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Are you trying to choose between Magento and Shopify for launching your online store? Not to worry; you’re not alone as selecting the right eCommerce platform is one of the most frequently asked questions among digital sellers out there.
As two of the most popular eCommerce platform brands on today’s market, Magento and Shopify both offer highly-rated feature sets customization options.
Our goal here is to help you decide which product would be better suited to your business’ needs.
Shopify & Magento: The Basics
Magneto is open-source and free to download. This unique tool offers both free platform options and all-inclusive premium features.
Magento eCommerce stores are typically cloud-hosted and the paid plans come with everything you need to design and manage your digital storefront.
Shopify is a standalone eCommerce store builder that allows sellers to create and run their online stores. Most merchants prefer using the platform because of its user-friendly approach. Web design experts and beginners alike can easily set up and expand their eCommerce store with Shopify.
We’ve identified some key differences and similarities between the two platforms:
Pricing
Shopify and Magento may have similar feature lists, however their pricing plans are very different.
Shopify offers a 14-day free trial to new users without a credit card required. Afterwards, you’ll have to activate any of Shopify’s month, annual or biennial paid basis.
Shopify Lite is the most basic Shopify paid plan and it costs 9USD each month. Bear in mind that the platform won’t allow you build an online store — however, you can sell via social media or an existing website.
Basic Shopify is the next available paid plan at 29USD monthly. Shopify and Advanced Shopify are the 2 subsequent plans with each costing a monthly fee of 79USD and 299USD respectively.
Shopify Plus is the final Shopify plan and it is mostly ideal for large online businesses and high-volume sellers. The Plus plan’s pricing is based on the business ‘specific needs and the merchant must contact Shopify directly to receive a quote.
In contrast however, you won’t find any Magento eCommerce pricing specifics on their website. Instead, merchants must contact the platform’s sales team for a price quote based on the business operations.
Also, Magento does not offer a free demo to new users until after they submit their business information to the support team.
Although Magento is free to download, the open-source platform requires users to pay additional security and web hosting costs along with any development fees needed to support your digital store’s launch. Magento sellers must also pay a percentage for processing online payments depending on your preferred gateway.
Ease of Use
for store customization. You can get things done quickly by simply you to create and maintain your eCommerce store. A complex and untidy storefront on the other hand, could tarnish your online brand’s image.
It’s a fact that Magento is not as easy to use as Shopify.
Shopify’s drag-and-drop website editor can serve as your one-stop-shop for store customization. You can get things done quickly by simply moving your store’s webpage elements around to position them anywhere you want.
Magento is best suited to web developers while users of all technical abilities can use Shopify.
Designs and Templates
Your online store’s theme gives visitors to your website their first impression and most potential customers regard design as a crucial factor when determining a business’s credibility. This makes carefully choosing the right template more essential.
Shopify offers 64 premium and 10 free themes you can choose from to inspire trust. All the themes here are mobile responsive and easily customizable. After selecting your preferred Shopify theme, the platform lets you change the color palette, add new pages, integrate
social media feeds, resize and move page elements, and more.
With Shopify, you can easily tailor your store template design to reflect your brand - all without prior coding experience or knowledge.
Magento also offers ready-made template designs that don’t’ require any coding skills; however, the custom themes demand for professional level web developer skills.
Furthermore, the ready-made Magento themes cost more than on Shopify and are best suited to larger online businesses with bigger budgets.
Customer Support
You’ll stand a better chance at making sales and gaining new customers once you can fix issues with your online store easily. That’s why your chosen platform’s Help & Support options must tick the right boxes.
After subjecting Shopify and Magento’s customer support options to rigorous testing, we were impressed by both platforms’ offerings.
Shopify provides you with 24/7 phone & live chat support, email, community forum, social media, and Help center support. The advanced specialist support and video tutorials can also come in handy whenever you need quick answers.
simplifies the online store building and management processes.-builder and as such, it doesn’t have dedicated support features. However, you will find multiple users guides with step-by-step information that simplifies the online store building and management processes.
Editor
Picking an eCommerce platform with a complicated editor will make it almost impossible for you to create your desired digital store and this could eventually damage your online brand.
Shopify’s drag-and-drop editor is more flexible and user-friendly than Magento.
The Shopify drop website builder lets you customize your storefront easily by moving web page elements around and positioning them exactly how you want.
In contrast, using Magento’s editor requires a steep learning curve as it involves interpreting code and other terminologies for use in building your digital shop or you could just hire a web developer to build one for you.
Overall, Shopify is ideal for users without much technical skills and knowledge, while Magento is great for web developers.
Ecommerce
Your online business will require access to powerful marketing tools that will help you reach target audiences and improve your bottom line.
Shopify and Magento come with their respective app stores which contain the most essential digital marketing tools. However, Shopify enables in-built features for social media advertising.
With Shopify, you get to use other brilliant marketing tools that come integrated with the platform. Apart from the ability to advertise and sell directly on Pinterest, Instagram, and Facebook, you can also run email campaigns via third party platforms.
In addition, Shopify’s multilingual support makes it easier for users to market and sell products in different languages.
While Shopify offers plenty of in-built marketing tools to help scale your digital store, the bulk of Magento’s marketing tools are obtained from its online Marketplace. This means users looking to run email campaigns must first install extensions.
Furthermore, you’ll likely require web developer skills if you wish to integrate custom eCommerce tools for your Magento store.
Apps and Widgets
Online sellers can take advantage of the ability to add extra functionality to their digital store, especially if their chosen eCommerce platform’s inbuilt features are inadequate for their desires.
Magento and Shopify allow you to install apps, add-ons, and extensions quite effortlessly. But which offers the better option?
You can choose from over 1,200 free and premium apps available on the Shopify App Store with each one developed to enhance business in different ways from shipping to social media advertising, email marketing, and more.
Magento users can select from more than 5,000 extensions found on the Marketplace with close to 2,000 of them available for free. You’ll find paid extensions you can use to integrate your digital store with Facebook. However, you might need help with installing some of Magento’s extensions.
While the Magento Marketplace has more extensions to offer, the apps you’ll find on Shopify’s App Market are more polished and easier to use.
SEO
Your eCommerce platform SEO features are there to help you use search engine techniques to boost your website’s visitor traffic, which ultimately translates into gaining more customers and making more sales.
The Shopify App store comes with dependable SEO apps you can use to edit web page titles and alter image tags. However, you’ll need to browse the entire collection for most of your SEO techniques.
Magento also excels in SEO tricks as the platform is integrated with plenty of online marketing guides for helping you get started.
Furthermore, Magento’s in-built SEO features allow sellers to customize web page URLs to improve their ranking on online search results. It also lets you edit image alt tags quite easily.
Blogging
Blogging can serve as an excellent audience-building approach. Your Shopify store comes with an in-built blogging engine you can use to improve visitor traffic and boost business sales.
Creating relevant blog posts can keep your audience engaged while helping you build a brand or product community.
You can build your Shopify blog by picking an appropriate name. Afterward, you can go ahead and develop a content-generating strategy.
The Magento Blog is a great free marketing tool that helps sellers improve SEO and generate more traffic. It also helps you create an online community that people would want to visit frequently.
Conclusion
Now that you’ve finished reading our post about the key differences and similarities between Shopify and Magento, you should have a better idea of which platform is better for you.
With Shopify, you have a user-friendly tool anyone can use to sell online faster, complete with a support team on standby.
In contrast, Magento sellers will require more time and technical knowledge to create their ideal online store.