Magento Vs Shopify- Which Is Good For Ecommerce Development?

The global expansion of the internet and the rise of ecommerce websites have transformed our way of shopping today. Indeed according to a forecast on Statista, it is expected that 65% of internet users will be buying products online by 2021. Hence the importance of online shopping is increasing worldwide leading to more investments in this field.

You can create an excellent ecommerce website when you use the right tools and features. Today, lots of ecommerce platforms exist that offer all features to create and start a full-fledged ecommerce store. Magento and Shopify are two of the most crucial ecommerce platforms that allow creating good ecommerce websites.

An ecommerce platform is the foundation on which you create your website. Hence, undeniably, choosing the right platform becomes a crucial decision. Whether you choose Shopify or opt for Magento for ecommerce website development, you should decide based on feasibility & suitability. So, here we will discuss these two ecommerce platforms and will try to understand which one is a better choice for you.

Magento vs Shopify: A Brief Overview

Both Magento and Shopify are top-of-the-line ecommerce platforms. These platforms have good features to develop websites of different forms and scales. But they do have some differences that can affect your website development decision.

Magento

Magento is a popular, open-source, and free ecommerce platform. It offers excellent tools and functionality to develop outstanding ecommerce websites. This platform was released on 31st March 2008 and was developed on Zend Framework. Magento comes in two main versions i.e. Magento Commerce and Magento Community Edition. While Magento Commerce is the commercial version, Magento Open Source is the community version of this platform.

Shopify

Shopify is an all-inclusive ecommerce platform that you can access after paying a certain premium. After choosing a suitable Shopify plan for your ecommerce store, you can create and set up your store and start promoting, selling, and shipping products to customers. Shopify is quite popular due to ease of use and start-up costs. It is a cloud-based or SaaS ecommerce platform. It has outstanding functionality and an intuitive admin panel from where you can add products, store data, and process data.

Magento vs Shopify: Pros and Cons

Shopify
Pros	Cons
Easy backend   It has quite an easy backend that makes it to control varied aspects of your site.	Transaction fees   It charges fees on transactions that can be avoided by choosing Shopify Payments.
Effective customer support   Whenever you have any problem with your site, customer service is very helpful to resolve them.	Cost of apps   The apps that you use for extending your website’s functionalities are paid most of the time.
App store   Shopify users can install different apps from Shopify’s own App store to extend the existing functionalities of their sites.	Expensive platform   Shopify is considered an expensive ecommerce platform.
Multi-channel selling   The ecommerce platform lets you sell products on multiple platforms including Facebook, eBay, Instagram, etc.

 

Magento
Pros	Cons
Highly flexible   Magento open-source is highly flexible because you are free to modify the code and create the solutions as per your specific needs.	Not beginner-friendly   Shopify is a beginner-friendly ecommerce platform that allows creating websites in no time. However developing an ecommerce website with Magento requires more effort and tech skills.
Ideal for medium and large businesses   It is an ideal ecommerce platform for large businesses. They can afford a development team or hire developers for custom Magento ecommerce development.	Bad customer support   Compared to other platforms like WordPress, customer support is more expensive. And, you cannot always find the right support for your Magento store on community platforms.
Huge community base   There is a large community of Magento users and experts who actively provide answers to anything related to this platform.	No easy installation   Installing Magento is not easy as there is hardly any hosting service that supports this ecommerce platform.
Great features   It has excellent features that many other ecommerce platforms lack. These features include multi-language and multi-currency support, multi-stores, multi-location support, and more.

 

Magento vs Shopify: Key Differences

Ease of use

Shopify has an edge over other ecommerce platforms in terms of ease of use. It offers a drag-and-drop interface for easy customization. On the other hand, Magento is comparatively harder. It is not a beginner-friendly platform for developing ecommerce websites. It makes Shopify ecommerce development convenient.

However, when it comes to customization, Magento has got you covered from all aspects. It means you get complete customization possibilities with this ecommerce website development platform. Hence, Magento is suitable for large businesses that require complex websites. Developers can harness the customization potential of Magento to build top-notch ecommerce websites.

With Shopify, one can start an ecommerce website within a few steps, and without dealing with code. On the other hand, Magento website development is a lengthy process that involves coding. Hence, if you are not from a technical background working with Magento might be challenging for you. There are lots of website themes and extensions available for Magento users. They can utilize these themes to build robust ecommerce stores.

SEO & Marketing Tools

Without good SEO, all your efforts will go in vain. It is important to choose an ecommerce platform that comes with the right SEO strategies. Both Shopify and Magento offer varied functionalities and marketing tools to bring better ROI. Both platforms allow integration of engaging content on your online store that helps in improving the SERP position. Here are key sales and marketing features of Shopify vs Magento.

Shopify

• Multi-channel selling: It has a built-in multi-channel selling feature.. You can sell products on Facebook, Amazon, Instagram, Pinterest, and more.
• Abandoned cart recovery: It allows recovering lost sales by sending emails to buyers who didn’t complete shopping on your site.
• Sell a large variety of products: On your site, you not only sell a variety of physical products, but you also sell different digital products easily.
• Partnership with major courier service providers: Choose from top courier services including DHL Express, Canada Post, USPS, UPS, and more.

