Which eCommerce Platform to Choose - Magento or Shopify?
Updated: Sep 18, 2019
eCommerce merchants should know how important it is to choose the right digital commerce platform as it is affects the game of eCommerce business to a greater extent. The chosen eCommerce platform must be flexible, deliver a winning customer experience, align with company vision and drive growth.
The following are some of the key differences between Mangento and Shopify platforms that must be considered before making the crucial decision of choosing the platform:
Magento is a very flexible, open platform that has the capability to innovate and provide outstanding new experiences to the customers.Shopify is not very flexible and uses a standard set of templates. Most Shopify stores look the same due to the inability to innovate.
Magento Marketplace offers more than 3600 extensions from different technology solution providers. This enables the platform to addon functionality and integrations in a single click. Shopify also has limited extensions/integrations available, but some functionality such as Checkout cannot be altered at all.
Magento has a wide network of partners and developers who can offer more customization to the platform compared to Shopify.
Due to the flexible and customizable nature of Magento platform, unlimited functionality and features can be developed in the future and hence the platform is under full control of the eCommerce merchant. Shopify does not support additional features and hence are used by limited number of global companies.
Magento is engineered to support B2B or B2C or Both. Hence merchants can start with one and extend to the other without replatforming. Shopify has been engineered for B2C and not B2B.
Magento can be used to host multiple sites in multiple languages and also accept multiple payment methods. Each instance of Shopify can handle only one language and currency.
The developer community of Magento is widespread and so the merchant can use the services of these developers to develop innovative solutions. As Shopify uses proprietary coding language, the developer support is limited and difficult/expensive to obtain.
Merchants can deploy Magento sites in cloud infrastructure like Amazon AWS. Shopify is a SAAS eCommerce platform and the merchants have no control over the hosting infrastructure.
To summarize...Magento platform can be used by merchants with a long term vision of constantly improving customer experiences and increasing the scale of their business. Shopify would be the right platform for merchants who would like to get quickly started with limited resources.
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PREVAJ CONSULTANTS is an eCommerce and Enterprise level application software development company based out of Chennai, India. The company has extensive experience in custom software development and web-based applications in general and eCommerce portal development in particular. PREVAJ has been serving clients for more than 9 years and has more than 400+ happy customers spread across the globe.