Shopify VS Magento Which One Is The Best Platform For You

1. Shopify vs Magento: Which One Is The Best Platform For You? Shopify vs Magento: Know All About Them And Their Basic Differences Shopify vs Magento: With the ever-increasing use of the web for commercial purposes, we see that the role of online presence is vital for any business. As eCommerce has evolved over the years, today, we observe that there are many eCommerce platforms available and there is tremendous competition among them. As the market is changing every day, these eCommerce platforms are designed to satisfy the needs of changing markets and various needs of niche businesses. In order to stay in the competition, you need to look for the best platforms for creating your eCommerce website or store. At the same time, the platforms you pick must allow you to adjust your online store or website according to your business needs. As there is no time to waste, your platform should have quick and easy customization options. Shopify and Magento are among the two most popular eCommerce platforms available in the market. Do you even know that according to Alexa’s studies, among the best eCommerce platforms available, Shopify and Magento are the top ones. There are approximately 27K Magento stores. Shopify and Magento compete with each other when it comes to eCommerce platforms as they both give outstanding online shopping stores and websites. So, before you WWW.PIKRANA.COM 1

2. pick any of these platforms for your website, it is necessary to know the main difference and key advantages of both these platforms. When we are comparing Shopify vs Magento, it is important to know about their individual benefits. The Key Advantages And Benefits Of Shopify Include: 1. User Friendly And Easy To Get Started If you want to start a Shopify store, you don’t need to do much of the hard work as starting with it is very simple. Within a few hours, a completely well-designed Shopify store can be designed just after you have created an account. You may start from scratch or use the specified Shopify themes to create your Shopify store as this will cut short a few steps and make the process much faster. Shopify is a great choice for businesses looking to expand their offerings and reach online with a simple and easy solution. The biggest benefit of Shopify is that you do get everything pre-requisite for selling your products online successfully. With a simple solution, it means you don’t have to worry about the hosting of a website which is sometimes quite a headache. In order to create a Shopify store, you don’t need to possess coding skills. You only need the following things to create a Shopify Store: – Subscription and an account – A custom domain preferably ( well, technically it is not needed) – Products 2. A Secure Online Store Security and reliability are some of the core benefits of Shopify. As online stores have a lot of customer data, users expect them to be safer and keep their data secure. The financial data needs to be kept safe. A Shopify store is safe for online shoppers as well as for you as an owner of the store. As Shopify promises to give 99.8% uptime, it gives good reliability for your online store. This simply means that your potential WWW.PIKRANA.COM 2

3. clients and customers would be able to reach you at any given time from any corner of the world. There are SSL certificates that every store is accompanied by providing more security and trust in your Shopify store. there are no business boundaries as many small merchants to large corporations are running their business through Shopify. 3. Responsiveness To Mobile Devices It is estimated that approximately 72.9% of the traffic on eCommerce sites will be through mobile phones. We can say that the digital era has shifted from eCommerce to mobile phones. Day by day. We see an increase in mobile searches. So it is crucial to give a great mobile-first and friendly experience to your customers for a successful online store. Every Shopify theme designed is made mobile-friendly and optimized to make your Shopify store function well. This is such a huge advantage as you don’t have to worry about the responsive part while you create your page. To make your Shopify store manageable from the mobile phones, there are mobile apps that allow managing on the go. 4. Useful Shopify Apps Though Shopify is full of features, everything you design comes with some or other limitations so did this. However, these are not a huge matter of concern and can be easily eliminated by making use of some Shopify Apps from the Shopify App store itself. No matter how diverse your business needs are, you are going to find an app for adding any of the functionalities. You are given the flexibility to try out the various features and decide which ones are needed for running the store. You will see that the app has functionalities ranging from marketing, analytics, SEO, customer support, upsells. Conversion optimization, etc. there are both, free as well as paid apps available. A monthly subscription is a way to pay for paid apps. 5. Shopify Community And Customer Support If you have somebody on your side to back you, you always feel more confident. Similar is the case when you start with a Shopify store. For starting a store, it is always overwhelming to get customer support. You will get the support through email, chat, or call. The support team WWW.PIKRANA.COM 3