Magento

• Checkout customization: Create excellent checkout experience for customers by customizing the process on your website.
• Multi-channel selling options: Use plugins to integrate online store with varied channels like eBay, Facebook, and Instagram.
• Set a fixed price or percentage-based discounts: You can set discounts based on your preference.
• Abandoned cart recovery: Recover abandoned carts via mails.

Performance

Performance is the key determinant in the success of a website as most users hate waiting for a website to load. If a customer lands on your site to purchase a product, your website loading speed will have an impact on his/her decision. No customer wants to get stuck on a site that takes ages to load. Hence, you need to make sure that you have a high-performance ecommerce website. It should offer a pleasant shopping experience.

Shopify is a high-performance ecommerce development platform. It lets you create fast and highly user-responsive websites. Moreover, it is a hosted platform and provides a minimum or no control over hosting and server management.

In the case of Magento, you have enough control over the performance and server adjustments. This is due to the flexibility you get with this ecommerce platform. It is a self-hosted platform that offers the choice of your own server. Also, offer choices to make other adjustments to enhance overall website performance. It offers you hosting options like managed hosting along with advanced technologies such as CDN, caching, and more.

With Magento, you have to choose between Magento Open-source or Magento Commerce. In case of Magento Open-source, you are responsible for hosting your site. And, with Magento Commerce, your site is hosted in the cloud, It ensures that your site is always live and never goes down.

Themes

When it comes to website themes, users of both platforms have a plenitude of options. There are a lot of premium and free website themes available for Magento and Shopify websites. By using these themes, website users can make their websites more engaging and visually appealing. With this huge collection of themes, website users can pick the desired themes. And they can customize their websites as per their preferences.

Moreover, Magento provides more themes to users that they can easily install on their sites. Themes for both the platforms come with customization options. Hence users can customize their ecommerce websites to build the desired online stores. Customization on Magento is relatively harder than Shopify.

Payment Gateway

For an end-user of an ecommerce website, ease, and convenience of shopping along with easy payment options are attractive. Hence having easy and quick payment options is essential for every ecommerce website. The payment gateway allows online stores to process online payments. So customers can pay through online banking, credit//debit cards, e-wallets, etc. Shopify comes with an integrated payment solution and other payment options. These options offer easy payments methods.

Magento does not offer any integrated payment solutions. But one can integrate third-party payment gateways into his/her ecommerce website. Extensions are another way to enhance the basic functionality of your Magento store. You can use a lot of such methods for configuration and setting up payment on your ecommerce store. You need to choose a secure and reliable payment method to ensure ease of payment from your online store.

Control

Control poses an important difference between Magento vs Shopify. In the case of Shopify, you have very limited control over your website. Furthermore, it is a hosted ecommerce platform, it means your site is hosted on Shopify. So it leaves you with little or no control over your hosting service. With Shopify, you don’t need to worry about hosting and configuration, everything is taken care of by Shopify itself. Hence, customization is limited to this ecommerce platform.

On the other hand, Magento gives you complete control over your site and lets you pick the hosting of your choice. You can configure and set up the server according to your preferences. Also, you get complete freedom to customize your ecommerce website according to your needs and preferences.

Customer Support

Shopify comes with active and convenient support services available from tech experts in the Shopify team. You can obtain quality customer support without any hurdle. You can easily connect with a representative of Shopify and get your issues resolved conveniently. Hence, there is someone you can always rely upon in case of any trouble with your Shopify website. Apart from this, you can also look for help online and resolve issues in no time.

On the other hand, Magento offers community support that comes from different types of community members. These members also include experienced and skilled Magento users. You can also seek help from Magento documentation to get a quick solution to your problem. However, finding the right help is more difficult with Magento than Shopify. This is due to no one-stop destination to get your issues resolved.

Magento vs Shopify: Verdict

Both Magento and Shopify have different pricing policies because they are two different platforms. On the one end, you have Shopify, a feature-rich ecommerce platform. It offers an easy way to start your ecommerce site, And, you are not overwhelmed with the different things like hosting, server configuration, back-end, etc. Being an all-in-one ecommerce platform, Shopify gives you the best user experience in a single package. However, using this platform can be expensive as you have to spend on apps and themes. This is an ideal choice for small and medium-sized businesses that want a ready-to-use solution to start their online store.

On the other hand, Magento is a highly customizable platform. Initially, the cost of developing an ecommerce site is quite low with Magento Open-source platform. This is because it is free and you just have to spend on the website themes and/or extensions. For large businesses that want complex and advanced websites, Magento is an ideal choice. They can hire Magento developers to create excellent websites.

Final Note

Creating an ecommerce website has become easier with the evolution of varied platforms like Magento and Shopify. You can build outstanding ecommerce websites by using any of these platforms. Moreover, every platform is different from the other. And, they are suitable for different development situations. You can choose the right platform by considering your requirements and understanding of these platforms. You can choose the platform that fits your requirements.