Magento vs Shopify – Which One Is Good For ECommerce Development?

Having an impressive and eye-catching online store can be considered as a modern solution for business success and growth. Due to it, many businesses are trying to be a part of the online marketplace by developing the best eCommerce website for representing the services effectively. ECommerce development is not an easy task for anyone. It is associated with numerous decisions and crucial elements. Here, you will get details about one of the biggest queries, which platform is suitable for developing an eCommerce website Magento or Shopify.

ECommerce Development – An Introduction

Ecommerce development is a specific process where a group of experts is going to build a business website for the exchange of products and services. Mainly the process is completed in four major steps.

Step 1: Requirement Analysis – Here, the experts are trying to understand the target audience and their requirements for creating a proper development plan for your website.

Step 2: Platform Selection – Here, you have to discuss all factors with experts and make a final decision by choosing a specific eCommerce development platform.

Step 3: Forehand Development – Here, the team of highly qualified designers will work and finalize the website’s layout and its appearance.

Step 4: Backend Development – It is the last step, where the developers are going to build a website on the servers.

Platform selection is an important step for a website. It will help you in making sure what kind of features and functionalities you are going to add. In the upcoming paragraphs, you will get complete information related to the Shopify and Magento one by one. 

Magento – An Overview

Magento is one of the leading eCommerce platforms when it comes to development. It is an open-source platform where anyone can create an impressive online store with the addition of lots of features and functionalities easily. While availing its services, the users are capable of designing and developing a platform as per their requirements quickly. 

Features Of Magento

It is available with lots of features by which you can work and run an online store without any kind of issue. These features can be considered as the reasons by which many people love to access their services.

Catalog Management

While running an online store, you have to take care of several factors and catalog management is one of these. It does not matter what kind of products you are offering or selling. A catalog works as a great source of connection between the store and the buyers. With Magento, you can access this particular feature with the following benefits.

• Provide the option to download digital products such as – videos, music, and so on.
• Easy to manage inventory
• Offline updates regarding the import and exports of products
• Easy to delete or edit product reviews
• Deal with virtual products effortlessly
• There are several other benefits that will assist you in making the tasks much easier.

Marketing & Advertisement

Without proper marketing & advertisement of a store and services, you cannot expect online success. Using Magento will help you in accessing some special marketing and advertising tools. It can be helpful in quick promotions and getting a good conversion rate. By using its tools, you can work on cross-platform selling, promotional pricing technique, manage coupon usage, free shipping offers, promotion of all products, developing landing pages for PPC ads, and much more.

Mobile-Friendly Store

In today’s era usage of mobile devices is increasing rapidly. Many internet users love to access services online with the help of smartphones. Due to it, everyone has to make sure that they are developing a mobile-friendly eCommerce website. It is also good from the ranking point of view. With Magento, you can easily develop a website that can be accessed on all types of browsers and devices with ease.

Site Management

Site management is going to be an important part of serving the audience perfectly and avoiding all types of issues. Magento is also considered a good content management system by which you can easily manage the complete website and all the operations such as – orders, shipping, returns, and so on.

Payment Gateways

All eCommerce store owners are mainly worried about the payment sources. Having a good payment system on the website will help you in managing lots of things and serving the visitors easily. Magento allows you to add all types of payment gateways.

Tracking, Analytics, And Reporting

For business success, you have to track the leads and consider deep analytics. It assists in understanding the origin of visitors and figuring out how you can generate more leads and boost conversions. The use of reporting features helps in paying attention to several elements such as – creating sales and tax reports, gathering proper stats about the store, and much more.

User-Friendly Dashboard

Magento provides services with an easy to understand dashboard interface by which you can control the website without any hesitation. It will help you in tracking all store activities and check out previous stats as well such as – previous orders.

Advantages Of Magento

• Lower cost – it is an open-source platform that can be accessed by anyone for free of cost. It makes the platform a perfect choice for small and medium-sized businesses online.
• Lots of functionalities – with the help of Magento, you are able to develop a fully-featured and highly functional platform with ease. It has lots of features and elements by which you can develop the online store as per the desires.
• SEO-friendly – while developing an online store, everyone has to be focused on lots of things and SEO-friendliness is one of these. For getting the website ranked, you have to pay attention to the search engine algorithms and guidelines. With Magento, you can easily develop a fully SEO-friendly website with ease.
• Manage multiple stores – for managing more than one online store, you don’t have to access different administration panels or dashboards. You can share a single dashboard for managing all Magento stores.

