Online (e-commerce) stores are becoming highly popular business models with both small and large firms owing to the hosts of advantages they offer at a surprisingly lower cost. It allows firms to expand their reach, connect more efficiently with their target audience, build customer loyalty and add significantly to their bottom-line.
In the following paragraphs we shall look at the top two of the most popular and best e-commerce and online store solutions available in the market—Magento and Shopify.
Magento is the most popular and common ecommerce platform powering close to 15 per cent of the top million sites in contrast to Shopify, which with 7 per cent share enjoys more or less half of what Magento commands. Magento comes with very detailed content, organized information and a professional look making it easy for organizations to build a successful e-store. This highly popular e-commerce platform powering big names like Olympus, Nike, Rosetta Stone, etc also generates more overall search interest.
Shopify offers free hosting, an extensive array of SEO friendly links and features along with a modern and user-friendly user area interface. Though boasting of some big names like Tesla, Shopify is primarily preferred by small and mid-sized businesses.
Magento vs. Shopify: How they fare on various parameters
User interface —both ecommerce platforms come with user-friendly and easy to use interactive user interface. Experts, however, opine that Shopify holds a slight advantage on user interface and also on ease of installation. In fact Shopify allows you to set up your online store in a jiffy where as you need some good technical competence and knowledge to set up a Magento store.
Flexibility-Magento is ahead here as it is an open source platform allowing you to make modifications on your own. Shopify on the other hand is a closed platform severely curtailing your freedom.
Capabilities—Magento with over 5,000 add-on extensions (free as well as paid) leads Shopify with a fair margin which only has over 100 apps and add-ons.
Inventory management— both Magento and Shopify allow you to list any number of products on your online store. You, however, should be careful if you are using Magento as too many products can slow down your server and your site’s loading speed. This though, is not the case with Shopify as it is a fully managed and hosted solution.
Coding— there is a huge difference between the two when it comes to coding. Magento is written in popular programing language PHP whereas Shopify uses the coding language called Liquid. Another major difference is that Shopify is proprietary software whereas Magento is an open source platform.
Open source nature of Magento ensures that the source code is freely available and can be easily modified making it ideal ecommerce platform for large and complex sites which may need to undertake code alteration to inculcate some complex functions.
Magento and Shopify both boasts of building smooth, efficient and profitable ecommerce platforms. Whatever be your choice, a quality ecommerce website development company can help you tremendously with your ecommerce website development. Accomplished firms have the expertise and the manpower to develop sophisticated and leading edge ecommerce websites to take your business to an altogether different level.