With the growing demand of online shopping, the platform for creating eCommerce websites are equally being competitive. Choosing the most suitable platform for your online store that can manage and maintain your products and payment options is a very critical step for any business owner. An immature choice can lead to failure of your business. That is why in this today’s blog, we are talking about two hottest platform for building an eCommerce website i.e. Magento and Shopify.
Both Magento and Shopify are shopping carts that allows you to create and manage online store. Both have the pros and cons as well. Let’s look at them individually below!
Shopify
Pros:
1. Ease of use
Shopify is good if you hate coding because you can easily set up your website via its simple and intuitive admin panel. It’s user-friendly and you do not need to depend upon developers to make small customizations.
2. Awesome free templates
It offers multiple killer templates for free which means you can attract your prospects via beautiful designs.
3. Great bandwidth
Shopify provides great bandwidth without any extra charge.
4. Multiple add-ons and extensions
Whether you are seeking to boost your website via SEO extensions or add some cool features via add-ons, Shopify has multiple free and fee-based extensions and adds-on to help you with.
5. Good customer/technical support
Shopify offers 24/7 customer/technical support. They are active on discussion forum and blogs where you can put your queries and get it resolved. You can even like the Shopify page on Facebook and follow the cart on Twitter.
Cons:
1. Product features
If you are seeking for some features such as email newsletters, one page checkout in Shopify, it will cost you extra charge whereas in magento, these are completely inbuilt for free.
2. Transaction fee
Shopify charges 1 to 2% transaction fees depending on your chosen plan.
3. Hosted solution
Shopify is a hosted solution and hence your online store is hosted by them so you have to pay hosting charge and the site is under their control.
Magento
Pros:
1. Open source
Magento is an open source software that is available for free. Also, hosting is in your own hand. It’s not in control of Magento as it was in Shopify.
2. Product features
The order management tools of Magento are much better compared to shopify. It also has broader range of product browsing options. You can easily find the cart that supports several marketing promotions like newsletter, coupons, surveys and polls.
3. No transaction fee
In compared to shopify, Magento doesn’t incur any transaction fee.
4. Payment processing
Magento integrates with several processors and offers one-page checkout which makes it better than Shopify.
Cons:
1. Difficult to newbies
If you do not know coding at all, then, using Magento might be problematic to you. You’ll be taken to several get started steps while you walk for the first time in this platform. It might also be difficult to edit themes without any coding know-how.
2. Customer support
Magento do offer 24/7 customer support but it has been faced by many users that it takes days to have your query answered via tickets. Some even wanted the inbuilt blog and mobile themes as they have found the cart too complicated to deal with.
3. Server speed
Many Magento users complain about the slow server speed.
4. Bandwidth
Users are unhappy with extra bandwidth charges.
Which one to choose then?
It actually depends upon your requirement. If you want a simple interface where you can quickly setup your store for your small business, then you can go for Shopify, but, if your store is for large business then the powerful product feature of Magento will let you choose it. So, what type of business do you possess? Let us know in the comments below!