4. ensures that your Shopify store is never offline and is always ready to help you with your queries and questions. You can also receive support from the community of Shopify store owners as this vast community can give you helpful feedback and support. The resources available with Shopify can be useful in learning and imbibing new business aspects that will help your online store. There are interesting and useful blogs regarding how to increase sales, marketing, and other important business aspects that you need to focus on. 6. Easy Payment Gateway Integrations You can easily integrate secure and reliable payment providers into Shopify. The integration process of payment providers and their gateways into your Shopify store is fairly simple. Currently, there are 100+ payment providers from around the globe that are working with Shopify. The gateway of Shopify is called Shopify Payments which is sad, not available Worldwide. So for including payment options, many stores have to rely upon the other gateways in order to accept payments. 7. Scalability Shopify offers a scalable eCommerce solution. With scalability, it means that it doesn’t matter if you start selling from a handful of products to a few customers or starting with a huge product line selling them to millions across the world; it will work for everyone. Let us consider an example. When scaling up the marketing campaigns, the last thing you want to think about is whether your store will be able to handle the increased demand in the near future. However, with Shopify, you are always at ease. For Shopify store owners, inventory management or scaling customer traffic will never be an issue. Marketing Related Features There are functionalities such as email marketing, SMS marketing, coupons, gift cards, etc. You can use many marketing tools and other functionalities also to promote your business. SEO WWW.PIKRANA.COM 4

5. SEO that is Search Engine Optimization plays a vital role in drawing the traffic to your store. It is a major driver of sales traffic and you do need to have a strategy for optimization since it is crucial for every Shopify online store. In order to fetch traffic, you need to be successful at SEO and for that, it needs you to invest more time. You have to follow the procedures for creating an online Shopify store that your audience can easily locate and find with important keywords. For any online store, Shopify SEO is suitable. Yet it has a few quirks that are not desired or not ideal in order to follow a strong SEO strategy. But overall when you compare Shopify vs Magento; Shopify SEO is a benefit since it is simple and easy to use and most importantly, you will be able to implement the basic SEO strategies with it. Overall, one can say that Shopify offers everything that you need for running an online store. It’s great to begin an online store for first-time online store owners and includes more features for those who are looking to add more of them. If you are running a business that has a huge potential to grow online, you should consider using Shopify. When your business grows, you can effortlessly scale up your Shopify store to match the ever-growing demands of your business. The above pointers give Shopify an upper hand in Shopify vs Magento. The Key Advantages And Benefits Of Magento Are: 1. A Powerful Platform For Ecommerce Development Magento will act as a powerful eCommerce development platform for satisfying all your business needs as it supports both, the new sellers that have fewer products as well as those who have a huge number of products in their eCommerce store. Magento is such an eCommerce development platform that can manage and store thousands of products effortlessly and without any kind of hassle. But if you have already opted for Magento from the very beginning of your e-commerce store development, you hardly have to worry about the scalability and performance of your store as it grows because you will be able to switch it easily and at any time. WWW.PIKRANA.COM 5

6. There are other additional things that Magento offers such as certain features regarding inventory and product management. This is going to be really helpful for your eCommerce store to manage as well as organize its products easily. On top of all this, you will be able to set up the filters and navigation on the Magento development platform. It greatly enhances the overall performance of your eCommerce store by bloating the conversion rates. 2. Advanced And Friendly With SEO: When you make use of the Magento development platform, the entire process of optimizing your eCommerce website or store’s product pages and descriptions turns out to be very simple and incredibly easy. The reason behind this is this platform is basically built keeping the SEO needs in mind. That is why it helps your products to get much better opportunities to appear on various search engines. When we talk about Shopify vs Magento, then websites that are created using the Magento platform are very much responsive. That is why the websites that you have created using this platform will work comfortably on all devices and show compatibility across all the web browsers. In addition to the improved SEO, the eCommerce store that you create will also give a much better user as well as customer experience. 3. Fast Loading Speed Incredibly faster loading pages are among the biggest and important advantages of using the Magento platform for eCommerce development. Every second matters on the online platform especially when it comes to websites or eCommerce stores because that one second decides whether your visitor is going to stay on your page or not. As this is a fast-paced world, people hardly have the time and patience to wait for anything including your web page to load. So if you have a website that loads slower, no one is going to wait and they will simply go to some other website that could possibly be one of your competitor’s websites. This is evident from the recently performed study which says that 50% of the users have abandoned websites that took more than a second or two to load. This simply means that users expect your online store or website to load within a second. Keeping the importance of faster WWW.PIKRANA.COM 6

