Magento Vs Shopify Vs WooCommerce: Battle to choose the best e-commerce Platform
The demand of e-commerce platforms has taken an upward shift with the rise and expansion of newer technology and tools. The modern-day customers find the e-commerce platforms easy and accessible and thus it has become necessary for the organizations to have an online presence to take their products to a larger section of the audience.
Top e-commerce development platforms such as Magento, Shopify, and Woocommerce are the reason behind the ease and success of top 10000 websites around the world. They not only help in expanding your business, but also protect your e-commerce business amidst difficult times.
In today’s socioeconomically driven business environment, it becomes even more important to build an e-commerce platform that is easily reachable and accessible. But, to launch an e-commerce store, you need to find the best e-commerce service providers who can build an impeccable website and mobile apps that render a sustainable business.
Magento, Shopify, and Woocommerce are very differently structured platforms. Their usage will depend on the requirement of the user and their suitability will vary accordingly.
Thus, without further ado, let’s begin the journey of understanding the Moguls of e-commerce app and web development.
Introduction to Magento
Magento is an open-source, PHP-based platform to develop e-commerce websites and mobile apps and it is owned by Adobe. It was launched in the year 2008. The popularity of Magento can be gauged from the fact that it is used by more than 250,000 e-commerce merchants around the world and it accounts for 12% of the e-commerce market. Moreover, the benefit of hiring a Magento Developer for your e-commerce store is that they can provide you with flexible and scalable solutions.
Introduction to Shopify
Shopify was launched in the year 2004 and is a feature-loaded e-commerce development platform that provides various templates for different niches. Shopify holds more than 21% of the market share in the e-commerce domain as it offers a streamlined approach for setting your online store. Shopify is a great platform for your online business as it gives a quick head start to beginners, and professionally handles heavy flow on e-commerce for established firms. It offers additional benefits such as maintaining, handling, and updating the underlying software.
Introduction to Woocommerce
Woocomerce is another essential e-commerce toolkit developed to transform a WordPress website into a beautiful and streamlined online store. The platform holds 22% of the market share and is supported by Automattic. The platform is an SEO ready e-commerce development platform. Companies offer top Woocommerce developers for hire with flexible hiring models to fit to your budgets. Woocommerce was launched in 2011 and today it has bagged 2,000,000+ users worldwide. It is, however, a small scale business’ pet because Woocommerce is not a standalone e-commerce development platform.
Gauging the terrific trio by doing the SWOT analysis of the e-commerce development platforms
Magento
Strength:
Magento has been a primary choice of business owners for B2B e-commerce.
With the best e-commerce solutions providers at helm, Magento is sure to get you an excellent scalability and core functionality of your online store.
Finding the best Magento development company will also ensure that your online store can handle a large number of SKU counts and work on multi-stores with just a single installation.
The online store will have a proper catalogue for products and order management so that the users would find it easy to navigate through the website or the app. Thus, it helps in enhancing the user experience.
Magento also provides better integration rendering improved community functionality.
Weakness:
The development cost is slightly expensive in Magento.
The web application developers working on Magento will require a third party extension and thus it will take a bit longer to develop an e-commerce store using Magento.
The themes in the Magento platform are quite complex to implement even by the top Magento developers and designers. Also it requires patience and a steep learning curve for the developers to ace it.
The online e-commerce platform developed through Magento requires hosting and SSL certificate and has a very high ownership cost.
Top brands such as Ford, Budweiser, and Coca-cola are using the best Magento e-commerce development solutions and are expanding their businesses by leaps and bounces.
Shopify
Strength:
Shopify is an e-commerce platform to make the portal easy to use and navigate.
The Shopify experts can add functionality to the store so that the orders placed by the end-user get processed as early as possible.
The development of an e-commerce platform takes a very short time with Shopify and the platform offers a plethora of intuitive themes.
The online store owners will also find it easier to add payment gateways like PayPal, Apple Pay, and Google Pay to reach wider customer base.
Even on the mobile app, Shopify becomes a great platform for your online store development process.
Weakness:
Shopify somewhat lacks flexibility when it comes to online e-commerce development for mobile app and website
The platform has less content management abilities as compared to Magento and Woocommerce
The platform also charges monthly subscription fees which increases when you are using more number of facilities and apps
If you have a third party payment gateway on your online e-commerce store, it will incur additional transactional fees and thus will be burdensome on your pocket. The credit card rates for Shopify are between 1.6% to 2.2%
Market leaders such as Redbull, Gymshark, Tesla, and Penguin are using Shopify for their online e-commerce management and thus scaling newer heights in their business.
Woocommerce
Strength:
Woocommerce is a popular e-commerce store because of its similarity to WordPress; furthermore, it provides free themes to download to the developers.
Woocommerce has some better content management facilities as compared to the other platforms.
The developers have total control of the base code for customization and the platform provides a huge catalogue of plug-in for other additional functionalities.
The best e-commerce solutions providers prefer Woocommerce as it is open-sourced and has a vast community of developers.
The platform is simple to use, easier to learn, and free to download as well
Weakness:
Like Magento, Woocommerce also requires hosting and SSL certificate and unlike Shopify, it is not an e-commerce first platform.
To secure the core software, the developers need to update the plug-in regularly.
Before hiring the best Woocommerce developer, you should know that the e-commerce development platform is heavily dependent on the developers for its maintenance. The support to the developers is only available through a plug-in developer or from the developer’s community.
It also takes a very long time to develop an e-commerce platform for the online store.
Leading brands such as Singer, Webber, Airstream and All blacks deploy the Woocommerce e-commerce development platform to increase the visibility of their online stores.
The Final Statement
As mentioned earlier, the dynamics of all three e-commerce development platforms are different. For example, Magento has the best option to reduce shopping cart abandonment rate, Shopify is better for third-party add-ons, and Woocommerce is good at the level of development requirement. Moreover, different market leaders are using all three superlative platforms according to their requirements as thus it becomes the duty of the organization to understand the needs of their customer and then choose wisely to build an online store.