Shopify vs Magento: A Comprehensive Review 101

Building lasting relationships in Marketing and Business is a tough task. Maintaining Marketing Relationships or relationships with new prospects and potential customers can also be super difficult. If your customers are happy, they stay longer. But if your customers are unhappy, they won’t just leave you, they’ll go ahead and also tell the world about it. There is always a tough decision to choose the right shopping Cart solution from many such as Shopify vs Magento. So, you need to make sure that you’re investing in creating a great experience for your customers, so that they don’t just stay longer but ideally, spread a positive word about you.

Shopify and Magneto are Cloud-Based Software as a Service (SaaS) Shopping Cart solution that allows businesses to set up an Online Store with little to no hassle.

This article will show you how to choose the right e-commerce platform by comparing Magento vs Shopify on various parameters. Here is a brief outline of the blog:

• What is Shopify?
• What is Magento?
• Shopify vs Magento – Introduction
• Shopify vs Magento: Pricing
• Shopify vs Magento: Themes/Template
• Shopify vs Magento: Ease of use
• Shopify vs Magento: Apps and add-ons
• Shopify vs Magento: Marketing features
• Shopify vs Magento: Transaction fee
• Shopify vs Magento: Dropshipping
• Shopify vs Magento: Provisions For Coupons
• Shopify vs Magento: Security
• Shopify vs Magento: Currencies
• Shopify vs Magento: Scalability
• Shopify vs Magento: Help & Support
• Other functionalities
• Shopify vs Magento – Summary

What is Shopify? 

Shopify is an e-commerce development platform. You pay monthly and use Shopify services. Shopify is suitable for both medium & large businesses. 

What is Magento?

Magento is an open-source e-commerce platform that allows merchants with a flexible online shopping system, listing products, and customization functionalities of their online eCommerce store. Magento also includes robust marketing, catalog management, and discount tools. It comes in two editions:- 

• Magento Community Edition
• Magento Enterprise Edition

Magento empowers thousands of retailers and brands with the best eCommerce platform and flexible cloud solutions to rapidly innovate and grow. It offers marketing, search engine optimization, and catalog-management tools. 

Shopify vs Magento – Introduction

Choosing the correct platform to launch an online business has never been easy, especially for eCommerce newbies. The most often asked questions appear to focus around open-source platforms versus hosted carts. Thousands of e-merchants have to do Shopify vs Magento comparison since they are both best-in-class platforms. Despite a few flaws, both platforms get points for providing great features for a feature-rich online business.

Shopify vs Magento: Pricing

Pricing is a critical issue to consider when selecting a shopping cart. How much money are you planning to put into your store? Which platform, Magento or Shopify, is more cost-effective for you? Here’s a comparison and contrast of the price-setting processes of Magento and Shopify.

Magento Pricing

A monthly subscription is not required for Magento. Downloading, installing, and setting up your store on this platform is completely free. However, in order to publish your website, you will need to pay for a domain and hosting. The cost of this service varies depending on your choices.

Furthermore, if you want to expand the capabilities of your store, you might consider adding a few connectors to your website. These programs can be found on Magento App Market for up to $15,000 in price.

Shopify Pricing

Unlike Magento, Shopify’s price is based on a subscription. You can choose from five different pricing tiers, ranging from $9 to nearly $2000 each month. This plan, fortunately, includes both name and hosting expenses, so you won’t have to worry about buying these separately.

Shopify Vs Magento – Pricing: Verdict

Shopify has a more economical range of website layouts and themes. While the highest pricing for a theme on Magento can be as high as $499, Shopify’s top website template is only $180. On the other hand, this website builder requests a quite convoluted method for calculating transaction costs based on your membership plan.

