Choosing the right platform for your online retail store is a complex decision to make. There are many solutions and service providers available, but it's impossible for anyone to come up with an all in one e-commerce solution that addresses every business instance. Because of that, you need to evaluate and understand the scope of your business and its future detection, then you should evaluate it against the available solution. This article provides a comprehensive guide in comparing Magento and Shopify.
1) Company overview
It's important to understand the story behind the product and the current status of the company before you get into a long term business relationship with them
Magento
- Magento comes as an open-source product. Meaning that anyone can download it for free, edit and host it on a server. However, you must have extensive coding experience to unlock the true power of Magento.
- Selling products and coding don’t get along at a retail business. So what usually happens is that the merchant hires a 3rd party service provider to develop their eCommerce store.
- When choosing a service provider, it’s important that they are experienced in Magento development.
- Magento Commerce and Magento commerce cloud are commercial products. meaning you have to pay for them. These products are targeted towards the enterprise-level merchants.
Shopify
- Shopify is a commercial product and a hosted solution. Your eCommerce store will be created and hosted in their platform, you pay them monthly for the service they offer.
- Unlike Magento, you can create and launch a Shopify store with zero coding knowledge. But when you want to customise your eCommerce store to provide your customers with a robust experience, you have to use additional plugins and the help of a developer.
- Shopify doesn’t allow you unconditional access to their source code and they expect you to have a sound knowledge of their code language "Liquid" before editing the code.
- Shopify has an enterprise version as well called Shopify Plus.
2) Product overview
Your e-commerce solution must be able to handle product volume and also future product enhancements.
Magento
- Magento comes as an open-source product. Meaning that anyone can download it for free, edit and host it on a server. However, you must have extensive coding experience to unlock the true power of Magento.
- Selling products and coding don’t get along at a retail business. So what usually happens is that the merchant hires a 3rd party service provider to develop their eCommerce store.
- When choosing a service provider, it’s important that they are experienced in Magento development.
- Magento Commerce and Magento commerce cloud are commercial products. meaning you have to pay for them. These products are targeted towards the enterprise-level merchants.
Shopify
- Shopify is a commercial product and a hosted solution. Your eCommerce store will be created and hosted in their platform, you pay them monthly for the service they offer.
- Unlike Magento, you can create and launch a Shopify store with zero coding knowledge. But when you want to customise your eCommerce store to provide your customers with a robust experience, you have to use additional plugins and the help of a developer.
- Shopify doesn’t allow you unconditional access to their source code and they expect you to have a sound knowledge of their code language "Liquid" before editing the code.
- Shopify has an enterprise version as well called Shopify Plus.
3)Market share
Market share itself is not a powerful indicator. Once you combine it with the sales volume generated or the kind of merchants that they serve, you get a better understanding about the platform that you must invest.
Magento
- 12% of the online stores are powered by Magento.
- Magento power 315000+ retail stores online.
- Out of the top 500 B2C online retailers, 70 companies are powered by Magento including Samsung, Ford, Nike, North Face and Olympus. And out of the top 300 B2B retailers, they power 40 companies.
Shopify
- 21% of the online stores are powered by Shopify.
- Shopify powers more than 1000000 retail stores online.
- Shopify is most popular among start-ups and small to midsize businesses and yet it's used by 10 out of the top 500 online retailers.
4)Unique Selling points
Once we have an understanding of the USPs, then we can validate them against the product attributes.
Magento
- Magento promises its users to have a scalable, customisable product that can be tailored to their specific retail needs.
Shopify
- Shopify promises its users to have an easy to use eCommerce platform that can be created and launched within days without any code literacy. They also promise a high level of support and maintenance to make sure that the site runs smoothly.
5) Cost structure
This is the most important and also the most complex factor to consider and in general, without the help of an expert it's hard to figure out the cost of your e-commerce investment.
Magento
- Magento open source is free to download and use. But it requires a considerable initial investment as there are 3rd party development costs.
- Even though there isn’t a recurring payment, there will be a cost of hosting and it could range between $4-$300 per month depending on the capacity required.
- When it comes to themes, there are free themes out of the box or you have the option to custom develop or buy a paid theme.
- Magento won’t provide all of their modules and features in the free version but they are all available as extensions to purchase at Magento Marketplace. This allows you to pay for what you use rather than having an all in one industry solution with many modules you don’t use.
- This comparison will give you a broader comparison between
Magento Open Source and Magento Commerce.
Shopify
- Shopify doesn’t have a free version but they offer a free 14-day trial. They offer 3 main packages which are priced at $29, $79, $299 per month.
- There will also be a transaction fee for both online and instore credit card purchases and it varies from 2.9%-2.4% + 30c. If you are using a payment provider other than Shopify Payments, there will be an additional fee of 2-0.5% (Shopify payment is available in 17 countries including Australia)
- Shopify also has 9 free themes and 64 paid themes to choose from. Just like Magento, each tire of Shopify will allow you to access more features and this comparison guide will provide you with a broader understanding.
- Shopify Plus is the enterprise version of Shopify and the price will start at $24k per annum.
6) Cost of ownership
It's important to know how much control you get over your online store. Also it's important to how you will get affected with any future changes to the company policies of your e-commerce service provider.