7. loading websites in mind, the Magento platform has been developed in a way to deliver quick and faster-loading pages that load within a second and boost your sales thus improving the conversion rates also. Speed attribute is common when you compare Shopify vs Magento. 4. Flexibility For Managing Content A flexible content system is yet another important advantage of this Magento development platform. A flexible content management system (CMS) is imperative for any eCommerce website as you will be easily able to update and bring in fresh quality content every now and then for attracting the audience. So going for Magento development is obviously better as eCommerce store owners will be able to customize and make the store more friendly for users. Magento is built using an intuitive and user-friendly page editor What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG). It is used for those who want to manipulate and modify the basic functioning of the shopping cart. This also acts as an editing tool that you can use without even having any coding skills in order to edit the eCommerce web pages. 5. Can Be Customized Very Easily Having an editable design is always good as people can easily manipulate the existing design and transform it into something they always wanted. Developing your website or online store on Magento also gives you customization freedom. Right from the overall look to the different product categories as well as content; everything can be customized if you are using Magento. However, any store that needs a very high customization process requires all the things to be coded from ground zero and this can be achieved by approaching a skilled Magento developer. You are also offered the choice for pickup from a variety of payment, language, and shipment that is suitable to the customers in a more user-friendly way. Therefore, using Magento makes it possible for you to include almost every functionality on your eCommerce store or website. Apart from that, a lot of plugins are available using which you can further add to the existing functionality of the eCommerce store. 6. High-end Advanced Reporting: WWW.PIKRANA.COM 7

8. In eCommerce, knowing consumer behavior is very important. This can be analyzed by collecting the stats and data in order to get deeper insights. With the Magento development platform, you do get to know how your store works and performs. There are plenty of high-end reporting features that provide you with nearly 20 reports through the medium of the web interface. The reporting feature gives reports on some major insights such the orders, products, customers, etc. For displaying the latest information, the report keeps on getting updated on a continuous basis. Some of them include the collection of shipping fees, the number of products ordered online insight about the best selling products, number of orders, taxes, and AOV, the number of registered accounts. So without much ado, start managing your eCommerce store in a smarter way by opting for Magento as you do get the latest insights, metrics, and other data as well. 7. Focussed On Online Sales: Yet another benefit of Magento is that it is built by keeping sales in mind. It means that if you are eyeing to get higher conversion rates then Magento is one of the best choices available out there. You might think how? Well, Magento already includes a segmentation option that allows targeting the clients and customers depending upon their buying as well as cart history. Along with that it also gives you relevant content. The Magento platform allows you to set up the product recommendations as well as upsells on different pages including the checkout and product pages. This will enable you to recommend the related product and items to your customers and eventually, this will lead to some help from your end to your sales team. Apart from that, you will also take the advantage of one-page checkout options that will make the customers abandon their cart less likely. The above pointers give Shopify an upper hand in Shopify vs Magento. Shopify vs Magento: Comparison Based On Various Categories While doing the comparison of Shopify vs Magento, we see that both the platforms offer a diverse range of features and functionalities that aid in improving the performance of the store as well as boosting its WWW.PIKRANA.COM 8

9. sales. However, there are many significant differences between these two platforms. So before we begin with the comparison, always keep your mind open and do keep your business requirements first before you opt for any of these platforms. Shopify vs Magento: Ease Of Use The first consideration that you should have while choosing any eCommerce platform is ease of use. As everyone wants to run their eCommerce store conveniently and with ease, a user-friendly interface is always needed. You would be happy to know the fact that both Shopify and Magento have a well-designed user-friendly interface. However, they are completely different in terms of the codes used. Magento makes use of PHP whereas Shopify uses Liquid. Magento is open-source which brings more advantages to Magento users. With open-source, it means that the source code is freely available and can be modified. On the contrary, Shopify is proprietary. This is the reason why Shopify is claimed to work well for simple stores and Magento for complex stores and big enterprises. Though there is a user-friendly interface available with Magento, it can be a stumbling block to beginners as well as for those who are using it for the very first time. Magento being flexible as compared to Shopify, still needs users to have some coding knowledge or at least learn some codes for making use of the functionalities. There is a wizard mode available with Shopify which is of great use for beginners as well as non-technical users. It allows the users to easily change and modify the basic attributes of your store and for that, you can make use of the easy-to-use customization tools and the drag and drop editor as well. So as far as user-friendliness is concerned, Shopify always has an upper hand over Magento. Shopify vs Magento: Support You won’t find any 24/7 phone support for Magento to help you solve your issues and grievances with immediate effect. However, you can use the Magento forum to connect with other Magento users to share your WWW.PIKRANA.COM 9

