Magento vs Shopify – Which one is Ideal for e-Store Development

All set to launch your eCommerce website? Be careful to choose the right platform! The platform you select acts as the foundation for your store and determines its appearance and functionality. Two of the most popular eCommerce platforms are Magento and Shopify and it’s not unlikely to get confused which one to pick.

We’ve made it easier for you. Below, we will outline a few parameters and judge both the platforms on the basis of these. But before that, let’s walk you through an overview of both the platforms.

Shopify

Shopify is an easy-to-use eCommerce platform. This hosted solution allows business owners to customize their site, sell products online, and efficiently manage the dashboard. It also has a Shopify Plus version which is a multi-channel platform with higher level of customization features and support than Shopify.

Magento

Magento is an open-source eCommerce platform that came to the market back in 2008. It is highly flexible, scalable, and customizable platform. The self-hosted platform offers all the relevant functions to develop an e-store from scratch. Recently Magento has launched a new version with added features and functionalities. Supported by the official community, Magento 2 is the perfect choice for the businesses.

Magento Commerce is the premium and paid edition of Magento. This is recommended for the business owners who prefer a one-stop cloud solution to optimize eCommerce sites and boost sales.

Okay, we are done with the intro part. Now let’s dive into a comparative study between Shopify and Magento.

Magento and Shopify – Who is the Winner

Before availing a Shopify or Magento development services, go through the following pointers minutely to analyse which one is the ideal option for crafting a spectacular online store. Oh and don’t forget to mention your verdict in the comment box below!

#Coding

• Magento – Magento uses PHP while Shopify uses its own coding language called Liquid. An important difference between Shopify and Magento is that the former is proprietary while the latter is an open-source platform. An open-source platform is available for free and you can modify the codes as per your requirements. The template codes in Magento can be easily altered to suit the specific requirement of your store but that’s not possible in Shopify.
• Shopify – As a proprietary platform, Shopify doesn’t allow you the coding flexibility. Shopify is a suitable solution for simple stores but not for complex ones that demand significant changes in the source code. Magento is ideal for large and complex stores.

#Security
Security is a crucial concern for an eCommerce website. In fact, studies reveal that 84% of the shoppers don’t intend to purchase from a website that doesn’t feature an SSL certificate or green security padlock in the URL bar (source: Blue Corona). Let’s take a look at how these two platforms deal with the security issue.

• Shopify – As Shopify is a SaaS based platform, it already includes security measures. This is an added advantage of Shopify. It meets 6 categories of the PCI standards and also includes SSL security on the hosted site to manage your customers’ confidential data. It protects your site from security breaches and regularly sends updates and patches to ensure high security. Further, Shopify has introduced a bounty programme to reward the users who can find security threats related to a Shopify store.
• Magento – Magento demands you to take a more manual approach to meet PCI compliance. Magento also presents updates and patches for security risks (like SQL injection vulnerability), but it’s the developers’ responsibility to keep your site up to date.Note that the security patches and updates are available for Magento 2 sites only. So it’s high time to migrate your site built on Magento 1 to Magento 2.

#SEO

An SEO optimized e-store can drive higher organic traffic from the search engines. This positively impacts your conversion rate.

• Magento – Magento excels in SEO as it offers an ample of SEO guides. It’s easy to customize your SEO efforts on the store. You can edit image alt tags (that help search engines to crawl and index the images) and customize URLs to enable search engines render your web pages precisely for a related search query. These are some built-in features in Magento. With Magento, you can also take the advantage of canonical tags, redirects, and no-follow links. You can also edit permalinks and meta tags as well.
• Shopify – Shopify relies more on the apps for SEO. Though you can edit image alt tags or page titles, you have to search the app store for most of the SEO activities. Here’s a complete guideline on how to SEO optimize your Shopify store.Take a look.That’s why, we conclude that Magento edges Shopify from the SEO perspective. It has a wider range of inbuilt SEO features to help you customize the SEO process manually.By the way, which one do you think is the better eCommerce platform between Shopify and BigCommerce? Find your answer in the blog.

