Setting up a suitable e-commerce shop is certainly important. Particularly important for small businesses since they have limited resources and budgets to set up an online store for their product. It can play a major role in making or breaking your business. There are lots of great e-commerce platforms and website builder options available for you. But none of them is more popular than Magento or Shopify. So, which one to choose from Magento and Shopify for setting up your online store? You are not the only one to raise queries about which one of these two to choose from.
Comparisons and differences between Magneto and Shopify seem pretty valid as they rule almost 70% of all E-commerce markets. When it comes to more significant players in the industry, there are more complex e-commerce sites available. Wherein, Magento is the leading competitor, while Shopify has a substantial grip on the market for “hosted, exclusive all-in-one” platform services. They are quite different in what they offer. But no worries! We are here to help you with your queries. In today’s website development blog, we are going to point out the key differences between Magento and Shopify to see which one is better for your business purpose.
Let’s being with the basics…
Overview of Magento
Magento is an open-source E-commerce platform that you can install for free. However, it does have a paid version, but it gets pretty expensive. Considering you are a small business or just started, it is unreasonable to pay so much money. With the free version, you still have to pay for web hosting, security features and add-ons but comparatively, it is much cheaper than the paid one. Most small businesses go for the open-source version of Magneto if they have a skilled developer under their sleeves. Yes, with Magento, you are going to need the guidance of a developer for setting up your online store. Some of its features include improved page caching, a better-structured code base, and enhanced file structure with easier customization.
What is Shopify?
Shopify has quite a simple framework than Magento for creating an online store. With Shopify, you don’t need a lot of coding knowledge. It supports an easy-to-use platform for someone who is a beginner and with no prior experience in web development. Though, you need to pay monthly fees to use it. You can say it is a ready-made solution for any kind of business that exists. Shopify’s free version is simple to use and provides an up to the marked professional background for your project.
Comparison: Magento vs Shopify
Usability
Shopify offers a drag-and-drop interface website builder. With Shopify, it is quite easy to build and manage your online store whereas, with Magento, you will need a developer if you need a customized shop. Additionally, creating and managing a Magento store requires a wide range of skills to manage it. The major upside of using Magento to build your e-commerce website is that it has a load of potential for customizing options. With Shopify, you would only be able to build a basic customized e-commerce shop. Also, the page offers a limited set of functionality.
Performance
The performance of the website is managed by the Shopify team itself on Shopify. The usual load time is about 2-3 seconds for a small store. However, adding multiple plugins can impact its loading time. Contact the Shopify team to find a solution if you want to optimise the performance curve on the call interactions. Extensive inventories and plugins also can benefit from Magento’s continuous performance. However, you will need a developer’s assistance to improve the store’s speed. Alternatively, you may get magneto management hosting, where the Magento professionals will look after the efficiency and functionality of your website.
Theme and Design
Shopify let you select from its more than 100+ themes to build your e-commerce website. Most of them are free, while you got to pay a price for some of the design layouts. The same goes for Magento but the selection curve is much more. Again, most of the theme is free but for some, you need to pay an amount. The major advantage lies with Magento where you can actually modify the theme that you choose for the website to optimize the user experience.
Add on and Extension
The app store for Shopify contains approximately 4000 both free and paid plugin options. They can be used to increase your online store’s functionality and performance. The addon is quite easy to integrate with just a click of a button whereas you may require some technical skill to install add-ons on Magento. With Magento, again the selection curve is a little higher than with Shopify. Different development companies also offer third-party Magento extensions.
Multilingual capabilities
Shopify doesn’t provide features for multilingual. And you particularly cannot set up localized payment methods per se. In order to create a multilingual store, you have to use a third-party extension whereas Native language support and local payment mechanisms are effortless to add with Magento. You can create multilingual stores based on the countries you want to reach and target.
In terms of Marketing and SEO Compliance
Shopify provides a lot of marketing tools such as email marketing, Facebook ad tools, and google smart shopping to promote your website. You also receive SEO tools to change your taglines and meta descriptions per your requirements. You can also include detailed product descriptions and related details. Additionally, Magento provides a tonne of marketing and promotion-related options. For particular products, you can set up specific prices as well. You can also include discounts, sales, and awards to attract customers’ attention. You can optimise the URLs for search engines with the help of the Magento SEO tool. They also provide permission to rewrite the URLs.
Payment Method
Shopify supports over 70 payment methods, such as PayPal, Razorpay, Stripe, Amazon Pay, and more. It also uses Shopify Payment as a payment gateway. If you do not use Shopify Payments, you must add additional transaction fees to the orders.
Additionally, Magneto provides more than 100 payment gateway options. You can add them from the Magento marketplace. Unlike Shopify, there are no additional charges to it if you use other payment getaways.
As per our understanding, we can easily say that Shopify is best suited for small businesses or start-ups with limited products or storefronts per se as it has quite a user-friendly interface to operate. Whilst Magento is suitable for any business size. On Magento, you can creatively build your store based on consumer demand. You have to invest much more in price than Shopify in developing and supporting the website. For growing a business that requires a lot of customizing, the best option is Magento but if you are looking to start an online store in no time and have no prior experience regarding web development, you should probably go for a Shopify website builder.