Magento
- Once you develop and host a Magento store, you own it fully and Magento doesn’t have any control over it and you get to edit it according to your unique business needs.
- This ownership comes with some responsibilities. As you are the owner of it you need to run upgrades, security patches and make sure that the site runs smoothly.
Shopify
- Shopify is more like a rented space and you don’t have full control or the full access to edit its code. But Shopify will take care of upgrades and security on behalf of you.
- Changes in Shopify’s policies and prices could negatively affect your business. For instance, in 2018 they decided that they won’t allow selling guns and ammunition in their stores and that forces such stores to migrate to a different eCommerce platform.
7) Usability
This is an area with many misconceptions when it comes to Magento. When assessing the usability, you must consider both the usability of creating and managing your online store.
Magento
- As a merchant with no coding knowledge, it's impossible to create and launch a Magento store and will need to hire a service provider with experience.
- Once the site is up and running, the admin panel of Magento is user-friendly and can be customised according to any user specification.
Shopify
- It’s possible to create and launch a basic Shopify store without any coding knowledge. But when you want to add advanced customisations, integrations, you will need to hire developers who are experts in CSS, PHP and Liquid.
- Shopify provides you with a standard admin panel that is user friendly but you don’t get to customise it. Sometimes you have to change your business processes to stay aligned with their CMS standards.
8) Customisation
Level of customisation is important when you have specific business sinariors to address and also when you want to differentiate your brand from others.
Magento
- This is what Magento stands for and both the front end and back end are heavily customisable.
- For example, let’s say you get product images from 4 different suppliers and they happen to be in different sizes, you can customise a backend process to resize them automatically when you import them to your online store.
Shopify
- Shopify has its limits when it comes to customisations and what you get with Shopify is a standard online store rather than a unique one.
- For example, let’s say you get product images from 4 different suppliers and they happen to be in different sizes. As your Shopify backend can’t be heavily customised, you will need to resize those images using a 3rd party application before importing them.
9) Scalability
Your e-commerce solution has to be futuristic to accommodate the organisation's future demand and scale.
Magento
- All business-critical integrations and automation are possible on Magento and some integrations might need extensions that need to be purchased.
- When your business grows locally or internationally, Magento can handle any level of expansion. You can manage multiple online stores with a single Magento instance.
- When it comes to international shipping, Magento stands out due to its flexibility. It also supports multiple languages and local payment options and local deliveries.
Shopify
- Shopify integrations are user friendly and some integrations need to have paid extensions and sometimes it can get costly. For example, integration Shopify POS to your Shopify store will cost you $89 monthly.
- Each Shopify instance can manage a single online store so you might need to invest in a few different instances and manage them separately or migrate to a different solution.
- Shopify also provides international shipping and it’s really user-friendly if your business is operating from the USA or Canada.
10) Customer experience
It's competitive and challenging to convert leads online. Your e-commerce store must integrate all sales and marketing channels to work in harmony to provide an omnichannel eCommerce experience.
Magento
- You have full control over your customer experience and can optimise it to provide a unique online experience that stands out from the rest.
- You get access to insightful reporting functionalities that allow you to measure performance and make critical decisions.
Shopify
- What Shopify provides is a standard customer experience and they optimise it to be aligned with the industries best practices.
- Shopify also provides you with customer data and insightful reporting but their basic $29 package doesn’t allow you access to the full reporting stack.
11) Product type
It's important to know that your eCommerce solution can handle what you sell. When a business grows, the complexity of its products grows with it. It's important to choose an eCommerce solution that supports your level of complexity.
Magento
- Magento allows you to sell anything as long as it's legal to sell. They don't dictate what products that a merchant can sell through their Magento store.
- Magento allows you to sell 6 different product types and they have put serious thought to address the complexity of a product offering. You get to sell
- Simple products
- Configurable products
- Virtual products
- Group products
- Bundle products
- Downloadable products
- Magento doesn’t have any limits when it comes to the product variants and attributes so you have the flexibility to offer a product to customers with many attributes to choose from.
Shopify
- Shopify has more control over the products that their merchants can sell so if you are having business with high risk or controversial items in your product range, you have to make sure that they are allowed to be sold on Shopify.
- Shopify allows you to sell simple and downloadable products but that cannot handle the growing needs of a business.
- Shopify allows you to have 100 variants of a product, but they only allow you to have 3 variant levels or attributes of that product and that's a limitation. Let say you have a product with 4 attributes, size, colour, print and material, then it's not possible to sell that in your eCommerce store and you need to combine those attributes into 3 or less.
12) Compliance and security
You must guarantee the safety of your online customers by providing a risk free online platform to purchase from.
Magento
- Since Magento comes as an open source solution, the merchant is responsible for the security and compliance. Usually, it’s your developer’s responsibility to run timely updates to ensure the security of your store.
Shopify
- Shopify takes this hassle away from you and they run all the updates and security patches to make sure that your online store is PCI compliant.
As you can understand each solution has its pros and cons and we can continue this comparison by adding more and more attributes and examples. What really matters is the nature and scope of your business and which platform can address your ecommerce requirement. If you are still in doubt, arrange a call with Maytech and we can help you. We have over 14 years of industry experience and will be able to help you on your ecommerce journey.
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