When it comes to Magento vs Shopify comparison, things go nothing but complex. Read ahead so that you can equip yourself with some solid points. 

Without ingredients, you can’t make a recipe. Similarly, without knowing about these two, you can’t get to a conclusion. 

Today we’re gonna discuss both platform’s features, pricing, and what makes one different from the other. Sounds pleasing enough? Yes, it is.. So without any further ado, let’s get started. 

Magento vs Shopify – Which is More Powerful?

Shopify Overview 

When you’re looking for an eCommerce platform, it’s all rainbows and butterflies with Shopify as it’s pretty straightforward to use and it offers 24/7 customer service. 

They’re always ready to answer, even when you mess up with your store at 3 a.m. More importantly, it has a bunch of integrations that make it super powerful for eCommerce. 

Point of Sale 

Point of Sale simply means it’s an app or software that tracks your inventory when you’re gonna set up an in-person or a physical store. Besides, it can also be installed for a physical store that you currently own. 

Shopify POS syncs with Shopify to track your orders and inventory for all of your active sales channels, retail locations, and online stores. 

Easy Sales Analysis

You don’t have to hire a data analyst for your website’s performance analysis. With Shopify, it’s easy to analyze sales, traffic, purchase rates, and customer demographics. Not only this, if you integrate to advanced apps like Profiteer, HIT analytics, Xporter, etc, you will get more detailed reports. 

Supports Different Languages & Currencies 

The world is a global village. In that case, let your products fly far and wide with Shopify as it makes this possible by adding multi-currency and web interface translation options.

Magento Overview

Magento is definitely one of the intuitive and robust eCommerce platforms on the market. The fun fact is – most people don’t know that Magneto is an open-source platform with a solid community. Along with this, it offers a huge range of powerful tools for building, marketing, and managing your online store. 

Engage Your Audience

It comes with advanced customer engagement tools like Multi-tier pricing for quantity discounts and Minimum Advertised Price (MAP) to organize your selling activity.

Generate Sales By Strategizing

The platform can generate flexible coupons and modify to stores, customer groups, time period, products, and categories. 

Magento vs Shopify Comparison 

Benefits of Shopify

1. Quick and intuitive store setup that makes it easy to launch your eCommerce store

2. 24/7 customer support and technical assist 

3. A mobile responsive storefront includes a built-in mobile eCommerce shopping cart that increases your sales

4. No web hosting or server maintenance charges because Shopify takes care of it 

Did you know Shopify has an inbuilt payment gateway that charges 0% transaction fees?  

Benefits of Magento

1. Guest checkout enables visitors to purchase a product without the hassle of registration quickly

2. A friendly and seller-supportive open source community 

3. Magento permits shipping to multiple addresses in one order

4. Authorized payment gateways and  integration with Authorize.net 

5. Gives you the ability to alter the  price of the specific product depending upon the group of customers

Shopify Advantages Over Magento

Basic Setup 

When it comes to Magento, the learning curve is pretty steep compared to Shopify. You will have to interpret the jargon and use code to build the online store you want. At some point, you might feel the need for hiring a developer.

Whereas Shopify’s easy customization saves you time and peace of mind. So you can tune in to your favorite song, open your browser, and start customizing your store. 

Beginner’s Sales Tools

Magento’s overall extensions cost installation for sales can get a little bit more pricey and a lot harsher on your pocket. In addition, it relies on its marketplace to enable extra features for your store. 

Being an all-in-one seller, SEO expert, marketer, and designer can be a tiring task. Why don’t you let Shopify carry some tracking and analyzing sales while putting your energy into the business you do? 

It has features like Abandoned cart recovery, which pings your customers that they’ve left a great product in their carts without purchasing it. And speaking of carts, its Multi-channel selling (selling on Facebook, Insta, and more) makes your sales journey a lot easier. 

Web Hosting 

When it comes to web hosting, Magento expects you to be an expert which is time-consuming. With Magento,  you should arrange your own hosting, install, setup, and configure everything before you can actually start your store. 

With Shopify, you can go straight to the customization as it itself hosts your Shopify store.

Read more about Shopify plus vs regular Shopify packages here in order to get better comparison between Shopify packages and prgrams.

