Magento vs Shopify, the Ultimate Comparison

Are you planning to start your E-Commerce Business, but are confused about the best options for E-Commerce platforms? You’re not alone. Don’t worry, we got you all covered. We will answer every question regarding E-commerce platforms, and help you to clear your head. Let’s get to the basics first.

What is E-Commerce?

E-commerce or Electronic Commerce is purchasing and selling of goods or services through the Internet, such as purchasing clothes, shoes, or other articles on an online platform, in other words, E-Commerce is a process where a businessman trades goods or services to the consumer with help of an electronic medium.

Now there’s a proper process for starting an E-Commerce business, you can refer to A Complete Guide: How to Build, Launch and Grow a Profitable Online Store to know more about how to start an online store step by step. And continue reading to know which is the best E-Commerce platform for your Online Business, Magento or Shopify?

Magento

Magento is an E-Commerce platform developed on open source technology that gives online merchants a flexible shopping cart system, as well as authority over the appearance, content, and functionality of the online store. Magento development allows convincing marketing, search engine optimization, and catalog-management tools. Magento's capacity to scale enables shops with fewer products and flexible needs to simply grow to many products and complicated custom behavior without switching platforms. It offers a number of plug-ins and themes which can easily enhance a customer's experience. Magento Development has one biggest advantage i.e; it can be used by anyone. Hence, you must be very particular while determining the correct type of hosting for the Online Store.

To make such decisions, let’s learn more.

To start an online business, there are a lot of aspects which are needed to be taken care of. The success of an online business depends on many different pillars, like how well the planning of the business has been done, the use of technologies the business is based on, etc. Choosing the best E-Commerce platform plays a very important role in the success of an Online Store.

Magento Development is composed to be used as an application by someone who isn’t a developer by profession, in other words, it can be used by anyone. The Magento community is remarkably vast and very useful and helpful for businesses. There are a number of benefits of using Magento like:

• It is easy to install and has additional plug-ins and layouts.
• Magento is an open-source technology that also offers adjustable, scalable E-Commerce solutions.
• Magento is an effective as well as a cost-efficient platform.
• It not only allows various discounts but also allows promotions during check-out.
• Magento gives more than fifty payment gateways.
• It allows the users to fully control the way of delivering the customer experience without any limits.
• Magento evolves as the business grows and changes over time.
• It supports expansion by managing multiple stores, transacting in multiple countries, languages, and currencies, and uses various worldwide shipping providers, everything within a single instance.
• Magento lets users sell customized products and digital goods online.
• It allows users to manage the complexities of B2-B commerce.

Recently the updated version of Magento i.e; Magento 2 has been introduced. For better uses and updated features, there’s Magento 2. This updated version encounters most of the issues faced with Magento 1. Magento 2 has user-friendly and is now easy to learn for new users. Compared to other E-Commerce platforms like Shopify, it is easier to complete tasks like accessing advanced reports, managing payment processors, sorting customers, marketing products, etc. for the admin. Admin can now achieve more in less amount of time. With the introduction of Magento 2, it is hard to beat Magento in the game.

Let’s give a quick look at Shopify

Shopify

Shopify’s E-Commerce platform works great for stores that trade goods and services that need a minimum arrangement. A businessman can sell a single product or more than one product by executing an advanced Shopify store according to the business requirement. This conclusively leads to an increase in ROI and raises the revenue of the business. Shopify provides great advantages for an Online E-Commerce Business. Let’s look at some of them:

• Easy to use: Shopify is easy to set up and use, it is the best alternative for those who need a complete solution at one stop.
• Endless Templates: Shopify is the platform that bundles up a range of professional online store templates that promotes uniqueness and visually appealing online stores.
• Customization: Shopify owns astonishing customization capabilities that help in easy integrating with apps.
• Security and Reliability: It offers the benefit of security and reliability. In an online E-Commerce business security and reliability plays an essential role.
• Powerful Marketing: Being a complete solution, Shopify has powerful marketing tools. It offers basic features to advanced marketing tools like custom gift cards, discount coupons, and many more.
• Mobile-Friendly: Shopify provides great mobile responsiveness, which is a key to success as the number of mobile users is increasing every day.
• Easy Payments: Shopify offers easy payment methods that make it easy for online retailers.

Guessing that we have learned enough about both the platforms, Magento and Shopify. Now let’s get to the part where we actually compare both the platforms.

Both Magento and Shopify are considered to be the most popular E-commerce platforms in the market at present.

Let’s compare Magento and Shopify on different aspects to understand them properly. Let’s give a look at them:

Magento Vs Shopify

Magento and Shopify are probably big-time competitors in the E-Commerce Platform Industry. And with the introduction of the Magento version 2.0, Magento is touching new heights in the market, making it a perfect E-Commerce platform for every business.

It is generally said that both of the platforms are very similar, but in reality, even though they serve the same purpose, they are quite different in many aspects. They have different core structures, payment options, ways of handling extensions, and many other functions and features.

• Ease of Use
• Popularity
• Coding
• Expense
• Control and Customization
• Speed and Performance
• SEO and Marketing

In terms of SEO options, Shopify offers a basic set of SEO options, like you can edit meta tags and optimize inventory and product pages. Shopify also allows in-depth optimization which involves transforming the file structure that facilitates search crawlers in carrying out their job. One biggest limitation of Shopify is that it is self-hosted, hence, the user can not make any server-level configurations. On the contrary, Magento Development helps you to unite and implement your custom SEO and digital marketing strategies without any trouble.