Shopify vs Magento

Keywords:- Shopify Vs Magento, Shopify, Magento, Shopify Developer,Magento Developer

When you're planning to launch a new online business, selecting the appropriate e-commerce platform can be a challenging task. Whether you are a small business looking to get some early customers, or a large enterprise looking to scale up quickly, choosing the right ecommerce platform is important for both.

There are many e-commerce platforms out there with similar functionalities, but in this article we are going to talk about two of the most preferred platforms for first time business owners and see what separates them out of the crowd.

Before choosing any ecommerce platform, you have to consider a few key points:

1. Design
2. Functionality
3. Ease of use
4. Server Maintenance and Backups
5. Payment processes
6. Credit Card Security and PCI Compliance
7. Site Uptime & Content Delivery Networks (CDN)

Now let's dive in.

‍Shopify-

‍Shopify is a fully hosted ecommerce platform that doesn't require any Tech knowledge to set up a basic store. This means you don't have to worry about setting up and configuring your own server, storing your data, or any other Tech problem as Shopify takes care of it at a fixed monthly fee.

Shopify is used by both small and large businesses alike who are doing business ranging from $100 to $10M a month. You can find a lot of drop shipping and mom and pop stores set up on Shopify due to its ease of use.

Here are the Top 7 stores curated by Sumo that use Shopify.

Beginners can notice that Shopify is simple to use. The dashboard is intuitive, store building is simple, and you can easily drop components to build your store. Give it a few hours of your time & you are ready to shine. If you own a little business and plan on doing most of the optimizations and maintenance, Shopify could be the option for you.

‍Pros of using Shopify:

• Tons of stunning responsive store themes to choose from
• Robust website builder
• Great app store having great plugins to improve the functionality of your store
• Impeccable customer support
• Extremely intuitive and easy to use
• A lot of checkout and payment options
• Extensive community of fans and followers

Cons of using Shopify:

• Some themes are paid, so if you're on a budget then you have to settle on one of the free themes
• Integrating apps into your store might make complex to use
• If you do not use Shopify Payments, there is an additional fee for every transaction
• Shopify is better suited for smaller shops with fewer SKUs, but if you have a bigger range of products with more SKUs then you’re better off with Magento.
  

Magento-

Magento is a self-hosted open-source platform that requires some level of Tech knowledge to set up a store. So it's difficult for an average Joe having limited or no Tech knowledge to build a store on Magento. Though that doesn't diminish its power. It is powerful in a way that it gives you complete freedom for customizing the store from start to the end.

With a fair knowledge of coding, you can build your own store however you want. There is no limitation in terms of framework or the languages you could use to design the store– as long as you have the right mindset.

Pros of using Magento:

• Excellent community with a lot of support for users
• Flexible platform with many customization choices
• Good vary of themes to decide on from
• Phone support offered
• No real committal to writing data required for Magento
• Magento 2 extensions

Cons of using Magento:

• Has a bit of a learning curve
• Quite tough for beginners
• Requires a lot of time to set up
• Many prices associated with fixing your store

If you still haven't been able to decide, then let's look at the below factors:

Cost:-

Shopify-

Shopify has three monthly plan options where you pay a fixed fee per month without any extras-

1. Basic Shopify- All the basics for starting a new business.
2. Shopify- Everything you need for a growing business. With all the features same as Basic Shopify, here you can also generate professional reports right from the dashboard.
3. Advanced Shopify- Advanced features for scaling your business. In addition to the Shopify plan, here you have the option to build advanced reports and also calculate third-party shipping rates with your own account or third-party apps at the checkout.

Additionally, you have to pay transaction fees of 2.0%, 1.0%, and 0.5% for Basic Shopify, Shopify, and Advanced Shopify plans respectively.

Magento-

Despite being open source and free to use, hosting & app prices might be higher. As your store grows, you will need to pay an additional amount for hosting. If you would like an ecommerce platform that allows your store to grow while not having to worry about prices, Shopify is the answer.

Some of Magento’s apps are free; however, others go alongside with an installation and yearly fee. Often, this can be $100-$500 mark per app, which suggests it'll rack up pretty quickly if you want to integrate many advanced functions into your store.