Disadvantages Of Magento

• Complexity – for developing an online store by using Magento cannot be easier for anyone. It is completely based on the coding and programming languages. It makes the complete process complicated and creates several issues.
• Expensive in enterprise version – in case anyone doesn’t find a community version suitable then the interested ones need to get Magento’s enterprise version. It is tagged with a price of 18000 $ annually. For the small and medium scale businesses, it may not be easier to bear such expenses. 

Shopify – An Overview

Shopify is also a great source for developing eCommerce websites. It is the reason by which everyone is getting confused and not able to make a final decision regarding the selection of one. It provides services with the availability of several tools and essential features. The services of this particular platform are available in both manners free and paid. Shopify Plus is representing the paid services where the users will get several advanced features to develop an impressive store. 

Features Of Shopify

You can access lots of features while using Shopify. These features can make the development task easier for you and provide lots of benefits.

Mobile Commerce Friendly

Everyone wants to keep their online stores perfect for mobile devices. It is the best way to serve the audience perfectly. Shopify is featured with all these things by which you can easily develop a mobile-friendly online store. It is available with several responsive store designs where you don’t need to put extra efforts into building a mobile-friendly website.

Several Payment Gateways

Shopify is available with lots of options when it comes to payment gateways. It will help you in developing an online store where your visitors can make payments by choosing the sources as per their comfort. It will assist you in avoiding all payment related issues. With all these things, you have the option of accepting payments via Shopify wallet. For using such a method, you don’t need to pay a single penny as commission.

24/7 Technical Support

It is available with a big support system where everyone can easily raise their queries and troubleshoot the issues. The users are capable of accessing this particular support service when they want.  

Set Up Shipping Prices

Developing an online store with Shopify will allow you to make lots of changes and customizations by which you can be focused on lots of things. Here, you are capable of providing services by setting up flexible shipping rates. Mainly the price variations are based on distance, quantity or type of product, and so on.

Multiple Languages And Analytics

The users are capable of adjusting the Shopify language interface as per their preference or choice. Along with it, analytics plays an important role when it comes to gather complete data and perform activities accordingly. Here, you can easily analyze the website and get information regarding the visitors, leads, conversions, and all other related factors.

Cart Abandonment Recovery

The most important feature that makes Shopify better than others is the cart abandonment recovery feature. It helps the store owners to figure out the users or visitors those who abandon the shopping cart by leaving purchase in between. After gathering such information, you are capable of remarketing campaigns by targeting such an audience and encourage them to complete the purchase. It is useful in boosting conversion rates. 

Advantages Of Shopify

• Various themes – it offers eCommerce development services with the availability of different types of themes and designs. You can pick one which is suitable for your business. You can find both free and paid themes in the Shopify theme store.
• Free trial – Shopify never asks or forces the users to pay money first and then avail the services. Firstly, it offers a free trial of 90 days where you can understand, it is good for your business or not.
• Easy to use – for using this particular platform and developing an eCommerce store you don’t need to use highly technical knowledge. Mainly it is based on the drag and drop system for building eCommerce websites.
• Third-party integrations – use of the integrations is beneficial in adding features and functionalities to the store. It allows you to integrate your online store as you want. As a result, you can add multiple payment options and many other features.
• SEO-friendly – it will help you in getting a perfect and fully SEO-friendly website. It means you never face any marketing or promotion-related issues in the future.

Disadvantages Of Shopify

• Expensive – Shopify is a fully paid service provider. With it, some of the themes are tagged with very high prices. Due to these factors, everyone is not capable of affording its services.
• Transaction fee – when you are going to get payments via third-party sources in Shopify, then you have to pay commission in the form of the transaction fee. It clearly increases the cost of a business.  
• Feature limitations – all features are not providing complete freedom to the users. Some features are tagged with limitations by which the users are not able to access it perfectly.

Conclusion

By paying attention to the previous details, you can get aware of lots of things about Shopify & Magento. Now, it depends on you, what kind of features you want, what the business requirements are, how you can achieve the objectives, and so on. For focusing on all these things and making a beneficial decision, you should consider a deep discussion with an eCommerce development expert. An expert will help you in avoiding confusion easily by suggesting a perfect platform.

About the author: Rio is the founder and CEO of Webomaze Pty Ltd. He believes in serving the IT industry by offering the best possible solutions such as – eCommerce design and development. He works with the best Magento developer with lots of knowledge and skills.