Here I am, as promised, with 5 more important criteria to use when running your Magento vs Shopify 2019 evaluation and weighing these 2 e-commerce platforms' pros and cons.
Or, better said: weighing the benefits and limitations that result once you've put their features against your own particular needs and use-specific priorities.
So, without any further ado:
6. Extensions and Add-Ons Available
The ratio between the 2 platforms is of +100 vs +5000. There's no question about it: Magento reigns supreme in this category...
And with no surprise, if you remember that it's an open source e-commerce platform, backed by a thriving community of developers.
As for Shopify, it might not provide as many apps and add-ons, yet it provides some perfectly curated ones:
- you don't need to worry that you'd be implementing buggy, risky extensions on your e-store
- from email marketing to loyalty programs, to accounting, you'll find apps and add-ons for pretty much any type of functionality that you might need to integrate to your online store...
7. Magento vs Shopify 2019: The Price Factor
When using the pricing strategy as a criterion for your Magento vs Shopify 2019 analysis you'll realize that:
- Shopify doesn't charge any fee for e-store setup and installation; moreover, it grants you a 14-day free trial
- Magento is, by definition, a free e-commerce solution; and yet, you'll still need to pay for your hosting and payment gateway
Speaking of transaction fees, you should know that Shopify comes with zero costs if you decide to use their out-of-the-box payment gateway. Whereas in case of Magento you'll need to pay the fees charged by your gateway provider.
No extra costs from Magento in this case, but no built-in payment gateway either...
In short: Shopify charges you a monthly fee, that covers both the hosting platform and the payment gateway for your e-store. On the other hand, Magento's a free, open-source platform, that still “surprises” you with inherent hosting costs...
8. Inventory Management
Another “tricky” category, since it looks that both Magento and Shopify allow you to enter an unlimited number of products into your e-store. And to easily manage your inventory...
Nevertheless, you'll still identify some key differences:
- in Shopify, you're limited to fewer options when it comes to administering your inventory
- Shopify integrates easily with third-party dropshipping inventory apps (e.g. Oberlo)
- since Magento doesn't provide the hosting of your e-store, as well, adding too many items to your store might, at some point, have a negative impact on your host server's performance (and, implicitly, on your page loading speed...)
9. Customization Opportunities
Once you've reached this criterion while running your Magento vs Shopify 2019 evaluation you'll realize that:
- Shopify scores better when it comes to its highly intuitive theme editor; you can easily drag and drop content elements across your website
- Magento grants you total freedom of customization — you can fine-tune every single aspect of your e-store — but at a cost: you depend on a team of experienced Magento developers to do all that customization work.
In other words, while both platforms are designed to power complex customization scenarios, Magento scores better since it's open source. Therefore, it allows you to custom-tune the look and feel of your online store and to extend its functionality any way you want to.
While both platforms ship with user-friendly, thought-out UIs that empower you to edit your HTML/CSS code directly, Shopify comes with a menu-driven editor. One that you can use to play around with fonts, colors and other attributes of your theme.
10. Multi-Lingual Support
While Magento provides you with multi-lingual support right out of the box, Shopify depends on third-party apps for this type of functionality. Or, you can always custom-write your code to include multilingual features...
Localization, based on a “cluster” of multilingual online stores, is not one of Shopify's strong points, that's for sure.
The END!
What do you say now: judging by your own Magento vs Shopify 2019 analysis, which e-commerce platform best suits your feature needs and best serves your priorities?
Do you value ease of use more than... freedom of customization? Is an impressive collection of advanced e-commerce features more important to you?
Image by Ryan McGuire from Pixabay.