Magento Advantages Over Shopify

Advanced Customization

In Shopify, some elements can be modified. However, most features like the checkout process cannot be customized. 

Whereas Magento is versatile for advanced customization and provides integrations that allow for marketing automation systems, CRMs (Customer Relationship Management), and ERPs (Enterprise resource planning). Don’t let the lengthy terms confuse you because Magneto makes it easier for you. 

Open Source 

Shopify is not an open-source platform. It makes use of a proprietary coding language with limited developer support, and you’re pretty much on your own with the help center assistance. 

On the other hand, Magneto is more inclined towards giving assistance for customization and seems to have better developer support. In fact, Magento boasts having  “260,000 developers worldwide who are continually generating new innovations and functionality.”

B2B Friendly Builder

Shopify is usually made to attract visitors and customers (B2C business). They’re not much business-friendly for transactions and heavy operations.

Magento vs Shopify Pricing Comparison

How Much Does Shopify Cost?

There are 3 different plans for 3 different needs!

• Use Basic Shopify for getting started

• Standard Shopify for building a good customer base

• Advanced Shopify for businesses that have started achieving big volumes of orders. 

Additional Plans Offered By Shopify

Shopify Lite: It’s definitely worth investing in, especially when you run another blog or website. It allows you to pop that ‘Buy Now’ button for all of your products on different websites. Customers can quickly checkout in a few clicks and you can easily gain the extra eyes (a.k.a. visitors) for your fabulous store. 

Pricing: $9 per month

Shopify Plus: It’s not for most small businesses, and honestly, it’s not really required until you need highly complicated and advanced features for your Shopify store. 

Pricing:  $2000 per month 

How Much Does Magento Cost? 

Although Magneto is free to install, before you give me a big smile after reading the word FREE, let me pop that bubble and say that web hosting, extensions, and your domain is NOT FREE. 

If we calculate, it would cost anywhere between $10 to $100 per month to host your website on different domain providers. The variation in price exists because the services offered by multiple providers differ. 

Here are the monthly hosting packages offered by SiteGround, which is a well-known web hosting service and goes well with Magneto:  

• Startup: $6.99
• GrowBig: $9.99 
• GoGeek: $14.95 

There are costs associated with buying your own domain, which usually costs around $10-$20 per year. To buy a domain name, you can visit popular domain registrars such as Domain.com, Namecheap.com, and GoDaddy.com, to register your new domain.

Setting Up Shopify

Step 1: Register for Shopify

Step 2: Fill In the Details

After completing this step, wait for a few sections and that’s it. Now you will be able to access your brand new dashboard. 

Step 3: Add In Your Product Or Import Product 

If you’re selling your own products, you can manually add the products. If you’re a dropshipper, you have to import using Oberlo or Google Chrome extensions. 

Step 4: Customize How Your Store Looks! 

Step 5: Set Your Payment Methods

There are a wide range of payment options that you can set up with Shopify. Choose the one that fits well for you and your eCommerce business. 

Step 6: Set Shipping Rates

You can click on manage rates and set your rates accordingly. 

Congrats! You’re pretty much done with setting up the basics of your Shopify store. 

Setting Up Magento for eCommerce

To setup Magneto, you have to install it manually and such a process can be a little time-consuming. However, time-consumption is not an indicator of difficulty here, don’t worry it would be easy and I’ve simplified the steps for you: 

Step 1: Find a Web Server 

A web server is basically where you host your website on the internet. SiteGround is a great choice for setting up your Magento store because it offers free and automatic Magento installation. 

Step 2: Download Magento

Before you can install Magento on the server you just purchased, you need to download the Magento software onto your local computer. 

Let’s go to Magento’s download page. Here, you will see three different Magento installation options: Composer, Git, and Archive.

This tutorial will cover how you can set up the Archive version of Magento. Relatively, it’s easy to install and pretty beginner-friendly.  

Scroll down on the same Magento download page and you will find this ‘Archive’ section. Click on that download button. 

You don’t have an account and I know that too. So go ahead and create a new one. 

Fill in the details: 

After adding details, check your given email ID to see an email from Magento. Once you get it, click on ‘verify your email.’

After validating your email, you will be prompted to your dashboard :

Come back to the Magneto Download site and hit on the ‘download’ button again. 