10. doubts and queries or search in the Magento help center in order to get the solution. As a Shopify user, whenever you run into any trouble, you get immediate help from the support team which is there for you 24/7. You get phone support or you may also connect with the support team through live chat or email. Shopify vs Magento: Pricing Comparison For accessing Shopify software, users have to pay a certain monthly fee. This is because Shopify is designed as a software-as-a-service that is hosted by a company. It also gives its potential customers a free trial of 15 days. This is very much helpful as you as a user will be able to investigate the platform well in advance before you actually start building your store. Here is a Shopify pricing list to give you a brief idea. The basic package is $29/month Premium one is $79/month The unlimited pack is $179/month Some transaction fee is charged by Shopify for payments gateways such as Braintree, Paypal, Authorize.net, etc. There is a fee percentage that ranges from 2.0% to 0.5%. The more costly monthly subscriptions you take, the lower will be the transaction fees. If your Shopify store sees many transactions, the entire fees can rack up to quite a lot of money. However, there is a way to avoid these fees as users can use Shopify’s direct payment gateway. Magento gives users a completely free Community Edition and it demands a cost. This cost is counted depending upon the demands as well as the needs of specific eCommerce stores and their size. This ideally makes Magento suitable for every kind of eCommerce online store. Those merchants who use Magento also need to pay for the hosting solution that costs around $1-$200 per month as it is self-hosted. Though users need to pay for hosting each month, e-commerce store owners will get more options of hosting solutions to select anyone from depending upon the need of their website. You need to pick the hosting WWW.PIKRANA.COM 10

11. wisely as it affects the storage, site speed, and the number of products that an online store is capable of handling. Shopify vs Magento: Features Compared Capability: Over 5000 add-on extensions support Magento. Whereas Shopify is having 100+ apps and add-ons including both free and the paid ones. From this, it is quite clear that Shopify lacks diversity. Magento can come with more front-end features for shoppers. It may be a gift card, coupon codes, wishlists, order status modules, and many other. Themes: There are plenty of themes available for both Magento and Shopify. Similar is the case with templates. each and every theme, as well as template comes with a highly responsive design. That is why the store that you design using these themes and templates will have the most eye-catching front-end look. Multi-lingual Capability: Magento offers users the convenience of supporting them with the inbuilt multiple languages. On the other hand, Shopify does not have that many multi-lingual capabilities. In order to create multi-lingual stores, store owners will have to adopt third-party plugins. SEO: both the platforms have optimized SEO capabilities that will help the stores effectively raising their SEO ranks in search engine results and get more organic traffic. Magento has both free and paid All-in-one SEO extensions. This allows the store admins to easily configure and manage their website’s SEO. Community: unlike Shopify, Magento has a strong community which is helpful for Magento users to discuss any relevant issues and share the solution to such common issues while configuring the store website. The Magento community that keeps on growing progressively includes partners, merchants, and developers. All will be helpful while dealing with any Magento-related issues. Shopify vs Magento: Security Security is an integral and very critical part of any website or online store. There are hundreds of websites that are hacked daily so it is vital WWW.PIKRANA.COM 11

12. to ensure your website’s security. In order to keep your website away from hackers and security lapses, you better need to make sure that only the best security plugins, as well as updates, are used on your site. PCI compliance is the set of requirements for companies or organizations that handle online payments. Ensuring PCI compliance can be very costly and time-consuming for online stores. You will be glad to know that Shopify comes with SSL encryption and is Level 1 PCI DSS compliant. This helps the site to get automatically protected. In addition to this, this platform offers great support for the eCommerce business in order to handle customer’s sensitive information with care during the course of their whole shopping experience with the store website. When we talk about Magento, it gives you the flexibility to improve the security of your website by yourself. Besides the fact that Magento has robust and tight security, you need to have a more hands-on approach in order to follow PCI compliance all by yourself. You will also receive frequent patches as well as updates that will keep you more secure. Apart from that, you will be able to add Magento security extensions for providing complete protection to your valued information. From the above discussion, we can say that Magento gives better security than Shopify. Shopify vs Magento: Comparison Of Add-ons Both Shopify, as well as Magento, offer an app store and extensions for adding multiple functionalities to the online eCommerce store. Speaking about Shopify, it has a comparatively small collection of apps that will assist and prove helpful in expanding and improving the different functionalities of your Shopify store in various manners. The apps store for Shopify is continuously developing with different apps being added. All these apps are quite simple to install and process. Magento, on the other hand, has more than 5000 extensions that are a huge advantage. These extensions integrate very smoothly with the backend of Magento. Magento is a large and open-source, community- driven platform and has a mix of both paid as well as free extensions. WWW.PIKRANA.COM 12

