Welcome to Part 2 of our Shopify vs Magento comparison. In this part, we have looked at where they match each other and where they differ.
Shopify Vs Magento Part 1: Platform Comparison
Apps and Add-ons
Both Shopify and Magento give you access to extensions and third-party apps that you can use to add new functionalities to your web store. While Shopify provides a collection of apps and providers on its approved marketplace, Magento gives you access to its large developer community.
What’s different? With Shopify, you’ve got everything built-in so add-ons tend to be unnecessary, whereas Magento users will most likely need extensions to enable any new feature that they want for their store. Magento offers far more options of added apps in their community, some free and some paid. Shopify’s app store contains a range of around 100 extensions and though it is expanding, Magento has over 5000 in this area meaning you’ve got a pretty good chance of finding whatever you need to customize your store on Magento.
Basic online store functionality
Both platforms offer a robust engine for powering an online store and provide all the basics such as shopping carts, collections, checkout units and product pages.
What’s different? You will probably find Shopify easier to use than Magento especially during set-up, but Magento offers features that go much beyond the basic functionalities to enable an online store. For enabling similar features in Shopify you will have to integrate multiple third-party apps with your Shopify store.
Integration with Socials
Both Shopify and Magento allows you to connect your store with different social platforms like Facebook and Instagram.
What’s different? Shopify integrates well with most social media platforms and makes it easy for you to sell through your Facebook pages, YouTube channel and Instagram. You just need to include ads with “buy” buttons right onto those pages and start bringing in new customers and entice existing ones using your social media outreach.
In Magento, you can either install the Magento Social extension or other third-party apps from the Magento marketplace.
Inventory management
Both platforms allow for the creation and sale of as many products as you’d like, and the same is with collections – create as many collections as you like.
What’s different? Shopify gives you direct integration to dropshipping inventory apps while Magento doesn’t. Another perk of Shopify being a hosted platform is that the performance and site loading speed does not suffer when adding an abundance of products, whereas with Magento you may need to upgrade your hosting plan if the volume of products increases substantially. Simply put, with Shopify you don’t have to worry about site loading speed, storage & performance issues with the increase in the volume of traffic, while with Magento you will have to check and take action regularly.
Provision for coupons and discount codes
Both the eCommerce platforms provide the option for adding discounts and coupon codes.
What’s different? Magento offers coupons and discount creation with no strings attached. Shopify does not offer this feature on the Lite plan but if you are on a higher plan, you start provisioning coupons and discount codes for your online sales.
Payment gateway options
Both Magento and Shopify offer different payment gateway options including third-party additions.
What’s different? Shopify has far more options – in fact, there are over 70. Magento does allow you to utilize third-party add-ons to create more options for yourself though. Also, Shopify has a 0% transaction fee for using their own payment gateway so you can avoid paying the added transaction fee altogether.
Multilingual capabilities
You can create a multilingual storefront with both Magento and Shopify and allow users to easily switch between languages.
What’s different? Magento supports adding multilingual options to your store from the get-go while Shopify users can only achieve this by paying for additional apps or coding such features into your theme.
Final Round Up
Both Shopify & Magento are powerful platforms for eCommerce with rich features and functionalities, but your need for flexibility and control will have to be balanced by your (or your team’s) technical capabilities to leverage those. Also, the choice of platform will depend on the size of your business, budget for IT spend, and your future plans in terms of scale.
While Shopify stands out in ease of use as its a fully managed service, Magento is open-source and perfect for a merchant looking for more flexibility, customization and greater control for their webstore.
We hope this helps you make an informed and well-thought-out decision!
