Payment Gateways
- Layered navigation
- Social media integration
- Top-notch security
- Order tracking features
Let's take a look at the pros and cons of using Magento:
Magento Pros
- It is customizable and extremely flexible
- It is scalable which means you can help a business grow and adapt to the ever-changing business environment
- Magento offers robust SEO capabilities
- Magento offers a mobile responsive online store as well as omnichannel support.
- Magento always complies with the law.
Magento Cons
- It requires a lot of money to develop a website on Magento as you require an experienced developer.
- It could take quite a while to start an online store
- You need to have a good amount of technical knowledge to work with this open-source platform
Overview of Shopify
Launched in 2006, Shopify is an 18-year-old ecommerce platform. In 20004, Tobias Lutke, Scott Lake, and Daniel Weinland started an online store known as Snowdevil which primarily dealt with Snowboarding equipment. But the existing ecommerce platforms couldn’t provide everything an online store needed.
This is when Tobias went on to develop and launch Shopify, pretty much the biggest ecommerce platform in the world right now and is also the best e-commerce platform USA.
As an e-commerce platform, Shopify offers everything that an online store owner would need to facilitate the smooth running of online businesses. From starting an online store to the final checkout and customer service process, it’s got everything covered. Let’s take a look at some of the features Shopify offers online merchants:
- Order management
- Secure transactions
- Payment Gateways
- Mobile Commerce
- SEO tools
- Marketing tools
- Omnichannel marketing
- Products Insights
- Offers Valuable Data on Sales and Customers
- Real-time Order Tracking
- Abandoned Cart Reminder
- Shopify Point of Sale (POS)
- Mobile Responsive Themes
- Seamless Customer Service
- Customization options
Here are some of the Pros and Cons of using Shopify.
Shopify Pros
- Shopify is extremely easy to set up and use
- Individuals don’t need to have any prior experience in developing or even any kind of technical knowledge
- Shopify is well-known for its customer support
- It supports businesses of all sizes
- It can integrate with a wide variety of third-party applications
- It is a self-sufficient platform and can host a fully developed online store
- It is scalable
- It is customizable and extremely flexible
- It is scalable which means you can help a business grow and adapt to the ever-changing business environment
- Magento offers robust SEO capabilities
- Magento offers a mobile responsive online store as well as omnichannel support.
- Magento always complies with the law.
Shopify Cons
- It could turn out to be a bit costly as a few features require payment
- It is quite difficult to migrate one’s online store if one wishes to take their business to a different platform.
- There could be instances where integrating third-party applications may turn out to be a tedious task
Magento vs Shopify: Comparison
Magento vs Shopify: Detailed Comparison
To be able to choose the best e-commerce platform USA for your online store requires you to know even the intricate details of either ecommerce platform. Here is a Magento vs Shopify comparison in detail.
Ease of Use
Having an easy-to-use ecommerce platform is extremely beneficial and can also help people who have no prior technical or coding knowledge. This is where Shopify takes the cake.
Shopify is definitely much easier to use. It does not require people to have any coding background and can even help novices create the best high-performing sites. It comes with a ton of paid and free themes.
On the other hand, Magento requires individuals to have some background in development. Since Magento requires coding skills, it offers complete customization flexibility. This same amount of flexibility in customization cannot be found in Shopify.
Customization and Flexibility
As mentioned earlier, Shopify doesn’t require you to have any coding skills, which means it offers limited customization options. Magento, on the contrary, is an open-source platform which means it offers a lot more room for customization and personalization.
Cost and Pricing
Magento
To begin with, Magento Open Source is completely free to use. But you will have to spend money on hosting your online store which could cost you anywhere between $100 to $500 on a yearly basis. Furthermore, this does not include the other costs involved such as transaction fees, SSL certificate, domain name, as well as third-party extensions. This could overall cost anywhere between $12,000 to $50,000 on a yearly basis, depending on your business.
Similarly, Magento Commerce has other expenses involved and isn't free, it can cost you anywhere between $43,000 to $180,000/- on a yearly basis. Magento Commerce Cloud’s overall price can go as high as $240,000 and as low as $60,000/- yearly.
Shopify
Shopify offers multiple plans that offer a ton of features and cater to businesses of all sizes.
- Shopify Lite - $9/ Per Month
- Shopify Basic Plan - $29/ Per Month (Paid Yearly)
- Shopify Standard Plan - $79/ Per Month (Paid Yearly)
- Shopify Advanced Plan - $299/ Per Month (Paid Yearly)
Additionally, there are other charges that apply too. For example, for premium third-party integrations, transaction fees can be anywhere between 2.4% and 2.9% on online credit card transactions, 2.45 to 2.7% on in-person credit card transactions, and 0.5% to 2.0% for other payment providers.
SEO and Marketing Capabilities
Magento
Here are some of the SEO features that Magento offers its users:
- XML Site mapping
- Meta Robots
- Meta Tags
- SEO-Friendly URLs
- HTML Suffix
- Suffix and Prefix for Title tags
- Option for URL Rewrites
- Automatic Redirect
- Canonical Tags
- SEO Optimization
- Analytics and Reporting
- Marketing Automation
- Email reminders
- Customer engagement tools
Shopify
Here are a few SEO capabilities of Shopify:
- XML and automatic sitemaps
- URL Optimization
- Meta tag support
- Mobile responsive themes and online stores
- High-performance stores
- Canonical tags
- Option to edit URLs
- SSL Certification
- Helps with keyword research
- Image optimization
Payment and Marketing Features
Let’s take a look at the supported payment gateways.
