Having difficulty in choosing the right eCommerce platform between Magento and Shopify?
Well, you’re not alone. Magento Vs Shopify is a common debate on the internet.
And while both Magento and Shopify are two of the biggest eCommerce players, there are some fundamental differences between Magento Vs Shopify that you should know about before making a decision.
In this article, we’ve shared a detailed comparison of Magento Vs Shopify to help you evaluate which one is right for you.
Magento Vs Shopify : Overview
Magento is a free-to-use, open-source eCommerce platform that’s been around for more than 11 years.
As of today, more than 250,000 eCommerce stores have been built using Magento and over $155 billion USD worth of goods have been sold through Magento-based eCommerce stores in 2019 alone.
Shopify, on the other hand, was first founded in 2004 as an eCommerce store named Snowdevil’s online store for selling snowboarding equipment.
After 2 years, snowdevil’s founders created their own eCommerce development platform as Shopify.
Today, Shopify is ranked second among top eCommerce platforms.
However, security experts have found that Shopify is vulnerable to different sorts of cyberattacks including the RFD attacks.
Magento, on the other hand, is a much more secure eCommerce platform than Shopify. Although security is just one part, there are many other factors one needs to consider before making a choice.
Below, we’ve shared a detailed comparison so that you can know the exact difference between Magento Vs Shopify.
Magento vs Shopify : Differences Comparison
So, how can you determine which is the right eCommerce platform between Magento and Shopify? The answer lies in evaluating the extra goodies (read: features each platform provides over one another.
Simply put, all you need to do is look for the most important goodies that are essential for building your eCommerce store to ensure that you make the right choice. That being said, let’s dive right in!
Inventory Management
While both Magento and Shopify allow adding an unlimited number of products.
Shopify, however, gets capped once it reaches 100 variant combinations for each complex product, and it also offers just three variant options - sleeve length, size, and color.
Magento, on the other hand, is the only eCommerce platform that truly offers unlimited scope for adding products. In addition, Magento also lets you create complex product types, which includes both bundling and grouping designated products.
Simply put, Magento is the best eCommerce platform that allows packaging together multiple products to create a product bundle to sell either at a fixed price or dynamically generated price.
Payment Gateway Options
A payment gateway is an important factor to consider before making the move to either Shopify or Magento.
While both Magento and Shopify support the majority of payment gateways including Braintree, Paypal, and the rest.
But, if you choose Shopify to build your online store, you should expect additional transaction fees, as Shopify charges extra transaction fees for each transaction made through any external payment gateway. This transaction fee starts from 1.9% + 30¢ and increases depending on the size of your store.
Magento, on the other hand, also supports the majority of payment gateways including Stripe, Braintree, Authorize.net, and so on, while maintaining secure transactions and without any additional transaction fees.
Basic Functionality
Both Magento and Shopify offer basic functionalities that are both powerful and easy to maintain. These functionalities include checkout modules, shopping carts, product pages, collections, etc.
However, the main difference is that if you use Shopify, you will have to get a dedicated app for each extended functionality.
Magento, on the other hand, has almost all intermediate and advanced features that may require as you grow in the platform.
Shipping Charges Calculation
Shipping charges calculation is one of the basic and essential features to sell goods via your online store. For instance, you don’t want to make any losses with shipping charges, and you also need to ensure that you’re charging a reasonable fee from your customers for shipping.
Both Magento and Shopify offer powerful and flexible option to automatically calculate the shipping charges, meaning you can rest assured that your shipping charges will be accurate on both of these platforms.
Provision of Discount Codes and Coupons
Discount Codes and Coupons are must-have features for increasing conversions on eCommerce stores.
Magento has an in-built promotions engine that allows everyone to easily add coupons and discount codes functionality without any difficulties.
In fact, compared to most eCommerce platforms, the Magento promotions engine is comprehensive, which allows you to offer two types of promotions:
- Catalog Price Rules - it’s a wide rule which can be applied based on criteria across the entire catalog.
- Cart Price Rules - It’s a condition-based promotion type where the action is applied at the time of checkout.
Shopify, on the other hand, does not allow creating coupons and discount codes in its starter pack. You’ll have to upgrade to a higher-end plan in order to create and distribute discount codes.
Though many people rely on scripts or use the Ultimate Special Offers app to provide discount codes and coupons, the only problem with these options is that as your eCommerce store grows, you will need to customize the scripts accordingly, which can get messy as you scale.
Magento, however, is much more reliable and extensible, thanks to its in-built, comprehensive promotions engine.
Why Magento is Best for eCommerce Store Development?
So far, we’ve compared all the important aspects one needs to consider for choosing an eCommerce platform and it seems that Magento is much more reliable than Shopify.
However, if you’re still having seconds thoughts on Magento, below we’ve mentioned 6 advantages of Magento Vs Shopify, which will definitely help you make the right decision.
1 - Magento is FREE!
As we mentioned in the beginning, Magento is open-source, meaning it is available in the public domain for free-to-use. And besides being open-source and having rich features, Magento also provides its users with incomparable flexibility to manage everything, from features and functionality to content and design.
All you need to do build and launch your Magento-based online store is your own hosting.
2 - Magento Gives Complete Freedom
There are absolutely no limitations whatsoever to how you design and customize your online store in Magento.
You can personalize every single element in your online store and make it unique to stand out from the crowd, which is extremely important to ensure customers remember you and come back time and time again.
3 - Huge Community
Compared to all other eCommerce platforms, Magento has the largest community of support.
This means if you ever run into any kind of trouble, the Magento forum will have a solution for it to help you get back online as quickly as possible.
All you need to do is, go to Magento Forum, search for your problem from its massive database of user-generated content, and apply the appropriate solution.
4 - Themes
Both Magento and Shopify offer a large collection of themes to help you customize your store to suit your taste and products.
But, the number of free themes offered by Shopify is quite low compared to the free themes offered by Magento.
In addition, the Shopify premium themes start at $80, while Magento premium themes start at as low as $1, which means Magento is at a great advantage.
5 - Add-ons
Shopify has 100+ third-party apps and add-ons, which can greatly help in expanding and enhancing your store’s functionalities in many different ways.
But that number is nothing compared to Magento’s 5000+ apps and add-ons availability.
Thanks to its huge community, there is a mix of both free and paid add-ons available on the Magento marketplace, while most of the Shopify add-ons are paid.
6 - Multi-lingual Support
Lastly, Shopify does not provide support for building multi-lingual online stores directly. Although, there are third-party premium apps available to help users add multi-lingual capabilities.
Magento, on the other hand, comes with in-built multi-lingual support, making it again a preferred choice for building online stores with multi-lingual capabilities.
Wrapping Up...
While which eCommerce platform is right for you still depend on your budget and goals, but in light of all these advantages and the points discussed above, Magento definitely comes out as a winner for building an eCommerce store with its unrivaled flexibility and powerful capabilities.
Magento is packed with all the required features and unlimited possibilities to power any kind of online store, making it a great pick for launching an eCommerce business. Want to Migrate to Magento 2? Get a free quote now!