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Magento Vs Shopify- Which Platform Should You Opt for?

 

Selecting the most suitable ecommerce platform for creating, managing and maintaining an online store is of a critical importance, as it can be the factor responsible for either success or failure for your business. Magento and Shopify are two widely acclaimed and used ecommerce store creation and management platforms today.

 

Magento Platform

 

Both Magento and Shopify offer basic store functionalities that are fairly powerful to use and maintain on an ongoing basis. Shopify can be said to be significantly easier to setup and use as compared to Magento.

 

So, if you are having a tough time choosing between Magento and Shopify You’re not alone.

After all, Magento and Shopify are two of the most popular ecommerce platforms in the market today. However, they’re often pitted against each other when in reality, Magento and Shopify are very different. Our comparison of Magento vs Shopify will highlight their differences and help you decide which is the best platform for you.

 

Thus, before we delve deep into the topic, let’s discuss the pros and cons of Magento and Shopify.

 

The pros of Magento-

 

If you run into trouble, the Magento Forum has an answer for everything to help you get online as quickly as possible. You can search for your query on the huge database of user-generated content. You’ll usually be able to find quite a comprehensive, but simple to understand, explanation to whatever you’re looking for. Consulting other Magento users is a great way to solve your problem as they’ve been in the same position as you before. This means they know what you want to do and how to do it – and can explain it in an easy way!

 

Magento is an open source platform which means it’s available in the public domain and therefore free to use. One thing you’ll have to remember with Magento is that you’ll have to pay for your own hosting.

 

With Magento, there are no limitations to how you design your store. You can make it really personal and original so you stand out from the crowd. This will help customers remember you and come back to your store time and time again. But, if you’re not confident with coding, or don’t have the budget for a developer, you’re best off using Shopify, as you can achieve very similar results in (at least) half the time!

 

The cons of Magento-

 

If you’re a non-technical person, Magento can be a very daunting platform with a steep learning curve. This is especially relevant when comparing it to Shopify – a platform that makes for a much more straightforward website building experience. If you’re not technology-confident, you’ll be pleasantly surprised at what you can achieve with Shopify with little or no problems at all. With Magento, you’re much more likely to run into difficulty.

 

Despite being free to use, you need to factor in hosting and app costs, which can become pretty pricey. As your store grows, you’ll need to pay more for hosting. If you want an ecommerce platform that allows your store to grow without having to worry about increasing hosting costs, Shopify is the way forward. Some of Magento’s apps are free, but others come with an installation and yearly fee. With Magento, you may also need to consider the potential of hiring a developer, which is a pretty hefty financial investment.

 

Familiarizing yourself with Magento’s interface is very time-intensive. It can look a little daunting to the first-time user so it’s best to set aside some time to get to know your way around the platform before getting stuck into building your site. With Magento, you need to be prepared to spend a good few hours tweaking lines of code to get your site looking exactly how you want it to. If you’re looking to get online quickly, it may not be the platform for you.

 

The pros of Shopify-

 

Shopify is always there if you get stuck, so you can resolve problems quickly and focus on making sales! They have 24/7 phone support, live chat and email functionality available to suit everyone’s taste. Shopify also has a forum where you can exchange website building and general business tips with other users – it’s a really nice community.

Shopify is great for taking your store to the next level and boosting your bottom line. Think of the Apple App Store, and how it allows you to do so much more with your smartphone. Shopify’s App Store is just like that, but for websites!

 

The cons of Shopify-

 

If you’re worried about added complexity, you just need to be really choosy about which apps your store can properly benefit from. You can get trigger happy at first because of the wide range of apps available, but choose wisely and you’ll be fine! You could start by integrating your Instagram feed to show off your products – this is really quick and easy to do. As your store grows, we recommend adding an email marketing app to help you grow your sales and maximize your customers’ buying potential.

 

Only 10 of their themes are free. If you have your heart set on a free theme, this does narrow your choice a bit. But, to give your store the look you really want, and your customer the shopping experience they’re looking for, their premium themes are well worth the investment.

 

To conclude, while both the Shopify and Magento Communities are fairly powerful ecommerce hosting platforms, Shopify provides greater ease of use since it is a hosted and fully managed service. Magento, while free itself, requires you to purchase hosting and carry out all the software/system setup and installation procedures yourself – something that only fairly tech-savvy people would be able to do.

 

iDesigniBuy takes pride in offering an integrated platform for its clients where one can take advantage of Both Shopify and Magento simultaneously. So, if you have any query related to the same, contact us right away! Our experienced professionals will take care of your concerns in a jiffy!