Magento vs Shopify vs WooCommerce: A Detailed Guide for You

Planning to open an online store and thinking about which e-commerce platform to choose from then you are at the right place. I will provide an overview and a detailed guide regarding the top trending platforms for your e-commerce website. Just go through the blog and you will be in the driver’s seat as far as your online business is concerned.

Well, all the three Magento, Shopify and WooCommerce are run by big companies so the chances of upgradation of the platform and enhancement of the functionalities are always there on the cards. All three combined hold more than half the market in terms of e-commerce business. In the following journey, I will provide a comparison regarding which platform to use among the three and what are the key aspects and benefits which come with the different platforms.

Magento

 Magento was initially released on the 31st of March, 2008. Magento is an open-source e-commerce platform that was originally developed by Varien Inc., a US private company headquartered in Culver City, California. Later, Roy Rubin, the former CEO of Varien, sold the company to eBay which then sold the company to Permira. In the year 2018, Permira sold the company to Adobe which bought the company with 1.68 billion dollars and integrated it with Adobe Experience Cloud which is its Enterprise CMS platform. As of 2018, the Magento platform is used by 700,000 sites worldwide. The top brands which use the Magento platform are Nike, Ford, Land Rover, Omega Watches and counting.

Magento provides two distinct platforms, one is Magento Open Source which was previously known as Magento Community Edition and the second one is Magento Commerce which is available in an on-premises version which is previously known as Magento Enterprise Edition, or as a platform-as-a-service which is previously known as Magento Enterprise Cloud Edition.

Advantages

1. Magento is flexible which in other words, we can modify the source code as per our requirements and desire. It also allows us to customize templates. The best part in this is Magento also allows third-party integration for various purposes like importing products, etc.
2. Magento has a large community of users as it is one of the most widely used e-commerce platforms worldwide. So, you can get help online from the large community in case of developing many extensions and plugins.
3. Magento is mobile-friendly because it allows you to create a mobile site without much difficulty and gives you the best mobile viewing experience for the consumers which helps to increase sales.
4. Magento is scalable so it’s the right platform for small businesses and startups so that they can upgrade their store in the future when they expand their business. In fact, Magento approximately supports 5,000 products and transactions per hour.

Disadvantages

1. Magento is time-consuming as it requires a lot of time to develop as it is a layered software with complicated architecture which makes the process of designing the site quite difficult. It often takes a whole lot of time to customize on Magento than to make the same on other platforms.
2. Magento requires a good hosting environment and store management. If you run Magento on shared hosting it will have a slow and poor user experience for customers.

Shopify

Shopify is a multinational company situated in Ottawa, Canada and was founded in the year 2004 by Tobias Lutke and Scott Lake.

Advantages

1. The most common advantage of Shopify is its simplicity. It’s extremely easy to develop a website on Shopify which in turn saves a lot of time in dealing with technical issues.
2. Another feature in Shopify is its in-house App Store. It gives access to over 1,200 plugins and apps. With a variety so large, you can find anything under the sun.
3. Shopify has a large community of users, so you get support online while developing on the Shopify platform.
4. It is a fully hosted platform which means you do not have to pay any extra money for maintenance and server hosting fees. It also means a certain level of freedom since Shopify is not reliant on a host to determine its costs and guidelines.

Disadvantages

1. The biggest disadvantage of Shopify compared with Magento is there is no free platform to use. You must pay a monthly subscription cost and there are certain themes for which you have to pay a certain amount.
2. The other disadvantage with Shopify is that there is a transaction fee when you sell online unless you use Shopify payments on your store.
3. Shopify has limitations in terms of customization compared to other platforms where you can customize.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce was launched on 27th September 2011 by WordPress theme developer WooThemes who hired developers from Jigowatt, to work on a fork of Jigoshop which later became “WooCommerce”. It has been estimated that around 3.9 million websites are built on WooCommerce

Advantages

1. The biggest advantage of WooCommerce is it is free and open-source which means anybody can code and develop in the WooCommerce platform.
2. WooCommerce is highly customizable, and you can customize it as per your requirements.
3. WooCommerce is one of the highly secured platforms as far as an e-commerce platform is concerned. This platform is regularly updated to keep up to date with cybersecurity. When it comes to payment security, WooCommerce is perfectly complemented with secure gateways and e-wallets, such as Stripe, PayPal, etc.

Disadvantages

1. As WooCommerce requires a wide variety of plugins, tools and extensions for developing an online store. So, the site performance gets hampered while installing and setting up the online store.
2. WooCommerce is free, we can agree on that, but most features are paid. The features come in a monthly subscription model or lifetime saver pack. It depends on what additional resources one is using to keep his/her store up and running. So, the hidden cost of maintaining and running an online store can be huge depending on the requirements.

Get started with your B2B eCommerce store and gain a competitive edge in the market!