Are you having a hard time choosing between Shopify and Magento? Well, you are not alone. After all, these two are the most popular e-commerce platforms that are often pitted against each other. Choosing the right platform for your e-commerce business is extremely important for creating, managing as well as maintaining your online store. This can be the factor that is responsible for either failure or success of your business. This is especially true for small businesses as they have to deal with limited budgets and resources. So to help you with the selection, we are here with a comparison between the two. Read on.
1. Ease of use
When you are choosing your e-commerce website application, the first and the foremost thing that you should consider is its ease of use. After all, you want your customers to make purchases from your e-commerce site easily and quickly, right? Shopify has an easy to use interface which is perfect for non-technical users. Also, it offers 24/7 customer support. In case you are technically minded and willing to invest some time in understanding the technical terms to maximise the full potential of the platform, you can go for Magento.
2. Data security
With Shopify, all your information is saved in a secure environment. This saves you from worrying about data integrity. On the other hand, by choosing the right hosting accounts, Magento can be made secure. Security patches are dispatched regularly in Magento, thereby keeping your data secure.
3. Cost
You don’t need to provide any setup fees with Shopify. A 14-day free trial is offered by them, which allows you to test and evaluate the features as well as the functionalities that are offered by their e-commerce hosting platform. On the other hand, as Magento is completely free to use, no setup fee is required. There are 4 different plans available with Shopify. If you choose Magento, you will have to provide your own hosting.
4. Themes and templates
In this discussion of Magento vs. Shopify, it can be said that both the Magento and Shopify communities offer a huge collection of templates and themes so that you can provide your online store with a look and feel that perfectly match your products and requirements. Compared to the Magento community, the free themes offered by Shopify are lesser. However, the Shopify themes are more contemporary than the Magento community. In case of templates, both of them offer quite a large number of responsive templates – paid and free.
5. Apps and add-ons
After customizing your theme, don’t you want to expand your store? Both Magento and Shopify have large app stores where you can get everything from finance and accounting extensions to marketing apps to take your online store to the next level. With Shopify, you will get more than 2300 paid and free apps to choose from. Magento offers about 3000 paid and free extensions.
6. SEO capabilities
You want to make money by attracting more customers to your online store, right? This makes it important for you to choose the right e-commerce platform that will help you with SEO tasks as much as possible. Shopify enables you to create search engine friendly online stores quickly and easily. Magento offers great SEO functionality as well. You will get more than 250 SEO apps to choose from. However, these apps are a bit pricey compared to the apps that are offered by Shopify.
7. Payment processor options
Are you looking for an e-commerce platform that will enable you to set up payment processors quickly and easily? Shopify would be the right option for you. Also, your transaction fees will be waived off if you use Shopify payments. In case you are looking to take your store abroad and want to connect with customers there, Magento can be of great help as they offer multilingual payment processors.
Both the Shopify and Magento communities are powerful e-commerce hosting platforms. While Shopify offers more ease of use as it is a fully managed and hosted service, Magento is free itself and requires you to buy hosting and do all the setup and installation yourself. This requires someone with years of experience and great knowledge. Digital Aptech has some of the best developers who are very good at developing e-commerce websites. Want to hire us? Give us a call now!