This time, the file will be downloaded. 

Step 3: Create a Database

Magento installation needs a database on your web host. If you’re using SiteGround, follow these steps: 

1. Create a New MySQL Database: To do this, go to your hosting account’s control panel and find the database section. In the SiteGround control panel, you will find the database section under Site Tools > Site > MySQL. Now click the ‘Create Database’ button.

2. Create User Account: Once your database is ready, find the ‘Users’ tab. Click on ‘Create User.’ After this step, you will receive an automatically generated new username and password. 

3. Set User Permissions: For you to manage the database, the user permissions need to be set. First, click the ‘Add New Database’ button next to the new username. When the page opens, go ahead and choose the desired user privileges and click ‘Confirm.’

Step 4: Run Magento Installation

Once the database is created, run the Magento installation, go to the web browser and specify the URL of the Magento folder. After entering the URL, you will see something like this: 

After all of this, you will get a page like this where you need to click ‘start readiness check.’ 

If you’ve followed the previous steps right, you will see something like this. Yes, click on Next. 

Add Your Database Details Now. I hope you have saved it all, didn’t you? 

Take Care of the Magento Web Configuration

Add your Store Address, Magento Admin Address, Encryption Key type and any other thing that you see. And remember, under encryption Key, you can either use Magento generated-key or a custom one.

Now you can customize your store!

Add the details of your store, like its default time zone, default currency, and language. Don’t worry, you can change these values anytime. 

Create Admin Account

This page will allow you to create an Admin account to manage your store. Note down these credentials for your future reference because you will need them to access your Magento backend.

Install Magento

The favorite part after all the hard work! You’re ready for installation. Press that gorgeous ‘Install Now’ button to get ahead.

Yay, and we’re done! Now you will be able to access your dashboard. 

Here’s a quick summary of the Magento installation process: 

1. Get Your Server Ready: You can use SiteGround
2. Download Magento – Download the Magento software from its official website
3. Create a Database on Your Host
4. Unzip and Upload Magento – Upload the Magento files to your new database
5. Set Up Magento – Add in the details and customizations 
6. Install and Finish – Tada! 

Shopify Vs Magento – Who is the Winner? 

After analyzing the various features of the two eCommerce website builders, I’ve reached a conclusion for Shopify Vs Magento. Shopify is excellent for small businesses and beginners because of its intuitive, easy-to-set-up, and rich in-built features. 

Whereas Magento is targeted towards experienced eCommerce stores and established businesses, who have the budget and time to build an eCommerce store from pretty much scratch. Magento plays around with coding and designing, so if you’re ready to invest your time into setting up and going the DIY route, then Magento is your best bet. 

Both these features are amazing for businesses who have high aspirations and are looking to set up their perfect eCommerce store. Choose the platform that best suits your business needs and get started! 

When it comes to building the best eCommerce website for your business, we understand that you are faced with an overwhelming range of choices. Not only this, I get that a lot of choices can actually make the decision confusing and tiring for you.

To make your decision simpler, we have analyzed a range of eCommerce website builders and poured all our insight and personal experience here. So, let’s just look at the 5 best eCommerce website builders that you can use in 2021 to build your perfect eCommerce store and boost your sales. 

Time to Build An eCommerce Website with the Almighty Shopify

Shopify is a lifeline for those online sellers who wish to build their own eCommerce stores. It allows you to customize your store just the way you want it to look. You can tweak how your store looks to suit your personality, your customer’s preference, or both! 

For example, you can make the shop more elegant with the help of stunning graphics that come with it. 

Or, you can experiment with pretty and loud colors that can reflect a sentiment: 

(Note that this article uses these stores as a reference only. This article is in no way affiliated with the illustrated stores) 

Do you want to see what makes Shopify stand out? Alright, here we go! 

Features of Shopify eCommerce Website Builder

Shopify Store Can Be Completely Customized to Reflect Your Brand Image

In simple words, you can DIY your way, setting up a store the way you want it to look.  

Supports Different Languages And Currencies 

The world is a global village. In that case, your store shouldn’t be restricted to just one country and language. 