Option Fee	Magento Pricing	Shopify Pricing
Monthly	×	Lite Plan: $9 Shopify Basic: $ 29Shopify: $ 79Advanced Shopify: $ 299Shopify Plus: starts from $2000(*)
Themes	Free – $499	Free – $180
Hosting	The price depends greatly on the Magento hosting provider you choose	Hosting costs are included in every monthly plan without extra expenses, except Shopify Lite.
App	Free-$15,000	Start from $15/month
Domain	$10-15/year	Free or you can purchase domains through Shopify at $14/year
Transaction	(Stripe)  2.9%+30¢ ( ***)	Shopify Lite: 2.4% Basic Shopify: 2%Shopify: 1%Advanced Shopify: 0.5%Shopify Plus: 0.15%Shopify Payment: Free of transaction charge

Shopify vs Magento: Themes/Template

After budget and ease-of-use issues, one of the main concerns for many businesses is the appearance of their platform. The first impression that customers have of you is really essential. Following me to learn about the Magento vs Shopify themes will allow you to reflect your wonderful brand and originality.

Shopify Themes

Shopify offers a large choice of themes, including nine free and 64 premium options. Even in terms of price, these may be a tad pricey for some people, given that Shopify entrepreneurs must pay between $100 and $180 to get a theme for their stunning stores.

Magento Themes

Magento themes have 11 fully mobile responsive themes available, with premium options costing up to $499. You can even start from scratch using Magento and develop your own theme (but this requires you to have deep coding knowledge, or a budget big enough to hire help).

Shopify vs Magento: Ease of use

When it comes to usability, Shopify has an obvious advantage over Magento. This eCommerce solution is simple to use due to the nature of a hosted platform. It’s designed for everyone, from techies to those with only a rudimentary understanding of the subject. Users of Shopify will have no issue setting up their shops.

Magento, on the other hand, is not as user-friendly as Shopify, particularly for non-tech consumers. Although this platform gives customers complete control over their website, installing and setting up their online business takes a thorough understanding of technology.

Shopify vs Magento: Apps and add-ons

Themes just affect the appearance of your website; however, if you want to add more functionality, you can use extensions. App stores and extensions are available on all systems. Most of these programs are only a click away, allowing you to expand your e-commerce site’s functionality. Follow along as I compare and contrast the features of Magento with Shopify.

Magento Extensions

Through the Magento marketplace, Magento offers almost 4000 extensions. Installing and implementing these extensions does not necessitate extensive coding experience (read more about the top 7 Magento Extension in 2021).

There are a few highlight extensions that are really useful. Mageplaza, for example, allows you to promote products by offering specific discount choices or by using plugins. When a new product is released, Product Pre-Order can instantly send an email to your potential consumers.

Shopify Apps

The Shopify App Store has over 4200 free and paid apps to help you expand your store’s functionality, govern it, and increase sales. We expose you to several popular Apps such as Booster Apps’ Trust Hero, which allows you to display trust icons to your visitors and potential buyers to reduce cart abandonment (read more Must-have Shopify Apps). Shopify also allows you to integrate marketing email campaigns, such as those from MailChimp, to reach out to your target audience.

Shopify vs Magento: Marketing features

SEO

SEO is important as it helps in increasing organic traffic to your website. Organic traffic means that people can find your website on Search Engine & hence more conversions & more profits. 

When it comes to SEO, Magento provides better options & flexibility as compared to Shopify. You can edit image alt tags (which help Google understand how to categorize an image on the image search platform), and customize URLs to help search engine users find your web pages more easily. All of these are built-in features, too. 

Shopify on the other hand manages SEO through its apps. Many such apps that can help you with SEO stuff can be used for this purpose. Some of these apps include SEO Booster, Smart SEO, SEO Image AI, etc. More can be found on the following link.  

Other marketing features

Both Magento and Shopify offer a robust collection of marketing tools to help you advertise your online store. Magento allows users to build versatile coupons for a variety of uses, as well as create landing pages for various categories and manage newsletters.

In the meanwhile, Shopify has an email feature built-in that you can use to market your products and send updates. This program also has a myriad of beautiful email templates that can be customized while yet maintaining professionalism.

Shopify vs Magento: Transaction fee

Shopify transaction fee

Payment Processing enables your e-commerce stores to accept payments. Shopify usually uses its own payment processing system & imposes zero transaction fees. More can be found at the following link. Also, Shopify offers payment gateways integrations for all the major payment options available globally. 

