Shopify vs. Magento (2023): Which is right for you?

Learn the advantages and disadvantages of 2 prominent e-commerce software: Shopify and Magento.

According to statistics from Statista, worldwide e-commerce sales are more than $3.5 billion in 2019 and increase rapidly in the following years. By 2023, sales are expected to reach $6.5 billion, which is nearly doubling in just 4 years. That's a considerable number.

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If big companies like J. Crew, Nordstrom, and Amazon built their e-commerce stores very early, today most small and medium businesses have followed suit. Most of them have been using e-commerce software - the platform that allows you to build an online store easily, quickly, and beautifully.

These softwares allow people with no technical and design skills to compete with the eCommerce giants on a fair basis.

When eCommerce platforms started appearing around 2006, they completely changed the market. In this article, we will learn about two prominent e-commerce software on the market: Shopify and Magento.

1. Shopify

Shopify started in 2004 when three enthusiasts decided to open a ski shop. Since there was no ready-made solution, they decided to create their own platform for e-commerce.

In 2006, Shopify was recognized as one of the most successful startups of the year. In 2015, Amazon closed its Online Store and recommended businesses use Shopify.

Today, the platform is used by more than 500,000 businesses. Prominent among them are Tesla Motors, Wikipedia, Mozilla, and Google.

From a technical perspective, Shopify is a WordPress-like CMS, beautifully designed for creating an online store. It is really user-friendly and requires no programming knowledge. Shopify allows you to get a fully functional e-commerce store in about 15 minutes.

Customizing your Shopify store is easy. You can create any look for your online store that you can imagine.

As for the cost, Shopify will split it up into several plans and start at $29 per month for the Basic plan. It includes unlimited merchandise creation, unlimited file storage, discount codes, two employee accounts, 24/7 support, and more. (See comprehensive Shopify plans comparison table here.)

Like any e-commerce platform, you can manage your inventory, gift cards, abandoned cart reminders, and almost any other part of your e-commerce store. using Shopify.

Shopify integrates with Google Analytics and its own App Store with hundreds of extensions – including integrations with popular email platforms like Mailchimp. Apps like Spocket are leading the way with 10 out of 1000 US and European Union products that you can add to your store with 1 click, making it easier to start selling online than ever.

Furthermore, there is a customized solution for small businesses. Even if you don't intend to open an online hypermarket, you can still find the right option for you. With Shopify Starter, you can connect with your customers through Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, or any other popular online channel. Customers can even use Facebook Messenger chat to purchase the items they want.

Advantage

• Integration with social networking sites, and WordPress blogs.

• Easy setup including the purchase of a custom domain name

• Own an app store with hundreds of apps

• 24/7 support

• Shopify supports good SEO

Defect

• Transaction fee per sale (standard with all e-commerce platforms)

• URL structure is not ideal for SEO

2. Magento

Magento CMS was released in March 2008 and acquired by eBay in 2011. Currently, more than 250,000 websites around the world operate on this platform.

Olympus, 20th Century Fox, Time Out, and many other famous companies are now using Magento as the foundation for their online stores.

The first thing you should know about Magento is that it has two segments. The first is Open Source Magento, free CMS software for self-hosted online stores. To use it, you should have your own domain name and web hosting.

The second one is Magento Commerce (Magento Commerce Cloud or Adobe Commerce Cloud) which includes Magento's Open Source Hosting and Platform as a Service (PaaS). You can test the paid option for 30 days and then make your decision.

Magento's strength lies in its many built-in functions. You can easily change the currency and language, apply discounts on selected items or for loyalty, add coupons, generate detailed reports, and more. Buyers can leave reviews and add ratings to items.

This is a very valuable feature because the majority of online shoppers trust online reviews and read reviews before making their purchase decision.

SEO optimization tools are also available on Magento. For example, webmasters can optimize each product's page. To make the store correctly indexed by search bots, one can easily create an XML map of the website containing links to all the pages of the online store.

In addition, Magento CMS has many different extensions and designs. You can even deep-edit the HTML or PHP code as needed to implement the special feature you need for your store.

With this platform, you can create several online stores and then manage them with one dashboard.

If several people manage an online store, different types of roles can be assigned to managers, programmers, accountants, copywriters, and more.

To be fair, Magento is a good solution for medium-sized companies with technical resources. Simply put, Magento has a bit more code and is less intuitive for e-commerce business beginners.

Advantage

• Lots of built-in features

• A large community of users and developers

• Scalability (suitable for selling 10 or 10000 items)

• Lots of pre-made extensions are available on Magento Connect

Defect

• Support is only available for Magento Commerce solution, which is very expensive

• Due to its large size, it should only be hosted on dedicated servers

Conclusion: Shopify vs Magento

Regardless of the size of your business, an e-commerce solution is right for you and helps you grow your sales.

Since switching to another platform can be painful and costly, it's essential to make the right decision right from the start.

Are you comfortable with managing your domain and hosting, or are you moving to a hosted platform? If you are not comfortable, Shopify is the best solution, as it is easy.

If your company is medium-sized and tech-savvy, then Magento is the best choice.

Hopefully, this article will provide useful information to help you save time, human resources and especially choose the right software for your business goals. Switching costs due to choosing the wrong e-commerce platform are very high, so careful research is essential.