Here’s just a quick demo on how to make a Shopify store multilingual: 

Customizable CSS And HTML 

Want to awaken the designer and coder within you? Shopify got you covered with a bunch of features. Go ahead, edit, design, and customize your eCommerce store using the Template Editor, which you can find right in the Shopify administration area.

Auto Calculate Shipping Prices for Each Customer

Adding shipping costs for each customer is a daunting task. On Shopify, you don’t have to deal with such problems as it can automatically calculate the shipping cost for you. 

Create Discount Codes Automatically

Gone were the days when you had to sit with Excel sheets to track discounts codes for each customer. With Shopify, you can easily create different kinds of discounts and it will do the tracking for you. 

Sales Analysis 

Shopify tracks your sales and visits to the store so that you can have a greater insight into your store’s performance. 

In addition to this, it also generates reports so that you can get into that ‘ultra-analysis’ mode and make data-driven decisions. 

Although these features look complex to grasp, don’t worry as these exist to ease up your work. 

Just because these Shopify features make eCommerce website creation absolutely simple, let’s see what payment plans Shopify provides. 

Shopify eCommerce Website Builder Pricing

The Shopify eCommerce builder comes with 3 different plans to meet your eCommerce needs: Basic Shopify, Shopify, and Advanced Shopify. Please note this, the stated prices are in US Dollars and are not inclusive of state taxes.

Basic Shopify

The basic package is pretty much amazing for people who are just getting started with their online business. If you have just started out, there’s no need to overspend on Advanced plans unless you build a strong customer base. 

Cost:  $29 per Month 

Shopify Standard Plan

This plan is made for sellers who have been selling online for quite a while now and have an international presence.

Cost:  $79 per Month 

Advanced Shopify

This plan is for those eCommerce sellers who would like to expand their business to a large audience and already have a strong customer base. 

Cost:  $299/Month 

Additional Plans Offered by Shopify

Shopify Plus

This plan is an expensive one, which would cost you $2000 per month. It’s not really required until you need complicated advanced features. So, don’t go for it until you have a huge revenue already. 

Undoubtedly, we can say that Shopify Plus is mainly for high revenue-generating businesses to integrate large and personalized tools.

Shopify Lite 

I personally vouch for ‘Shopify Lite’ because it allows you to pop that ‘Buy Now’ button for all your products on different websites. Whether you run a fashion blog or you post a back-to-school article, you can easily link your products and let your customers purchase your product in a few clicks. 

Plus, it comes at a super cheap price of $9 per month. 

Pros and Cons of Shopify

Pros

1. Simple and Intuitive Interface: Simply setup an attractive store without any hassle of coding or designing the entire layout. 

2. Appstore: Just when you thought Shopify couldn’t get more customizable, I am here to tell you that it has over a thousand apps that can let you automate and improvise your eCommerce store’s overall outlook.

3. Completely hosted by Shopify: There’s no need to grind extra for domains or registering an SSL certificate because you will get it all from Shopify. 

Cons

1. Advanced features come at a higher price: The advanced Shopify package may be a little heavy on our pockets. However, with a little bit of analysis and insight, you can easily overcome the costs and see this price as an investment for your eCommerce store. But really, don’t go for overpriced packages until you need them for your business expansion. 

All in all, Shopify is an amazing eCommerce store builder for those who are getting started with their online businesses. The ease of customization and setting up makes it a great platform for any startup. 

Try WooCommerce to Build eCommerce Websites

Before we get into what WooCommerce can do, let me tell you that it’s a plugin that only works on WordPress. 

Yes, it’s nothing but an eCommerce website builder plugin that is customizable and open-source. More importantly, it’s built on WordPress and comes with a bunch of features for FREE.  

Features of WooCommerce 

1. Ease of Payment: WooCommerce accepts all major credit cards, bank transfers, checks, and cash on delivery. Apart from that, it also supports 140 region-specific payment gateways, including Stripe, Google Pay, PayPal, Amazon Pay, and Apple Pay.

2. Mobile App: WooCommerce comes with an iOS and Android mobile app that enables store managers to update products and fulfill orders.

3. Customizable Interface Using Extensions: The platform’s marketplace is loaded with hundreds of free and paid extensions that add multiple features and functionality to your store.

It’s super easy to get started with building a WordPress website. In case you already own a WordPress website, WooCommerce would work like a charm for you. 

