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Shopify vs. Magento: When starting an eCommerce business, choosing a platform to build and run your store on is one of your most important decisions. As you research the many options available, you might see these names popping up repeatedly: Magento and Shopify.
Shopify gives you a fully hosted platform with various features and fixed prices and is known for its user-friendliness. On the other hand, Magento gives you a choice between Commerce and Open Source, both lauded for their vast feature sets and customization capabilities.
Shopify
One of the reasons Shopify is so popular is the breadth of features included in its platform. The features included are one of the factors that set it apart from similar software, like when comparing Shopify to BigCommerce, for example.
Some of Shopify’s unique features include:
- Shopify Payments: Shopify has its payment processor with its platform; if you use Shopify Payments, there are no additional transaction fees.
- Abandoned Payment Recovery: Automatically email users with a link to their abandoned card encouraging them to complete their purchase
- Blogging platform: Not only do you have a store website, but also a blog to post articles and encourage customer discussion.
- Automatic taxes: Shopify automatically manages country and state tax rates.
- Mobile app: Shopify’s customizable mobile app lets you manage your orders, products, staff, and customers on the go.
- Marketing: Shopify has advanced features like SEO optimization, loyalty programs, discounts, gift cards, social media integration, and more.
- Shopify App Store: The Shopify App Store has over 7,000 apps (from drop shipping to email marketing) that you can download to extend your store’s functionality.
- Customer support: Shopify offers its users 24/7 support, as well as access to its help center, discussion forums, and e-commerce university.
Magento
Like Shopify, Magento is known for its platform’s impressive list of features.
Here are some highlights:
- Instant Checkout: Besides your general shopping cart capabilities, Magento offers Instant Checkout, which allows users to checkout quickly and easily on a single page.
- Site management: Magento has advanced site management capabilities, allowing you to control multiple websites and stores from a single admin, as well as create, preview, and schedule content updates.
- Payment processing: Magento works with popular payment gateways like PayPal and Braintree and has integrations with over 300 others, including international gateways.
- Reports: Magento’s platform includes 100 pre-built reports, nine reporting dashboards, and the ability to create and edit your own words.
- Customer Development: Magento gives you many ways to engage and support your customers, like guest checkout or login, email marketing campaigns, coupons, promotions, wishlists of products, and a gift wrap option.
- International Commerce: Besides working with international payment gateways, Magento allows you to manage multiple national sites from the same store or environment. Magento can also support multiple currencies, languages, and tax rates (including fixed EU product taxes).
- Add-ons: Magento Marketplace offers over 4,500 different add-ons and extensions that can be downloaded to enhance your store’s functionality.
Shopify vs. Magento: Pros and Cons
Below are few Shopify vs. Magento pros and Cons:
Shopify Pros
- Easy to use
- Themes are visually appealing, responsive and mobile-friendly
- Abandoned cart recovery is built into all pricing plans.
- Excellent dropshipping features
- Multi-device sales support
- Great tool for selling on social media platforms
- Email marketing tool lets you send up to 10,000 emails monthly at no cost.
- Support for a wide range of third-party applications
- Great SEO features and support for SEO tools like Yoast.
- Shopify Payments removes transaction fees
- Discounts for paying for a one-, two-, or three-year billing cycle
Magento Pros
- High level of scalability
- Offers great flexibility and customization options
- Excellent management features, support for multiple languages, multiple currencies, and pricing
- The large user community for hands-on support
- Excellent SEO and marketing features (including Google Site Map, engine-friendly URLs, and meta descriptions for products and categories)
- Support for a wide range of product types
- Optimized and mobile-friendly payment experience
- In-depth analyzes and reports
- No transaction fees applied
The Cons of Shopify
- Transaction fees apply to those using a 3rd payment gateway
- Limit of three options per product
- The full report feature is only available on the most expensive plans
- Shopify Payments is available in a limited number of countries
- Lack of theme customization options
- Multi-currency selling features don’t work in all countries
The Cons of Magento
- Very expensive if you pay for Magento advanced editions.
- Themes and coding knowledge templates to be installed
- Hosting and domain must be purchased separately
- Lack of default themes
- Lack of built-in support for selling on social media
Shopify vs. Magento: Which is Precise for You?
Whether Shopify or Magento is right for you depends on your business type, budget, and goals.
Shopify is best for you if:
- You are a minor or medium-sized business owner without a large budget and want to set up your online store as quickly as possible.
- You are a one-person army that starts and runs your business independently.
- You are one of those who discover dropshipping or POD.
- You want to promote your brand or products on social media platforms or your existing websites.
Magento is best for you if:
- You are a big company with a big budget that wants to build a brand online
- You have coding skills, and you want to create a personalized online store
- You want the freedom to develop your themes or templates
Conclusion
This concludes our Shopify vs. Magento face-off. You should now be able to decide if Magento or Shopify suits you.