Magento Or Shopify: What To Choose For Your eCommerce Store?
One of the toughest things to do with the development of an eCommerce store is to find the platform which is perfect for your business needs. Any kind of the wrong choice with the development, design, or management of the store may lead to the collapse of a business.
Especially, when you are running on a small budget, it becomes very crucial to make the right decision. However, when it comes to the idea of top development platform for running an eCommerce store, two names which always comes at the front giving a tough edge of competition include, Magento and Shopify.
Most of the time, people who are in need of a new store or want to migrate for a better option, they turn towards only two of these platforms. However, there are some basic differences which one must need to know:
- Shopify is a paid and commercial option while Magento is a free open source platform.
- Shopify has its own hosting solution while Magento needs you to provide hosting, installation, and configure in advance before you start development of the store.
- Shopify is better for beginners while Magento is a feature loaded platform made for advanced developers.
Though Magento has paid options, they are suitable for only big businesses that can spend big money on the websites. However, if you have an expert developer or you have experience working on Magento, working on a free tool can help you convert goals.
In case, you are having tough times finding the best platform for your website development needs, here we have a quick comparison between the two that can help you find a perfect pick for your needs:
Features Check
Basic functions: both the platforms share great functionality when it comes to the most basic yet essential goals. But Shopify is slightly easier to start but Magento has advanced features that deliver a great deal on functionality.
Inventory management: both platforms allow you to create an unlimited collection of products. However, Magento could bring you some trouble with large collections because of hosting issues while Shopify gives you a great grip with integration to dropshipping inventory options.
Shipping Cost Calculation: both the platforms support easy shipping calculations which is essential for every store that needs to deal with physical products. However, Shopify supports some extra dropshipping assistance with more accurate shipping rate calculations.
Coupons and Discounts: if you are planning to run some coupons and discounts on your Shopify store. Sorry, you have to compromise a bit here because Shopify cannot help you on this. However, Magento helps you establish coupons and discounts from the moment you begin with the store.
Payment Gateway: Shopify can give you the most benefit with payment gateway because it supports more than 70 gateways which in comparison to Magento is far higher. But still, you can add third-party extensions to Magento. Moreover, using Shopify may make you feel forced with the gateway choice as third-party gateways need you to pay fees for the transaction.
Themes & Templates: though both of the platforms have thousands of themes to offer, the number of themes on Shopify is much less as compared to free themes available on the Magento open source platform. Moreover, the premium themes on Shopify start at a hefty tag of $80 and those for Magento starts with $1.
Add ons: Shopify offers a rich list of 100 apps and add ons to improve on the functionality and it is still growing with increasing needs of developers. However, Magento is a giant in this area as it has more than 5000 apps and add-ons to offer.
Multilingual Options: Shopify needs you to reach for third-party apps for upgrading your store with multilingual options or else you may need to go for custom coding from an expert while Magento still has an advantage as it offers better built-in support for multilingual requirements.
SEO: both Magento and Shopify are designed to deliver maximum convenience for SEO goals regarding traffic, conversions, etc. both platforms are designed dedicatedly to meet SEO needs.
Customization: Magento, as well as Shopify, are both good enough to work on customization needs through the editing of HTML and CSS coding. However, Shopify also offers theme editing options and drag/drop options for customizations delivering an easy design interface. Though the customization is easy with Shopify, Magento offers greater capabilities for such needs.
Blogging Features: both the platforms support blogging needs but Shopify gives it as an integrated feature. However, blogs on Magento are much more customizable thus improving functionality.
Convenience
Talking about the trends, Magento and Shopify always take a count in the list of best eCommerce store building platforms. They are both very powerful because they have the capability to work on easy interface development which is vital for every online store.
However, one good thing about the use of Shopify is a wizard mode where it gives complete support to the beginners which may feel a little hard on Magento. Moreover, when you have to work on everything like hosting, with your store up, it may get a little complex. So, here Shopify has a little bit of advantage as compared to the Magento.
The Prices
Shopify does not bring you any fees for initial set u as it runs on 14 days free trial with hosting support. After that, you need to pay for the plan of your choice which may vary from $14 to $179 per month. Moreover, you may need to pay extra money for the bandwidth usage as well as transaction fees for extra payment gateways included.
On the other hand, Magento is a free eCommerce development platform because of its open source abilities. But it needs you to pay for hosting and good hosting may bring you to cost of $5 to $100 or maybe more per month. However, you don’t need to pay any transaction fees or bandwidth usage fee with Magento. All in all, they both have different needs to spend money either it is purchasing themes, hosting, or any other essential need.
Deciding The Right Pick
Shopify and Magento are both highly powerful and functional eCommerce development platforms. But as we have seen above, Shopify is more manageable because of its complete package facilities for hosting and management while Magento has more opportunities to explore with its open source service enabling you to get complete authority on the store.
But Magento still needs to invest in hosting and installation which is more a technical task for uninformed beginners and needs an expert Magento Web Development Company in India to intervene. Both of them have own potential and capabilities and it would be difficult to say which one is not up to the mark for working your eCommerce store goals.
So, deciding the right pick entirely depends on your needs and your budget. What’s your pick?
Do share your views with us in comments.
Posted by Ravi Sharma
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