Magento vs Shopify vs Woo-Commerce

The e-commerce industry has revolutionised consumer buying in the past decade and it won’t be wrong to say that it’s growing every single day. The traditional Brick & Mortar model seems as if its fading as e-commerce has provided ease and convenience to customers. The majority of customers find it easy to look for products online that they need and purchase from there rather than making physical visits to outlets.

The e-commerce industry has revolutionised consumer buying in the past decade and it won’t be wrong to say that it’s growing every single day. The traditional Brick & Mortar model seems as if its fading as e-commerce has provided ease and convenience to customers. The majority of customers find it easy to look for products online that they need and purchase from there rather than making physical visits to outlets.

e-commerce has been a tool of success for small and medium businesses as well. There are hundreds and thousands of businesses operating online and making profits out of it.

There are a number of e-commerce platforms available. The critical part is to choose which e-commerce platform will best suit your business requirements and help your grow business substantially. Since e-commerce is booming these days there are thousands of e-commerce platforms available and each platform has its own specialty, but the trick is to choose a platform that provides a mix of most of specialties.

It is a matter of critical importance to choose wisely on an e-commerce platform that will be the best fit to your business.

Whether you are new to this business or an old player it can be confusing to choose the best platform to start with.

Three of the most powerful and widely used e-commerce platforms that dominate this space Magento, WooCommerce and Shopify. Almost all of the top e-commerce websites are built using these platforms as they provide a robust and flexible set of functionalities that are required for any business.

According to stats, Magento leads the list of most commonly used e-commerce platform for medium and large enterprises. WooCommerce comes second and Shopify is next to WooCommerce in the list.

It is important to understand importance of each platform before you choose any for your business. I’ll be comparing these three platforms in this blog which will help you choose better for your business.

We’ll compare Magento, WooCommerce and Shopify based on following factors:

  • User Friendly
  • Security
  • SEO
  • Performance and Scalability
  • Price & Cost
  • Theme & Templates

User Friendliness:

When it comes to user-friendliness Shopify tops the chart as its easily understandable, it has drag and drop tools and editable themes that makes it simple to use.

WooCommerce comes second to Shopify when considering user-friendliness as it’s easy to use but not as easy as Shopify because WooCommerce is a plugin that is installed in WordPress and Shopify is a subscription based Solution

Magento unlike Shopify and WooCommerce is not user friendly and when it comes to use, it’s not designed for a person with limited knowledge and only a person with deep technical knowledge of Magento can handle it properly.

Security:

When it comes to Security, Shopify tops the chart again as it has SSL certificates embedded into it by default.

In Magento, the user need hosting and PPI to make the website secure. So, we can come to a conclusion that it’s difficult in Magento as compared to Shopify but not that complex.

WooCommerce is last in the list as the user has to install SSL certificates that are sold by third party and it costs a good amount of money to the user. Apart from SSL certificates from third party, the user need to have strong passwords according to WordPress Standards.

SEO:

Magento tops the chart when we compare Shopify, Magento and WooCommerce in context to SEO features. Magento is a platform highly customised for SEO and has a broad list of SEO features that comes in Magento by default. Magento has a SEO score 100 out of 100

WooCommerce comes second in the list and is considered to be one of the most SEO friendly e-commerce platform and it is due to wide range of customisations available and it allows access to the source code of e-commerce store.

Shopify provides many SEO functionalities and is highly optimized for SEO. So, we can conclude that Shopify and WooCommerce have a tie in this regard.

Performance and Scalability:

When it comes to Performance and Scalability Magento tops the chart as it’s highly scalable and a very powerful CMS available. It won’t be wrong to say that Magento is the most powerful CMS. It has wide range of features that makes Magento a winner in this regard.

Shopify comes second in the list as it loads quickly as compared to most of the e-commerce platforms.

WooCommerce would be last because it’s good till some limit and once it reaches the limit, it starts to slow down when loading images with a large number of variations. This makes WooCommerce lack in this regard.

Price & Cost:

WooCommerce is a free plugin that is installed into WordPress so, it tops the chart as it’s free to use for any user.

Magento has two editions i.e. Community edition and Enterprise Edition. Community edition is free to use and Enterprise version is for large enterprises and the business have to contact support to get a quote for it.

Shopify is a subscription based platform and its basic plan costs $29/month (and 2.9% + 30¢ per transaction) whereas, if we go for advanced plan it costs $299 (and 2.4% + 30¢ per transaction). Shopify Plus pricing starts at $2000/month.

Themes and Templates:

Any WordPress theme can be used with WooCommerce plugin. WordPress has wide range of themes i.e. it provides wide variety for the businesses/customer to choose from. Another advantage of WooCommerce includes, themes are available in economical prices.

Magento has default Luma Theme which is free, apart from that Magento has paid themes and price can range from $40-$200 depending upon the functionalities the theme might have.

Shopify do offer a few free templates but most of the themes are paid and the user has to spend a good amount for a theme, an average Shopify theme costs $140.