With WooCommerce, you can avoid the extra effort that goes into the setting and establishing a store, integrating it to your personal or professional website. All you have to do is approve WooCommerce to integrate with your WordPress website like this: 

After answering a few questions, you will be prompted to this page: 

Being a new member, you can choose the Get WooCommerce pre-installed option so that you can build your eCommerce website from scratch. 

Choose the Auto Install option if you already have a WordPress site. 

Note: You should have an upgraded Business or eCommerce plan on your existing WordPress website to use this Auto Install feature. 

Go for the DIY route only if you consider yourself as a well-experienced person who has no problems with coding. 

WooCommerce Pricing

As I told earlier, WooCommerce is pretty affordable and definitely doesn’t burn a huge hole in your pocket. However, what I have not told you so far is this – when it comes to register for a Business or eCommerce package on WordPress, it takes a different cost. 

Cost of WordPress packages: 

Plus, if you go for additional feature upgrades in WooCommerce, the costs would quickly add up. 

Pros and Cons of WooCommerce

Pros

1. It’s free to use it as long as you don’t think about upgrading
2. Amazing accessibility when you already own a WordPress site

 Cons

1. Plugin updates are annoying for almost all WooCommerce users because it’s time-consuming
2. The hidden costs of purchasing the eCommerce or Business package on WordPress + the costs for installing additional extensions. 

My take on WooCommerce is – it’s a pretty good eCommerce website builder for those who already own a WordPress website. 

Wix eCommerce Website Builder

You might have tolerated so many Wix ads popping while watching your favorite vlogs on YouTube. The ads might have been annoying, but Wix is a versatile platform for sure. 

Features of Wix

Storefront And eCommerce Website

It has over 500 Professional Templates that allow you to tailor every aspect of your site like a storefront. Besides, you can make your own customized cart for your customers.

Multichannel Sales 

You can sell your products on Facebook, Instagram, Google Shopping, eBay from a single dashboard. So we can say, Wix is the ultimate time-saver. 

Express Checkout

Express Checkout feature enables customers to purchase your products faster by directing them straight towards the checkout process. 

Customer Profiles

Wix analyzes the customer profiles and habits based on your customers’ order history, shopping habits, and contact information. This feature lets you build an idea about what kind of target audience you would like for your brand. 

How Much Does Wix Cost?

Wix comes with 3 different plans. My top tip for eCommerce beginners would be – always start with the Basic plan because it will allow you to understand the eCommerce playing field without emptying your wallet.

Pros and Cons of Wix eCommerce Builder

Pros

1. A huge template collection to choose from.
2. Intuitive interface that allows you to drag and drop elements.
3. Marketing and designing your website becomes absolutely easy.

Cons

1. The eCommerce site isn’t transferable. In simple words, if you wish to take your store away from Wix, you have to build it all over again on another platform. 
2. Once you choose a template, you get stuck with it. Uh oh. 

Choose Wix if you would like to have the breadth of functions and the ease of making your eCommerce website. 

Squarespace Makes eCommerce Website Development Easy

Squarespace has been around in the eCommerce website building for quite a long time. It’s best known for adapting to market needs and introduces extensions & integrations that enhance the overall experience of its users. 

Features of Squarespace

Enhance Brand Engagement with Simultaneous Posting and Unfold App

Squarespace allows you to auto-post your content to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or Tumblr. All post entries and images are optimized and tagged automatically so that you can stay stress-free. 

Unfold App is a Squarespace feature that grants access to basic template collections and editing tools, including standard fonts, filters, stickers, and more. These features help you engage with your audience through your brand.

Analyze Your Store Performance

As you can see, it provides a comprehensive insight into your traffic, visitor demographics, and sales. You can track your visits, unique visitors, pageviews count, growth, and loss over time. 

This feature also tracks how key performance metrics, such as Revenue, Units Sold, Orders, Visits, Conversion Rate, Average Order Volume, and Revenue Per Visit change over time. 

SquareSpace Extensions

Squarespace has a large variety of useful extensions that improve your eCommerce store. For example, it has extensions that handle the financial aspects of selling online. These extensions reconcile sales transactions and manage accounting. 

When it comes to the extensions offered by Squarespace, that’s just the tip of the iceberg! 