#Performance & Speed

Speed and performance are the two major factors that can affect or improve your users’ experience on your store. If your site takes a long time to load, the users may bounce and you may lose hard-earned potential customers.

• Shopify – Since Shopify is a hosted solution, you need not worry about the loading speed and performance of your site. However, you are unable to control the hosting environment and adjust the server level. So if you face any speed-related issues, you need to contact the Shopify support team.
• Magento – Magento is renowned for its admin control and hosting flexibility. As a self-hosted platform, it enables you to choose your own server and perform all the necessary adjustments to boost the site performance. With the release of Magento 2, the community has further made new enhancements to allow you to minimize the server response time for any store activities, optimize the web pages for fast rendering, and make backend operations highly efficient.

#Sales Tools

Sales tools are an integral part in eCommerce sites. Below, we will outline some of the best features of Shopify and Magento that you can integrate in your e-store.

• Shopify
  -Multi-channel selling – you can sell your products on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Amazon as a built-in feature.-Cart recovery – you can recover your potential customers by sending auto-generated emails to them and give them an opportunity to make a purchase.-Partner with DHL Express, USPS, UPS, and Canada Post – it will save you the hassles of establishing your own courier service.
• Magento
  -Multi-channel selling – here, you have to install extensions to integrate the store with eBay, Instagram, and Facebook.-Customize checkout – you can create a bespoke checkout for your store.-Import bulk products from your database

#Scalability

These days, entrepreneurs seek to launch an MVP (Minimal Viable Product) and then go on to extend its features and functionalities. And this is more common in an eCommerce site. If you want your online store to grow over time, you should choose a platform that ensures high scalability.

• Magento – Magento is popular for its extensive scalability and flexibility. Businesses looking to expand their stores heavily rely on the platform. Magento can also cope with high traffic level so your website can evolve with time.
• Shopify – Shopify is more of a simple tool. So if you look to develop a small scale site with low commitment, availing Shopify development services can be the right decision for you. So, for us, Magento is a better bet to develop a more scalable site.

#Add-ons

Adding extra features and functionalities can help you stand apart from the competition. Both Shopify and Magento allow you to easily install apps and extensions and enhance user experience on your e-store.

• Magento
  Magento Marketplace is filled with 5000 extensions to choose from among which 1970 are free. However, the paid and free features vary on the basis of the platforms. For instance, it costs around $199 to integrate your Magento-based store with Facebook, which is free on Shopify.You can always choose any and every functionality to add to your store, but here are a few of our favourites:
  -Banner slider – include advertising banners along with a personalized link to help the users easily land on those product pages.-Remarkety – integrate social feeds and email marketing campaigns with your store.-Amasty multiple coupons – you may add custom discount coupons and encourage orders.

  -Product pre-order – send emails to the customers automatically once a new product is available.

• Shopify
  Shopify App Store is equipped with over 1200 apps – including both premium and free ones.Here are a few noteworthy ones:
  -Analytics Buddy – pulls Google Analytics data into Shopify dashboard and provides you with useful insights.-Trackr – send auto updates on the whereabouts of orders to your customers-MailChimp – integrate email marketing campaigns with your Shopify store to boost sales.

#Payment Gateway

What is an eCommerce store without a secured payment gateway! These days, eCommerce website development company professionals encourage to integrate multiple payment gateways on your store to enhance convenience.

• Shopify – Shopify has its own payment processor called Shopify Payments. It imposes zero transaction fees (except for the regular credit card processing fees). It also supports over 100 payment gateways like PayPal, Apple Pay, Amazon Pay, Stripe, etc. – all of these come with a transaction fee.
• Magento – Magento supports over 150 payment gateways like Square, Stripe, etc. You have to install these from the marketplace to integrate these to your store. Magento also enables you to sell directly through Amazon by using your own Magento-based inventory. Through Amazon marketplace, you can reach a wide customer range.

Our Take
As you could see, there’s no good or bad, right or wrong once it comes to selecting Magento or Shopify for your e-store. If you want to develop a simple small-scale online destination, Shopify can be the ideal choice. And go for Magento if you are looking for a scalable, robust, and heavy eCommerce site.

Hope you have found the article useful. Stay tuned for more interesting insights.