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Magento vs. Shopify: The Pros and Cons
When it comes to deciding between Shopify and Magento for your eCommerce store, the debate never seems to end. Shopify powers 4,159,344 live websites (as of March 15, 2023), whereas Magento has 148,282 live websites (as of March 15, 2023), so both are very popular in the market and have a great range of options for various kinds of online stores. This makes it an even more challenging task given the uniqueness of each.
If you are thinking that both are the same as eCommerce platforms, you are not completely right about it. There are so many key differences between them. Shopify offers a simple setup, user-friendly themes, and a bevy of built-in features that advanced businesses will need; Magento supports a more open-source approach (like WordPress), with many customization options based on your needs.
Let’s dig deeper into these differences to help you understand the pros and cons of each and choose the right eCommerce platform.
Shopify
Shopify was founded in 2006 by Scott Lake and Tobias Lutke to address the dissatisfaction with existing eCommerce website platforms. It is a hosted solution that is best suited for beginners, given its simple user interface and low learning curve. It may not have started as an eCommerce giant, but it has spread its wings in the industry due to its extreme functionality, customer support, and ease of use. It’s no surprise that Shopify theme development is so in demand these days.
As of May 2022, 5.6 million stores use Shopify, and 70% of domains are enrolled under Shopify. The numbers prove just how much Shopify is winning the hearts of the eCommerce industry. Let’s elaborate and understand it more by walking through the pros and cons of Shopify.
Pros of Shopify
Here’s everything that Shopify has to offer to your eCommerce site.
Innumerable Themes
There are tons of exquisite Shopify templates for you to choose from for your site. Like other DIY website builders, these themes allow you to go beyond just a basic Shopify store to create something truly interactive and unique without significant coding knowledge. The Shopify store offers a variety of free and paid themes that are responsive across all devices, so there is bound to be a perfect aesthetic for your eCommerce business.
Extensive Community Support
It is backed by a large community of advanced Shopify experts and dedicated fans. In case you are stuck while working with Shopify, technical support is accessible every hour through phone, chat, and email. It works beyond regular business hours so the customers can expect instant support from them.
Improved Functionality
You can extend the functionality of your website with the Shopify app store. It offers 7,000+ applications to help businesses customize their stores. It allows you to even choose from an array of credit card payment processors, payment gateways, checkout options, email marketing tools, social media functionality, and more.
Sell on Multi-Platforms
Shopify supports selling multi-channel sites such as Amazon, Instagram, Facebook, and eBay.
In-Built SEO
Shopify’s search engine optimization features are surprisingly easy-to-understand and effective. You won’t need a lot of technical knowledge to ensure your online business is ready to rank first on Google.
Smooth Integration
Integrate Shopify into an existing site built on another platform with its “Buy” button. It comes as a useful feature for businesses who just wish to integrate some Shopify eCommerce solutions into their existing website.
Cons of Shopify
Additional Expenses
Most themes are paid for in the Shopify store. For instance: 64 Premium theme options are available, with prices starting from $140.
Limited Linguistic Capability
It doesn’t offer full multi-lingual capabilities directly, for which you would require third-party apps.
Demands Skilled Developers
If you want to get a customized theme, you will have to look out for an expert Shopify developer to get the task done. It can make a dent in your wallet at the start of your business.
Fee on Every Transaction
It enforces fees for every transaction when you don’t use Shopify payments
Hear From Industry Experts
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Magento
Founded in 2008, Magento is an open-source platform that offers complete flexibility to merchants on its functionalities and shopping carts. It is a self-hosted platform in which all the hosting costs are included in the monthly or yearly subscription. This way, you get a whole package and you don’t end up paying extra. It has a decent collection of plugins and apps for domains like payments, security, finance, accounting, and more.
Magento has a 2.32% of market share in the eCommerce industry globally. It handles transactions of $155 billion (USD) every year.
Pros of Magento
Savings with Magento
You can leverage discounts and coupon codes when you choose Magento, so you can save your budget.
Exceptional SEO Capabilities
The extensive suite of SEO allows the store owner to control the links that get passed on to Google or other search engines. You can leverage metadata for the homepage, rich snippets, prefixes, suffixes for title tags, and more. You require no additional extensions or modules when you have built-in SEO features of Magento.
Massive Developers Support
You can easily avail yourself of resources for help in your projects of any size with more than 260000 developers worldwide through Magento forums.
Limitless Customizations
It is a highly flexible and customizable platform that does limit your future expansion in terms of features and functionalities. You don’t have to re-platform to extend to other platforms as it integrates well with a wide variety of third-party solutions.
High Flexibility
Choose from high-quality, audited extensions that help the merchant to add and expand the store capabilities quickly and easily. You would be astonished to know that the marketplace of Magento offers 3600+ extensions that can be installed and implemented without any knowledge of coding.
Operational Efficiency
Achieve maximum scalability and operational time with Magento’s global cloud foundation and services without considering the user’s geographical location. You can customize integrations and optimizations to the specific needs and business goals of individual store websites.
Cons of Magento
Demands Expertise
It is not beginner-friendly. A person should have knowledge of Magento development.
Isn’t Budget-Friendly
It isn’t cheap. This is the reason that it is not suited for small business owners. You need to spend a good amount of money to stay updated on Magento’s platform. Compared to eCommerce platforms like BigCommerce and Shopify, it is an expensive solution irrespective of the free entry cost of Magento. It is due to the expenses consumed in Magento custom development, maintenance, integrations, support, and extensions.
Technical skills are a must
It requires advanced technical skills to connect everything together to attain the desired output. If you think you can do it on your own, dig yourself into principles of object-oriented programming, Git, PHP, and MySQL.
One Mistake Can Ruin Your Whole Website
If even one complex coding goes wrong, the whole site may suffer and go down.
Key Takeaways
With everything said above, we can conclude that Magento and Shopify both are great options. It depends on you as a business on what suits your requirements the best. You may just be starting out in the industry or would be hosting a full-fledged business. Making the right choice is what will accelerate your growth in the market.