How Much Does Squarespace Cost? 

As compared to other eCommerce website builders, Squarespace has similar pricing. For now, it comes in 4 different pricing packages: Personal, Business, basic Commerce, and Advanced Commerce. 

• The personal plan is priced at $16 per month and doesn’t support eCommerce sales, so it’s not wise to pick that for a trial. 

• The business plan is priced at $26 per month, which is a good deal for beginners. The thing to note here is- it charges a 3% transaction fee per sale.

• The Commerce plan is divided into 2 categories: Basic ( $30 per month) and Advanced ( $46 per month). The Basic plan isn’t actually ‘Basic’ in its true sense. It does offer a host of features that you shouldn’t overlook just for its name. This category is specially built for those who already have some idea about eCommerce sales and are looking to scale their business. 

• Advanced Commerce plan is for those sellers who already have an established store and are looking for enhanced functions and features. 

For Squarespace, I believe that a Business plan is best for those who are freshly starting with building their eCommerce store because it offers multiple features at a reasonable rate. 

Highlighting this point again: it has a 3% transaction fee (transaction fee is pretty common in most eCommerce website builders, so don’t take that off as a surprise, but it’s definitely something you should know.)  

Now let’s discuss the pros and cons of Squarespace!  

Pros and Cons of Squarespace

Pros: 

1. Quickest customer service! (I loved their instant chat service) 
2. Squarespace’s blogging feature is quite versatile as it comes with multi-author functionality and allows you to schedule posts in advance. 

Cons: 

1. The website takes a long time to load… Yeah, it‘s  s l o w . . . 
2. Squarespace isn’t much SEO-friendly.

Overall, Squarespace makes a good website builder, especially if you need continuous support while setting up your eCommerce store. 

BigCommerce eCommerce Website Builder

BigCommerce markets itself as “Ecommerce For A New Era.” Their slogan is partly true because BigCommerce does offer a lot of features for relatively low or no cost. 

However, it doesn’t mean that BigCommerce comes for free. So don’t let that disappoint you. It still has a host of functions that make it an attractive deal for startup owners. 

Features of BigCommerce

Fast Performance

BigCommerce uses Google Cloud Platform to bring the fastest experience for your store. And when it comes to lowest page load time, it seems to be the best available option in the market. 

Preview Before Publishing

Unlike Wix, BigCommerce is an absolute lifesaver for theme selection. On BigCommerce, you can always preview how a theme is going to look on your fabulous store before hitting that ‘purchase now’ button. 

Customer Groups

This has to be the best and unique feature for eCommerce store owners. This feature allows you to segment your customers for pricing, product access, and promotions without maintaining a second site. Sounds like an amazing deal, isn’t it? 

How Much Does BigCommerce Cost? 

BigCommerce comes in 2 different versions. The first one is Essentials and the second one is Enterprise. Once you see on top left corner, you will see two options: 

From my perspective, Essentials package is the one that beginners can easily afford, manage, and scale. Here’s the pricing chart that you will find inside the Essentials. 

Now if we talk about the Enterprise, well that’s quite expensive and there’s no fixed price for it. If you want to find out what Enterprise plans feel like, contact the sales team for it. 

Pros and Cons of BigCommerce

Pros

1. It contains a ton of advanced features like ‘Customer Groups’ and ‘Previews before Publishing’ that a lot of other eCommerce website builders don’t provide. 
2. An unlimited number of staff accounts on any plan.
3. Provides the fastest shopping experience for large inventory stores because of its Google Cloud Platform offerings. 

Cons

1. The pricing is really expensive for the ones that are seeking budget-friendly eCommerce website builders.
2. The free themes are very similar to each other.

This package is the best pick for those who already have an established eCommerce businesses or those trying to scale their businesses to a higher level. I wouldn’t recommend BigCommerce to beginners only because of its high costs. 

Best Method to Build An eCommerce Website in 2021

After a lot of analysis and trial and error, we have a winner here: 

It is… 

Shopify because it’s the most efficient and seller-friendly eCommerce website builder around. On top of everything, it offers a host of features, a reasonable pricing, and a 14-day free trial. 

Choose it if you love it. This gives you a lot of flexibility and doesn’t make you feel restricted to one platform just because you paid the money for it.