Magento vs WooCommerce vs Shopify

Royex Technologies is a leading Ecommerce Website Development Company based in Dubai and offers bespoke eCommerce solutions using Magento, Wordpress and Shopify, with extremely dynamic and user-friendly interface. We could help you decide which eCommerce platform best suits your needs and develop a top eCommerce website as per your business needs.

WooCommerce, Shopify and Magento are three of the most common eCommerce solutions in the market. They are scalable, functional and make it easy for people to launch eCommerce stores. These platforms are very different in how you could get started with, the way they are structured and what sort of project and user they are best suited for.

Settling down with wrong eCommerce platform is one of the worst mistake entrepreneurs can make. Searching for an eCommerce platform that best suits your business can be a confusing task. We have provided a detailed comparison of the three most popular eCommerce platforms to help reduce your dilemma.

Magento

Magento offers different experiences and platforms based on user needs. Magento Enterprise and Magento Community are two primary offered products. The community platform is free to download and open source offering community based support. The Enterprise site is an eCommerce solution for large retailers which includes tons of features, premium technical support and thousands of extensions.

Magento has a variety of built in functions. Currency and languages can easily be changed, and discounts could be applied to loyal customers or selected items. Magento also has different search engine optimization tools. An XML-map containing links to all pages of online store could be easily created to make the store properly indexed by search bots.

Magento CMS has various templates and many extensions. To implement special features in your store, you could even dig into HTML or PHP code. Also with this platform, several online stores could be created and managed using one admin panel.

With companies having engineering resources, Magento is a better solution as it is less intuitive and more code intensive for an entrepreneur.

Pros :

* Large users and developer community.

* Huge number of ready made extensions available.

* Fully customizable design using templates. Admin and storefront can be fully customized as per business needs.

* Built in SEO features.

* More than 700 responsive themes.

* Easy catalog management and can handle large SKU counts.

* Multiple options for payment gateway

Magento is perfectly scalable whereby you could easily switch from 100 products to 10000 products.

Cons :

* It has a hugely expensive premium plan.

* Magento could run quite slowly.

* Require solid programming and development skills to fully utilize Magento.

* One cannot use cheap hosting with Magento and thus requires a similarly powerful web hosting.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce is just an eCommerce plugin for WordPress. In terms of sales, WooCommerce is the largest of eCommerce platforms. It would be required to install WordPress first on web server before installing WooCommerce.

It provides several features like discount coupon, Ajax shopping cart, geolocation support, SEO optimization, responsive design and Google Analytics integration.

Paid WooCommerce plugins allow some advanced features like quick browsing, various payment methods, list of desired products, pop up notification, additional products displayed just before purchase, product comparison and so on.

It is not always easy to get images and text in required way. The content does not flow in the expected way and hence some knowledge of HTML would be required in order to fix it.

Pros:

* One of the most advanced features of WooCommerce platform is one page checkout. Checkout forms and product selection are displayed on a single page.

* WooCommerce comes with ratings and user reviews. Every product can be easily rated by clients by adding ratings to their comments.

* It provides full control of codebase for customizations.

* Plenty of paid and free themes to choose from.

* Hundreds of extensions and plugins that enable owners to extend the functionality of their stores.

* Huge support community as it is widely used.

Cons :

* Paid extension and hosting.

* Not as comprehensive as other platforms like Magento, and hence is mostly used by small eCommerce stores.

* In order to use WooCommerce, site must already be built in WordPress.

* Requires constant updates of core software and plugins.

* Content doesn’t always look right in browser. Requires code to get things in desired manner.

Shopify

Shopify, a leading SaaS eCommerce platform with a massive user base, is a CMS sharpened for online store creation. It can easily be managed by a non programmer and is really user-friendly. Shopify provides several ways to sell products and it includes integrations with POS system, Facebook and a hosted online store. If you are a beginner and don’t want to be bogged down by technical issues, this could be your best platform.

Shopify is highly secured as you need is a strong password since the SSL certificates are embedded in Shopify subscription. Shopify packages come with inclusion of domain name. However, it includes “.myshopify.com” at the end of url and you would need to upgrade to possess a completely customizable URL. Shopify would then host website on their servers.

Shopify has an App store embedded with tools that you could integrate in order to enhance the functionality of your store. Like any other eCommerce platform, you could manage your gift cards, inventory, reminders for abandoned carts and any other part of eCommerce store using Shopify.

Pros :

* Easy to setup without much technical knowledge.

* No transaction fees if ‘Shopify Payments’ is used.

* You can sell via channels like Facebook store or Facebook messenger with Shopify, and hence is highly compatible with social media.

* Integrations with WordPress blogs and social media sites.

* Theme setup is easier and much simpler to use.

Cons :

* Weak CMS capabilities for larger content sites.

* Weak catalog scalability for large and complex catalogs.

* Very difficult to do certain things outside of app market and core feature set.

* Fees could increase dramatically if higher Shopify version is used.

* Not an ideal URL structure for SEO.

All the above mentioned comparison of eCommerce platforms have a lot of different features and similarities which their users could be proud of.   

If your company has a high revenue and sales, Magento is the right choice for you. High level functionality and technical support is offered by paid versions. The demands of complex business models could be met with Magento’s advanced features. For fast growing businesses that want to scale, Magento could be the best option.

If you have a WordPress site and want to add shopping cart or store for small scale business, WooCommerce could be a great option to consider. Users could take full advantage of vibrant open source community that WordPress is known for and any WordPress theme would work with your plugin using WooCommerce.

For brands that want to go to market much faster, Shopify is an ideal option as it is very easy to setup. It also offers free hosting and hence all you need to do is get an account and your products could be created right away. The addons directories and extensive Shopify themes are targeted for online stores for selling furnitures, digital books or clothes, and hence you could get started right away.

At the end of the day, it all revolves around your project, your plan, your requirements and your clients. We have given you a comparison on most popular eCommerce platforms to help converge your requirements into one solution.

Our certified expert developers provide result-oriented solutions for your business and always open for communication. If you are looking for affordable Magento, Shopify & woocommerce development services in Dubai, we are here to help you. Feel free to ask questions, please call us on +971566027916 or mail at info@royex.net. You may visit our website : www.royex.ae