The pandemic fuelled eCommerce industry has seen new heights & opened up doors to many budding & scaling businesses. Businesses across industries are investing heavily in technology to ensure smooth operation of business at the same time to increase sales & revenue.
The same is true in the eCommerce industry as well. There are many options to choose from & having multiple options adds to the complexity of decision making. So, here is a quick comparison between Magento vs Shopify vs WooCommerce to help you take a suitable & better decision for your business

Magento Introduction

Magento, founded in 2008 has been acquired by Adobe in 2018.

Magento offers both open source and enterprise editions. The enterprise version has both cloud and an on-prem enterprise solution. Magento enterprise is suitable for medium & large businesses that has very large catalogue & require high-functioning online stores.

The open-source version is suitable for small businesses with small catalogue. Magento is a beast when it comes to performance, SEO, and scalability.

Magento currently has 10% share in top 1 million eCommerce website in the world.

Magento Added Features

• Inventory Management
• While scaling your business, inventory management is one of the biggest challenges. Magento’s advanced inventory management system allows importing and exporting of products in batches & also syncing the warehouse stock with the e-shop.
• Support
• Magento supports multiple currencies & languages. So, anyone can setup their store targeting any part of the world without any hassle.
• Hosting Choice
• Magento offers multiple hosting services (dedicated, shared etc.) & gives you the freedom to choose a suitable hosting service and maintain your store on your terms.
• Magento also offers its own hosting solution, Managed Magento Hosting, which ensures a secure, smooth & quick integration.
• Multiple Websites
• You have an option to manage multiple webstores from a single Magento backend (Admin Panel).
• Each website maintained can have its own design, customizations & cart systems etc.
• Platform Performance (Speed)
• Speed is one of the advantages of Magento Commerce platform. The recently released Magento 2.3.6 offers significant upgrades with performance improvements & security upgrades.
• Analytics
• Magento offers advanced store/sales analytics with its AI powered analytics tool Adobe Sensei.

Shopify Introduction

Shopify is a notable SaaS platform founded in 2006. It holds a 21% market share. This platform is suitable for small businesses & individuals who can setup their eCommerce site quickly with its basic subscription.

Unlike Magento, a potential downside of Shopify is that it has limited flexibility to change/modify the source code of the website. This proves as a disadvantage for large companies or companies that are planning to scale in future.

Shopify Added Features

• Design
• Shopify offers a variety of good-looking & professional looking themes that are categorized as both free & paid.
• Customer Profiles
• Shopify generates a complete user profile and suggests tailored offers to re-target the user which is useful in increasing conversion rate and customer retention rate.
• Calculate Real Time Shipping
• Shopify delivers the shipping costs in real time if you cater to customer across different geographies

WooCommerce Introduction

Launched in 2011, WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin, in a sense, it is not really a platform on its own, but just an add-on.

WooCommerce is suitable for small businesses with limited eCommerce requirements and higher content management needs.

Most of the features an eCommerce site would require will be provided by plugins. These plugins can be paid as well as free.

The paid plugins contain comparably advanced features. So, as your feature requirements changes/grows, so does the cost of implementation.

WooCommerce Added Features

• Themes & Plugin Collection
• WooCommerce is well known for its theme collection. It offers thousands of themes for the users to select from.
• WooCommerce has a collection of plugins which offer different features.
• Customization
• Availability of various plugins makes WooCommerce more customizable. But the downside of installing 3rd party plugin is that they may bring security issues or degrade the performance of the site.
• Integrated Blogging
• Blogging is one of the most important touch point/engagement point for any e-shop. WooCommerce carries the blogging features of WordPress since it acts as a plugin to it.

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Still not sure of which platform to choose for your business? Schedule a call with us to get a better understanding on how you can kickstart your eCommerce business or scale up to the next level!