13. Using these extensions will help you to add more out-of-the-box features as well as functionalities to your store without messing with the coding part or writing time-consuming codes. So, after we know about the choices of add-ons available with both, Magento and Shopify we can say that Magento is a winner in this case. Shopify vs Magento: Speed & Performance Comparison The speed of your online store and its performance are the pivots that decide its success. They are the critical factors in making your online store a hit. This is because no customer has that much time and patience to wait for your slow loading page to load completely. None of the store users like the waiting game. They love when your page loads within a seconds, and they are immediately able to browse through the product and make the purchase quickly. Slow websites lead to an unsatisfactory user experience. This makes the users less likely to come back to your store for making any purchase in near future. the conversion rate of your website will eventually, be affected. You should take note that Shopify is a hosted solution. This means you hardly have to worry about the speed as well as the loading time taken by your online store. As it is a hosted solution, you are in no control of the hosting environment of your website. Plus, can’t do any adjustments to the server levels. So if your website is facing any issues or runs into any problem in the future, all you can do is to contact the support team of Shopify. On the contrary, Magento is well-known for the flexibility and control it offers. You have the freedom to select your own server and make all the necessary changes and adjustments in order to accelerate your website’s performance. You will be able to do it because Magento is a self-hosted platform. With such liberty, there is no doubt that you will have to pay a bit more for reliable hosting services from the providers of Magento Web Hosting. There is an advantage of all this as you can experience fast loading website, stable and smooth performance as well as enjoy customization freedom. Therefore, Magento is certainly better when you compare the speed and performance of Shopify vs Magento. WWW.PIKRANA.COM 13

14. Shopify vs Magento: The Popularity Magento and Shopify are very well-known technologies in the eCommerce business but it is hard to choose among them. The basic thing that a beginner looks at first, is the popularity of these two platforms. So let us see about the popularity of these platforms. No wonder that both Shopify and Magento are leading the market of eCommerce business. Though they are among the most used ones, the stats about both of them are very much different. Shopify occupies twice the market share but Magento is opted by giants such as Bulgari, Liverpool FC, Pepe Jeans, Ford, etc. These businesses are enterprise-level and collect a high volume of traffic. This means that their website must and should be highly secure, flexible, robust, and provide payment, design, and shipping options. If we dig a bit deeper and take a look at the industries that use Magento and Shopify, we are going to get a much clearer perspective regarding their differences. With these observations made, it is seen that Shopify is used for a lot of websites that are related to clothing range, jewelry, makeup, etc. because these are the areas that need aesthetics as well as functional delight. So we can say that Shopify is a more widespread eCommerce platform and is among the most used content management systems (CMS) available. This is quite easy to get from the ease of use that Shopify provides, a variety of Shopify themes as well as apps available. Shopify vs Magento has become an enigma nowadays. On the other hand, enterprise-level websites prefer to go for Magento. This is because of the fact that enterprise-level websites need more flexibility, support for multiple languages as well as need to have powerful hosting. Magento is comparatively less popular but the websites that are Magento platform-based collect high traffic volume. If you are a Shopify user, the themes listed below will be great for your work. We have listed some popular Shopify themes for you. Here are some themes for both platforms to give you a better idea of Shopify vs Magento. WWW.PIKRANA.COM 14

15. Emoll Emoll is a premium level and multipurpose Shopify theme curated for satisfying the different business needs of niche businesses. It serves as an incredibly powerful tool for your as well as your client’s Shopify store. All the necessary theme settings and other dynamics, as well as different sections, are included in the theme for generating a responsive design with a versatile layout giving an outstanding user experience. With multiple layouts styles at your disposal, you will be able to seamlessly create a unique store. You can use all these thongs to generate a seamless experience depending upon the seamless requirement of your business niche and industry. The codes included are at par and follow all the standards of Shopify. You will always get the benefits of new updates as well as the new features introduced by Shopify. The premium level theme Emoll gives you freedom for adding or editing content that will greatly improve the quality of life. You will be able to edit the media also within the different sections of this theme. It comes with a clean layout and fully responsive templates based on Bootstrap 4. The quick and reliable support from developers will prove to be helpful and make you concentrate more on your business other than worrying about things if something goes wrong. This well-crafted theme takes care of all the things including a stunning UX of the Shopify store. Themes like Emoll give a upper hand to Shopify when we compare Shopify vs Magento. – there are 08 unique homepage styles – Pixel perfect design – Powerful Admin panel – GDPR compliant – Comes with detailed documentation WWW.PIKRANA.COM 15

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