What is Shopify?
Shopify is a commerce platform that allows you to create your own online shop and start selling your products. Shopify was established 10 years ago. Shopify’s purpose, as a commerce platform, is to maintain and help your business to become better and more successful. Thousands of entrepreneurs from 175 countries use Shopify to make their business grow.
You can sell the following products and services on Shopify:
– Physical products. Anything which is hand-made e.g. jewelry, bath bombs, t-shirts, gift boxes, beef jerky etc.
– Digital products. This could include e-books, email templates, audio downloads etc.
– Services and consultations. Customers can book online and sell online or in-person consultations.
– Memberships. You can sell subscriptions.
– Ticketed experiences. Selling the tickets.
– Classes and lessons. Customers can purchase, rent, and book lessons.
– Rentals. One can rent various things.
Shopify Benefits
Although Shopify is considered to be a useful and acceptable platform for managing one’s business, there are pros and cons that you should take into account choosing this particular commerce platform.
Simplicity of usage.
Even though Shopify provides assistance with managing the store’s technological needs and a clear interface, Shopify lacks functionality. Unlike Shopify, Magento 2 is a self-hosted platform, more flexible with theme customization and with managing larger stores.
Big choice of storefront themes. There are beautiful storefront themes that make your website look more professional. However, there are only ten free theme templates available. You will need to make one-time payment to get access to all the themes. Additionally, for extended customization, you have to understand Shopify’s Liquid code or hire an expert to manage it.
Shopify app store.
Shopify has apps to help you automate the tasks. Shopify apps will simplify your accounting flow an integral, and tedious, part of running a growing business. Shopify integrates the software of other tool providers. All sales and figures will automatically be transferred to the accounting software.
Support service.
Shopify provides their clients with support service available via email and live chat. Yet you can get help only with some general questions. If you face technical problems, you will have to ask for help at forums. Besides the phone calls are possible only in the US, UK, New Zealand, and Australia.
Marketing and discounts.
Shopify provides you with marketing tools. You can do the following: generate discount codes, sell your products on different social media, Improve SEO, create blogs, use accelerated mobile pages, get an automatically generated sitemap. Although AMP feature is usable only if you pay and install an app. Still exporting blog posts are time- and energy-consuming. Customers can use only one discount per order.
Pricing.
There are many complaints about subscription and transaction fees. There is no transaction fee for stores that use Shopify Payments but this option is obtainable in a few countries. Stores located in other countries use a third-party payment gateway (like PayPal, Amazon Pay, 2Checkout, etc.) which adds a 0.5%-2% fee per transaction.
Magento 2 benefits
Magento 2 is an e-commerce engine that is used by a wide range of people. This is a platform that can offer multiple features. Magento 2 is flexible and includes attributes powerful marketing, search engine, and a wide variety of other tools that let entrepreneurs create specific sites that are suitable for their business and needs.
Hiring a qualified Magento 2 team will support your business to achieve any goals and success. Why Magento 2 is essential and vital for your business? We have listed the most prominent advantages for you.
High performance and scalability.
Indexing is a very important part of transforming the merchant data. You are able to improve query speed and the performance of the website by creating and updating index tables. Magento 2 optimizes web pages for faster delivery, increases server response times for all website activities, improves the efficiency of backend operations, and enhances database flexibility and scalability to handle peak loads.
Well-improved checkout process.
The checkout process is very significant for e-commerce website. Clients abandon their shopping carts very often and for many reasons such as the checkout process is very slow to load, there are few payment options, they are forced to create an account to view products and there are few shipping options. You can actually lose much of your income.
Unlike other e-commerce platforms, Magento 2 has improved the checkout process which consists of only 2 stages: shipping and review and payments.
Mobile friendly.
Nowadays people tend to use their smartphones more and more. In fact, a lot of people buy online with the help of their smartphones and tablets. Magento 2 is mobile friendly with a responsive design, themes, and checkout. Having a friendly mobile version of your store will increase your sales and help your business grow.
