A crucial factor to consider for the eCommerce Web Design for an online store is the selection of the most suitable platform for the creation, management, development and maintenance of the store. This factor is critical to the success of your business. It can go either way towards success or failure, based on the choice you make. It is of utmost importance for a small scale business as it has to manage with lower budget and scanty resources.
If you are planning to create your e-store or migrate to another platform, you must consider these two leading eCommerce tools, namely: Magento and Shopify. There are some huge differences between the two that you may want to take a look at. The two fundamental dissimilarities are:
- Magento community is open source, thus a free software. On the other hand, Shopify is a commercial product, thus paid.
- Shopify hosts your store, whereas Magento requires you to arrange your hosting, install, setup and configuration of everything before setting up your store.
The other comparable differences are:
Various templates and themes:
Both of them offer a huge collection of templates and themes for the beautiful design of your store. Shopify’s collection of free themes is significantly smaller than Magento. Both of the platforms also provide Premium (paid) themes for eCommerce Web Design. However, Magento’s premium themes are very cost effective. Magento offers paid themes starting at just $1. Whereas Shopify’s themes start at $80.
Shipping charge calculation:
Both the platforms provide very resourceful and flexible options for the easy calculation of shipping charges. This is the most fundamental and essential feature for selling goods by an eCommerce website.
Setting up of Inventory:
Shopify has a Starter plan of $14 per month. This basic plan limits you to 25 maximum store items. Magento offers virtually limitless number of items for your eCommerce website. All the other plans of Shopify support unlimited items. However, it is noteworthy that in Magento, your host performance matters. There can be some issues if you add too many products on Magento store if the hosting is not powerful. You do not have to worry about this in Shopify.
Payment gateway options:
Shopify has support for 70 payment gateways. On the other hand, Magento has far lower number of payment gateways. Thus, Shopify has got the leading edge here. However, it should be noted that more payment gateways can be added to the Magento store using third party add-ons.
SEO capabilities:
Magento and Shopify both offer extensive SEO resources that will help you to drive more and more organic traffic to your store through Search Engines. Both are giving each other cut-throat competition and are running neck to neck in it.
Add-ons and Applications: Magento has a whopping lead here, with over 5000 apps and add-ons, which is of course because of the open source environment and the community driven nature of it. Shopify supports well over 100 add-ons and apps with which you can enhance the functionality of your store. Thus, Magento is winning here, in terms of eCommerce Web design.
Customization Potential:
Both the eCommerce platforms are robust and offer good options for customization through an interface which allows the developer to edit the basic code, directly giving you full control over the eCommerce Web design and the look of your store. However, Magento provides unrestricted freedom for the same. It should be noted that this freedom is however for proficient web developers only.
Magento has provision for discount codes. It also has multi-language support. Both of these are not there in Shopify. In terms of cost, Magento is way more cost-effective. Also, it is the most widely used eCommerce platform.
Conclusion:
Both of them stand to be fairly competitive platforms, Magento stands out to be the choice of rather more techie people who want full customization control. Shopify provides ease of use as it is a fully managed service. In terms of cost, Magento really is a winner. Overall, both are fairly powerful and efficient platforms. Therefore, choosing one of the two is really subjective to the needs of the store owner.
