Selecting the most suitable ecommerce platform for creating, managing and maintaining an online store is of a critical importance, as it can be the factor responsible for either success or failure for your business. This is particularly important for a small business since it has to make do with limited resources and budgets.
As someone planning to create an online store or migrate your current store to another platform in the near future, you might be considering your options. Shopify and Magento Community Edition (aka Magento) are two widely acclaimed and used ecommerce store creation and management platforms today. There are, however, some huge fundamental differences between these platforms that you should be well aware of before making a comparative evaluation of the two.
Choosing the right online store platform is very important. This beneficial for a successful ecommerce website.
There are many options for new businesses or existing ones not satisfied with their current platform. Two of the biggest contenders are Magento and Shopify. These two platforms are often spotted head to head in the race for the best ecommerce framework, although they are totally different.
Popularity
While Magento is popular for quite a long time, Shopify is probably one of the biggest competitors in the market. With the release of Magento version 2.0, Magento might inch even higher on the list, making it an ideal solution for all business sizes.
Cost
Shopify is a commercial product (that you need to pay for) while Magento Community is a free, open-source software
Usability
Shopify is a hosted solution while Magento requires that you provide your own hosting, install, setup and configure everything before you can actually start creating your store – something requiring medium to high level of web development and programming skills.
Both Shopify and Magento offer basic store functionalities that are powerful to use and maintain. Shopify is significantly easier to setup and use as compared to Magento.
Both platforms allow flexible and powerful options for calculation of shipping charges which is one of the most basic and essential aspects of selling physical goods via an ecommerce storefront.
SEO
Both platforms offer extensive SEO capabilities in order to help you drive more organic traffic to your store via search engines, scoring almost neck-to-neck on powerful SEO features and benefits, as extensively described in this article: Choosing the best ecommerce platform for SEO capabilities.
Customization
Both platforms offer robust customization capabilities, via an advanced interface that allows you to edit the raw HTML/CSS code directly to give you total control over the design and the look-and-feel of your store. However, as mentioned above, Shopify scores better here by providing a simple, menu driven method to change the basic attributes of your store such as fonts, colors etc. very easily while with the customization capabilities with Magento are as high as it can get because all its code is open source, any of which you can modify in any way you wish to. Albeit, this unrestricted freedom to customize can be used only by those who have deeply entrenched web programming and HTML/CSS coding know-how.
Conclusion
It is hard to say which ecommerce platform is better for every single online store. What really matters depend on goals, budget, and experience. When deciding between Shopify and Magento, consider what is most important to you.
Is it creating a quick store to handle 100 products? Shopify may best suit your needs. If you’re looking to develop an online store with unlimited potential for features, scalability, and customization, Magento is likely better. Again, it depends on the situation.
Magento is packed with useful built-in features and limitless possibilities through add-on extensions. These reasons, in addition to the improvements with Magento 2, make it a great pick for ecommerce businesses.