Ecommerce businesses and sales have been booming over the past few years and many organizations are constantly scouting to increase their online presence and reach. Although there is an array of CMS’s readily available for businesses to choose from, a custom ecommerce platform with a wealth of features helps you get a head start on the competition.
Small enterprises and start-ups especially have to consider many aspects and choose wisely, keeping in mind their finite resources and the fact that they are venturing into previously uncharted territory. A significant aspect of taking the business online is to choose a versatile ecommerce platform to create, manage, and scale the operations. Shopify and Magento are the foremost names when it comes to ecommerce platforms. Here, we take a look at the two ecommerce website development platforms and their features that could make or break a venture.
It is fair to say that the Shopify ecommerce platform has a hold in the ‘hosted, one-stop,’ niche, while Magento app development is primarily aimed at more complex industries.
Overview
Magento is a PHP based ecommerce platform, widely used by midsize and enterprise level organizations that have fairly large resources. Magento app development is becoming increasingly popular in the B2B space which counts multi-national brands such as Coca Cola, Bulgari, Nike etc. among its clientele. Statistics indicate that around 12% of all online stores are deployed using Magento app development, with an annual revenue of over USD 1 billion in online sales.
Launched in 2006, Shopify is a cloud-based ecommerce platform that is best suited for small businesses who want to build a website from scratch. Shopify offers deeper customization, better support, and other useful features. Shopify’s clients include brands such as Tesla, Red Bull and Victoria Beckham Beauty, among others.
Customization
Customization helps businesses to be in control of their functionalities, and as different businesses require contrasting components, deeper adaptations help with focussed performance. Magento app development provides developers complete access to the Magento Marketplace, which expands the website’s capabilities with ample choice in themes, languages, and libraries.
Shopify customization options while not as vast, allows developers access to upwards of 100 themes.
SEO
The emphasis on SEO and its effectiveness in effecting organic growth for businesses is beyond any arguments and implementing SEO friendly features on ecommerce platforms is a must to attract more viable leads that could lead to increased conversions and thus higher revenue.
Although Magento and Shopify, have SEO friendly characteristics, Magento is more elastic in terms of SEO functionalities, and Shopify is slightly more rigid. Both Shopify and Magento provide effective SEO extensions; namely Magento 2 SEO Suite Ultimate, Google Rich Snippets for Magento 2 and Shogun Landing Page Builder and Schema Plus for SEO for Shopify.
Payment Gateways
Magento and Shopify perform admirably when it comes to connecting online stores with payment options. The Shopify ecommerce platform enables easy integration with relatively more payment gateways than Magento. Shopify supports more than 70 different payment gateways like PayPal, SagePay, AliPay Global, Authorize.Net etc., but also enforces transaction fees that range from 0.5 – 2% on every transaction.
Shipping
An important aspect of ecommerce purchases is shipping the goods to customers via their preferred mode to give them a sense of security and safety. Both Shopify and Magento for ecommerce platforms provide options that help customers calculate shipping charges. Magento provides comprehensive shipping and delivery functions, by assigning admin access to multiple settings and has straightforward integrations with major shipping providers such as DHL, FedEx, UPS etc.
Shopify offers easy integration tools with drop shopping service providers & also enables merchants to get competitive rates from international shipping carriers.
It is fair to say that both Magento and Shopify provide impressive features and performance and the choice of the platform depends upon the type of business and at what stage of the growth trajectory the business is at. If you are looking for ecommerce website development services to build an online marketplace for your products, the highly skilled team at Smart Sight Innovations will guide you on the various benefits of each platform to help you decide on which is best suited for your requirements.