Ease of Use:-

Shopify-

Shopify is a one-stop-shop, drag and drop internet site builder. This means you can simply customize your store by dragging components around the page however you want. All the tools you would need are present right in the platform. Thus you can start selling online in no time at all!

With Shopify, you can-

·        Easily insert custom pictures into your theme to separate out your store and make it unforgettable to your customers

·        Quickly add the products to the inventory and make it live.

·        Set up payments in a few clicks.

·        Customize the design and feel of your store to mirror your business and catch the eye of web shoppers

·        In addition, you can do all this without knowing a single line of code.

Shopify also has great customer support and agents are available 24/7 via phone, live chat, and email to resolve your queries.

Magento-

The Magento CMS (Content Management System – their equivalent of Shopify’s editor) is less intuitive than Shopify’s interface. It means there are additional obstacles to navigate for the first-time user. Magento is a flexible platform permitting you a lot of freedom; however you may run into few problems if you don't if you have never programmed before.

As Magento is developer-centric, you need to learn some coding to experience to utilize its complete functionalities.

Being open source they do not have 24/7 phone support, but they do have a pretty large developer community should you need any help.

Payments:-

Both Shopify and Magento offer tons of options to accept payments. By default, the customer can pay through popular merchant options like credit card, or Paypal but Shopify supports over 100 other external payment processors. You can integrate any of them with just a click of a button.

Shopify also has their own system named Shopify payments using which you can avoid paying the transaction fees which they otherwise charge.

Magento, on the other hand, has few basic payment options to get started and you have to hire a Magento developer to integrate any other payment options with your website. Since all other payment options have to be integrated individually, this makes it a poor choice just from a payments point of view.

Inventory management:-

All Shopify plans starting from the Basic one allows you to sell unlimited products in your store, so you don't have to ever worry about your inventory getting out of hand. Or the scale or complexity of your store.

Magento, on the other hand, facilitates selling a wide range of products but your server and hosting charges will rise proportionally since more inventory needs more space to host.

Shopify also has many plugins for inventory management if you're using drop shipping platforms like Oberlo.

‍

Themes and Templates:-

Both Shopify and Magento have an assortment of themes to choose from for all occasions- be it Clothing, Art & photography, Electronics, food & drink, and more. You can choose a theme that best suits your product and product type.

‍SEO:-

Shopify comes fully loaded with all features needed to rank your website for SEO like:

• It provides you an option to add relevant keywords for your store. For e.g., if you are selling clay teapots, then you can add keywords like "clay teapots", "teapots", "clay items", "fancy clay teapot", "blue clay teapot", and so on.
• It gives you an option to build your own site structure, so your content is more accessible by the search engines.  
• Sitemap- Shopify automatically generates a sitemap so you don't have to worry about generating one yourself.

Magento falls short on these and you have to do most of the SEO work yourself.

Blogging functionality:

Shopify does offer a blogging functionality to build your long-term customer base. It can also serve as a great way to improve the user stickiness and offer all the information they are looking for while browsing your store.

For Magento, you have to integrate a third party blogging platform like Wordpress to run your blog.

Conclusion:-

Shopify is easier to start with. Magento is more complex.

Shopify has a great customer support team, whereas you have to figure out most of the problems in Magento yourself.

Shopify doesn't require any coding knowledge to build a basic store. With Magento, you should be able to have a good grasp over at least a couple of languages.

When should you use Shopify?

• If you're someone who doesn't know coding and want to get your store up and running in a short span of time.  
• If you do not want to worry about payments, integration, and compliance.
• If you do not want to scale the cost of running your store, as you scale the inventory.
• If you like the other general conveniences like customer support through phone, email etc. whenever you need it.  

When should you use Magento?

• If you have the resources to get a dev team in place who knows how to build ecommerce stores.
• If you need a greater number of customizations beyond what Shopify offers.
• If you're comfortable integrating all the payment processors to the store yourself.
• If you have basic to intermediate knowledge of SEO and how search engines work.
• If you do not have any financial constraints in terms of rising Tech costs as your store grows.