Magento transaction fee

Magento also offers very good transaction options to its users & provides a bit more flexibility of payment gateways integration as compared to Shopify. It also doesn’t charge any transaction fee. Magento also allows one to sell directly through Amazon while using Magento-based inventory. So it’s quite a valuable feature if you want to target an audience on Amazon through Amazon FBA. 

Shopify vs Magento: Dropshipping

Both the platforms offer flexible shipping facilities and allow integration with other dropshipping tools. Dropshipping plays an important role in overall profitability.

Magento

Magento allows integration with Dropship extension that allows e-merchants to start selling products from AliExpress with a charge of $249.

Shopify

Oberlo is a shipping platform that helps users to find shippable products directly from suppliers. Shopify allows users to integrate with many other tools that help Shopify users accurately calculate drop shipping charges.

Shopify vs Magento: Provisions For Coupons

This feature allows users to create customized Coupons rules to encourage more sales and increase revenue.

Magento

It allows all the Magento users to create discount coupons or free coupons for all the customers or specific groups of customers based on the type of products they bought or the cost of all products they added to the cart.

Shopify

Shopify allows all users except Lite to create their own coupons rules for customers. Users can increase sales by clubbing 2 items in one and selling at a higher price or providing the fixed value of discount on a specif product.

Shopify vs Magento: Security

Security is an important aspect for any online shopping platform as it stores user’s data, customer’s data, and many important records that need to be private.

Magento

Magento provides users a flexible option to improve the data security of the store by themselves. To get additional security, one can install the Magento extension in the payment and security section to keep the business data safe.

Shopify

Shopify offers certain security features listed below:

• Fraud analysis
•  SSL Certificates are available for every Shopify sites
• PCI Compliant
• GDPR Compliant

Shopify vs Magento: Currencies

Managing online shopping stores worldwide also adds the number of currency a platform supports for online payments.

Magento

It supports currencies from 200 countries around the world to make payments easily.

Shopify

Shopify owners can sell products in 133 currencies supported.

Shopify vs Magento: Scalability

Scalability becomes an issue when it comes to expanding your online shopping stores. A scalable platform avoids any haphazard situations and keeps the store running all the time.

Magento 

Magento offers flexible scalability options to its users and ensures to handle any amount of traffic without fail with its fault-tolerant design.

Shopify

Shopify is suitable for beginners users to professionals who require big storage spaces and handle huge traffic. Users can upgrade to Shopify Plus to get Enterprise level features.

Shopify vs Magento: Help & Support

Shopify Support

Shopify surpasses its competitors by providing extremely dedicated help and support. A professional team is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week via phone, email, and live chat to address clients’ concerns in a matter of minutes. Users may also access the Shopify community forums, support center, API documentation, and a variety of video tutorials.

Otherwise, you can hire qualified Shopify specialists to ensure that all issues are resolved and your business runs smoothly.

Magento Support

Magento does not provide live chat, phone, or email support as a self-hosted solution unless you sign up for the Magento Commerce Cloud plan for B2B.

Magento users, on the other hand, can make use of a fantastic user community. You may get helpful assistance from Magento experts all across the world here. Aside from that, there is an active help center that gives round-the-clock assistance.

Other functionalities

• Abandoned Cart Recovery: Sends an email to store consumers who departed without finishing the purchase process.
• Multiple Selling Options: Products can be purchased physically as well as digitally.
• Multi-Channel Selling: Sells on marketplaces like Amazon, Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram as a built-in feature.
• Convenient Shipping Options: works with USPS, DHL Express, UPS, and Canada Post to expand delivery options.

Shopify vs Magento – Summary

In this blog, you have seen how Shopify and Magento compare to each other. To decide which tool is more suitable for your needs, you need to study your needs, budget, time & technical expertise that are available at your disposal. In any case, if you are looking for an ETL tool to load data from a source to your destination without having to deal with code, then Hevo is the best!

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Hevo Data provides its users with a simple platform for integrating data for analysis. It is a no-code data pipeline that can help you combine data from multiple sources (free sources like Shopify, Shopify Webhook, etc., and various paid sources). It provides you with a consistent and reliable solution to managing data in real-time, ensuring that you always have analysis-ready data in your desired destination. 

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