Magento
Here are some of the payment gateways supported by Magento:
- Stripe
- PayPal
- Authorize.net
- Braintree
- Amazon Pay
- Square
- 2checkout
Shopify
Here are some of the payment gateways supported by Shopify:
- Shopify Payments
- PayPal
- Stripe
- Klarna
- Square
- Authorize.net
- Verifone
Additionally, you should know that Shopify also charges transaction fees, depending on the product and model of payment, it could be anywhere between 2.4% to 2.9% + 30 cents. Contrarily, Magento does not have any transaction fees but it does charge merchants an incremental fee along with a payment provider.
In terms of setting up, it's quite easy to set up payments on both of them, let’s take a look at the process.
Magento
- Head over to settings and click on “Configuration”
- Fill in the relevant details
- Save your settings
Shopify
- Head over to Shopify admin and click on “Settings”
- Now head over to the Supported Payments Methods section
- Select “Add Payments”
- Select a Payment Provider of your choice
- Finally, click on Activate
Performance and Security
Performance and security are two of the most important factors involved in running a business and the best e-commerce platform USA always makes sure online stores have great loading speeds. Customers don’t like to be kept waiting for too long, they need fast-loading web pages and online stores. Additionally, customers also value brands that value the security of their data.
Magento
Remember, Magento is an open-source platform and it offers online merchants complete flexibility and customization control. But here’s the catch, if you want to make use of all the features and functionalities, and make your online store high-performing and fast-loading, then you must be technically proficient. This is among the best options if you want a fast-loading customizable site.
The Magento Open Source option will offer merchants the opportunity to start an online store and run it at the most basic level. But you do have to put in a lot of work if you want to keep up with your competitors. The Magento Commerce Cloud can host your online store on the cloud and help significantly in improving the site speed. Furthermore, Magento can also handle extremely large traffic volumes, at an average, there are over 160,000 successful online stores that are powered by Magento.
In terms of security, here are a few things you should expect:
- Two-factor Authentication
- Security Scan
- CSRF Protection
- XSS Protection
- PCI Compliant Hosting
- SSL certificate
Shopify
Shopify is a self-sufficient platform. Users don’t have to worry about fast-loading websites as Shopify comes with features that make sure your online store is high-performing. Unlike Magento, Shopify is not as customizable in comparison. But it has preset themes and features that offer online merchants whatever they require to run an online store. Shopify handles a ton of traffic volume, there are over 240,000 online stores that are powered by Shopify.
Additionally, Shopify has built-in features for security, here are a few of them:
- Fraud Analysis Feature
- SSL Certificate
- PCI-DSS Compliant
- GDPR Compliant
- Two-factor Authentication
Customer Support
Shopify comes with dedicated customer service available 24/7 via email and chatbots. Furthermore, Shopify is one of the best e-commerce platform USA and is known for its excellent customer support. Users can also access the community and can also access other online resources.
On the other hand, Magento does not have dedicated customer support but it does have an active community with experts on the subject of starting an online store through Magento. There are also Magento-certified developers who can help greatly. Apart from that, online stores can take help from Magento Partner Agencies.
Case Studies and Real-World Examples
Let’s take a look at a couple of case studies of brands that use Shopify and Magento.
Magento
Paul Smith is a British apparel brand that wanted to offer its customers a stellar overall shopping experience while selling products worldwide. Paul Smith chose Magento to achieve its goal. Magento’s “Endless Aisle” feature can help in showcasing the product without any restrictions.
As a result of using Magento, they were able to offer customers a stellar shopping experience and a staggering 17% increase in conversion rates. Additionally, mobile conversions also saw a 5% increase and overall there was a whopping 25% increase in sales.
This showcased Magento’s customization capabilities that helped shape the store.
Shopify
MakerFlo is a crafts company that helps its customers create customized products for themselves. They used to conduct business through their custom website before they chose to migrate to Shopify.
After migrating to Shopify and automating a lot of operations, MakerFlo saw a 2,400% YOY increase in revenue. Saved costs by using Shopify themes and not hiring developers.
These are just some of the many examples, it further goes on to show that adopting a reliable ecommerce platform can help businesses scale up and increase revenue as well as their audience base.
Conclusion
In this Magento vs Shopify comparison, it is quite clear that both these big names have a lot to offer despite their differences.
Magento is an open-source platform that is pretty much free of cost to use but requires a lot of technical knowledge but this also means that it has a lot of customization options to offer. Shopify, on the other hand, is a self-hosted platform which means it has every feature that a business requires to be successful and you don’t need to have any technical background for the same. But Shopify is not free, there are plans for businesses of all sizes and industries.
However the best platform for your business depends entirely on the needs of your business. So don't be shy, if you're planning to use either one of these platforms, then you should make sure you try them out and choose the optimal one for your business.