Easy to upgrade.
If you are a customer that owns a web-store and you want to migrate from your current e-commerce platform, Magento 2 is the best choice for your business. It is easy to upgrade. It is necessary to improve the platform’s security patches. The upgrade helps to improve the e-commerce experience to the customers.
Key integrations.
Magento 2 is adapted for integrating useful extensions. This will help you to carry out many worthwhile and important activities. The Magento 2 extensions include payment gateways like Papal, Braintree, etc.
Instant purchase.
Instant purchases help clients to buy products very quickly and easily. It uses all credit cards, PayPal, etc for stored payment information. It is good for mobile shopping as it makes it seamlessly easy to place orders and also helps to promote purchases tremendously. Customers place their orders easily without following checkout processes. This will also help to improve the chance of the impulsive shopping which clients repeatedly do. This will help your business grow.
Email marketing automation.
Email marketing automation helps customers to create campaigns in a short period of time. We can create automated campaigns through SMS, Push, email, and other channels and manage transactional emails for your Magento stores.
Advanced reporting.
Reporting is significant for an e-commerce business. Magento 2 offers 20 reports that are placed at the interface. This feature gives you essential and comprehensive information about the following areas: orders (the number of orders, AOV and taxes, and shipping fees collect), customers (the number of registered accounts), and products (number of products orders and which product sells best).
Why Magento 2 is better than Shopify
Magento 2 and Shopify are big players in the e-commerce markets though they have different systems for each area.
We have reviewed the following areas and compared both platforms.
Design and themes.
Unlike Shopify, Magento 2 is open-source. That means that anyone can join to developing this platform and add new functionality. There are plenty of designers who dedicated much time to create different designs and themes for you to choose from. Shopify isn’t open-source and cannot offer thousands of plugins but Magento 2 can.
Cost and Fees
Shopify has a description cost while Magento 2 is free to download, nevertheless if you want some premium plugins or to build out some custom functionality, you will need to hire developers to perform that which is totally worth it to help your business develop and grow. Shopify is alright for small businesses but if you own a big and serious one you definitely should use Magento 2.
Ease of use
The advantage of Shopify is its simplicity in usage. It is friendly for new users. One can easily learn how to use it. Magento 2 isn’t that tricky as you might have thought. It just requires a bit more time to get fluent in it. Although Shopify is easier to use, this is at cost of functionality. Magento 2 offers a lot more options and functions. One can easily sacrifice the ease for a wider range of tools to make a web-site the best possible version.
Third-party integrations
Shopify doesn’t have a community around it. Here you simply get what you see. While there are a lot of third-party developers and a huge community who work on extra functionality.
Market scalability
Shopify is quite scalable but Magento 2 is much better in this since it has a developed payment system. Magento 2 also has a powerful payment system that can be used to facilitate and track international sales, which is good news if your business plans to go global. Magento 2 pricing is all about upfront investments in plugins, themes, and custom development, whereas when Shopify scales, monthly costs can start to climb.
SEO
SEO is really important for companies as their income also depends on how they are found in search engines. Shopify is easier to run and understand mainly because an essential part of SEO is creating and deploying high-quality content. Magento is a bit heavier and you need to devote some time to get benefit from it but there’s no reason why it can’t be a powerful centerpiece for a solid SEO strategy. Remember about the low cost of Magento, so this is no problem to hire a reputable Magento 2 developer team to create even more powerful custom functionality.
Conclusion
To choose between Shopify and Magento 2 is a choice of preference. You should think and review both platforms taking into account their pros and cons. It’s better to think twice before choosing not to regret it in the end. It is always possible to migrate from one platform to another but it is really time-consuming and of course, you will have to pay again.
Fortunately, now you know about all the benefits of Magento 2 and why to better try it to be sure that your web-site is unquestionably going to develop and grow. Why experimenting with different platforms when you can absolutely rely on Magento 2?
