Choosing the right eCommerce platform for creating, running, and maintaining an online store is very important because it can make or break your business. This is especially important for small businesses, which have to do with less money and fewer resources.
We talk about many eCommerce platforms on this site, but Shopify and Magento are the most popular. Shopify has a firm hold on the hosted platform market, while Magento is the most significant player in larger, more complex eCommerce sites.
If you want to open an online store or move your current one to a different platform soon, you might be thinking about your options. Shopify and Magento are two of the most popular and well-known platforms for making and managing online stores.
Shopify
It is an eCommerce platform with many features and is easy to use. Shopify was started in 2006 in Toronto.
The platform is easy to use and has all the tools and themes that both beginners and experts need. Because of this, it is a massive hit with small and medium-sized businesses. You don’t need to know how to code to use Shopify.
It has five subscription plans that give you access to its powerful drag-and-drop builder. Each project has different features.You can also try Shopify for free for 14 days if you’re not sure.
Pros of Shopify:
• You can choose from many beautiful responsive store themes
• An all-in-one online store builder
• Great app store for making your website even more helpful.
• Customer service is pretty good
• Simple to use
• Lots of ways to check out and pay
• A large group of devoted fans
Cons of Shopify:
• Most themes come with a price tag.
• Adding apps to your store makes it more challenging to run.
• Every transaction costs money (unless you use Shopify payments)
Magento
Magento is now Adobe Commerce, it is one of the biggest eCommerce platforms in the world, with more than 250,000 online stores that are open and running. It is an open-source option that Roy Rubin and Yoav Kutner released in March 2007 through Varien Inc.
Magento 2 is the most popular CMS for building eCommerce websites because it can be used in many ways. It has a robust architecture and can grow as needed. There are three Magento platforms: Magento Commerce, Magento Commerce Cloud, and Magento Open Source.
Prices change depending on what you choose. For example, a license for Magento Commerce costs between $22,000 and $125,000 per year, a request for Magento Commerce Cloud costs between $40,000 and $190,000 per year, and a license for Magento Open Source is free.
Magento Pros:
There are many benefits of Magento platform.
• Flexible platform with many ways to change it
• Scalable, and robust platform
• Big community of developers
• You don’t need to know how to code to use Magento open source.
• Magento is free to use and has open source code.
• Many Magento 2 extensions available
Magento Cons:
• Pretty hard for beginners
• Need expertise to customize the website.
• Setting up your store will cost you a lot of money.
Shopify vs. Magento:
Mobile Responsiveness
Sites don’t just need to look good, though. They also need to consider mobile users, mainly since Google’s best practices for mobile-first indexing often use mobile versions of websites when indexing and ranking new sites.
It’s not surprising that Google has chosen to put mobile first. In 2021, sales from mobile commerce will reach $359.32 billion, which is 15.2% more than in 2020. Retail mobile commerce sales are expected to reach $728.28 billion by 2025, 44.2 percent of all retail eCommerce sales in the U.S.
Both Magento and Shopify have responsive templates that are already set up. Even though these templates look and feel simple, they get the job done and keep the user experience clean and easy to understand.
But if you are willing and able to develop an eCommerce store, Magento shines in the mobile. Many Magento stores use flexible product grids, mega menus, and the ability to change the layout uniquely.
Shopify also has some of these features, but in a mobile-first world, you’ll be much more successful if you keep a store with great functionality and clean code to shine in terms of SEO.
Fees for taking payments and making transactions:
Since Magento 2 doesn’t charge transaction fees, you’ll only have to worry about the transaction fees charged by your payment processor. These vary depending on your business type, how long you’ve been in business, how customers pay, the number of transactions and more.
If you only use Shopify Payments, the built-in payment processor for the platform, online transaction fees will be between 2.4 percent and 2.9 percent plus 30 cents per transaction. Shopify still charges a transaction fee even if you use a third-party processor. Depending on your Shopify plan, it can be anywhere from 0.5 percent to 2 percent per transaction.
Shopify supports more than 100 different payment gateways, such as PayPal, Square, Stripe and Apple Pay. Magento 2 works with more than 150 payment gateways, but most are for big businesses. With Magento 2, you can also use their marketplace to add any third-party payment processor you want.
Add-ons
Both platforms have an app store and extensions that you can use to add more features to your online store.
Shopify have apps that can help improve and add to the functionality of your Shopify site in different ways. Apps for loyalty programs, accounting, email marketing, and other things are always being added to the Shopify App store. The apps are approved and have straightforward installation steps.
On the other hand, Magento has a substantial advantage because it has more than 5000 extensions that work well with its backend. Magento is a significant, open source, community-driven platform with free and paid add-ons that let you add to the out-of-the-box features and functionality without writing code.
How easy it is to use:
Shopify is easier to use for people who don’t know much about coding than Magento 2. With the Shopify platform, you can change almost every part of your website with simple point-and-click instructions. It’s also a viral platform, so if you run into problems, there are a lot of tutorials, self-help tools, and customer support to help you.
Ideas and plans:
After budget and ease of use, one of the first things that many companies think about is how their platform will look. So, customers’ first impression of your business is a significant factor. Themes let you show off your beautiful brand and who you are. Let’s find out what Magento and Shopify have in common!
Shopify Themes:
Shopify has 13 free and 73 paid themes that you can use to find out more. Even for the price, these might be a little pricey for some people, since Shopify owners have to pay between $150 and $350 for a theme for their mesmerizing storefronts.
• The drag-and-drop editor lets you add, change, remove, and change the size of Shopify theme elements.
• All the themes are made for mobile use.
• It’s easy to add pages or make new ones.
• You can change the images and color scheme to fit your business.
It makes it easy to add social media feeds:
Magento Themes:
You can buy up to $499 worth of 6 fully mobile-friendly themes from Magento Themes. You can even make your theme from scratch with Magento (but this requires you to have deep coding knowledge or a budget big enough to hire help).
• It can be customized in more ways (as long as you have a firm technical foundation)
• It lets you add animations to your store to make it more interesting.
• Put a slider of your best products on your home page
• You can add newsletter options to the bottom of your website.
• Add “cross-selling blocks” to the pages of your products.
Conclusion:
This article has shown you how Magento and Shopify are different. Now that you know which platform is best for you, let’s quickly go over the main differences between the two.
Shopify is more accessible for people to use than Magento. You will be able to get faster online and have help available quickly.
Magento is more of a work in progress. To make your idea come to life, you’ll need time and technical know-how, and you’ll depend a lot on a Magento forum (or on developers).
• You want your store to be open as soon as possible.
• You’re just starting e-commerce but want to grow it into a full-fledged business.
• You’d like to pay for everything at once and have a support team on hand.
• You know how to code and want to open an online store for your medium or large business.
• You want coding to give you complete freedom to be creative.
• You already have a global audience or want to reach people in other countries.
• You want to build a big brand that makes a lot of money and is willing to put time and money into the design. That’s the end of our battle royale between Magento and Shopify. We are sure you’ll build a fantastic online store. We hope the best for you!
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