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Magento vs. Shopify: Differences You Must Know

Aug 08, 2016

3 minute read

With the proliferation of e-commerce platforms, merchants have to make the tough choice of choosing a suitable online shopping solution. To create, manage, and maintain an online store, retailers must be well-versed with features offered by the available e-commerce platforms that can match well with their requirements. In this blog, we’ll take a look at the two biggies of the e-commerce world — the do-it-yourself platform Magento, and the plug-and-play solution Shopify. magento_blog_image Shopify is an e-commerce platform that provides hosting to its users. With zero set-up costs, easy installation, and handy dashboards, it sets its users free from the chores of web development and programming. However, being a commercial solution, it imposes fixed monthly charges on the merchants.

Magento, an open source e-commerce platform is well known for allowing its users to host, setup, and configure everything themselves before building their store. This platform is absolutely free, but requires programming and web development skills.

Let us take a look at the major features and differentiating factors of the two widely acclaimed and preferred e-commerce platforms:

Features	Shopify	Magento
Inventory Management	All Shopify plans allow you to add unlimited items to your store, except for the Shopify Starter plan that limits you up to 25 items.	Magento lets you add unlimited products to your store. However, adding too many items can affect your host performance and site loading speed.
Design Friendliness	Shopify offers 21 free and 116 premium powerful themes that you can easily adapt without knowing any specific code. Also, you can access source code files.	Magento offers 120 customizable themes to its users who can edit them by establishing a connection with an FTP client. Also, it requires developer expertise.
SEO Effectiveness	Shopify allows you to edit meta content and add Google Search Console tags. However, it obstructs you from editing the core pieces of your site.	Magento drives targeted traffic to your store by leveraging Google sitemap and SEO friendly URLs. Also, it helps you implement on-page strategies.
Multi-Lingual Capabilities	Shopify does not have inbuilt multi-lingual capabilities. However, it supports third party/paid apps that can help you create a multi-lingual store.	With inbuilt multi-lingual support, Magento provides you with the ability to create store views for multiple languages.
Pricing	Shopify offers a free trial of 14 days followed by a fixed monthly fee. For Lite plan: $9 For Advanced plan: $299 It imposes a transaction fee on using a payment gateway other than that of Shopify. For Lite plan: 2% For Advanced plan: 0.5%	With an absolutely free e-commerce platform like Magento, you only need to pay for your monthly hosting charges.
Ease of Use	With a well-designed user interface, Shopify is considered a strong and easy to use e-commerce platform. It includes a wizard mode that helps beginners set up their online stores.	Magento also has a user interface that is simple and thought-out, but being an un-hosted solution, it becomes challenging for end users to procure hosting and set up their own store.

Both Shopify and Magento are powerful e-commerce platforms that offer exclusive features to enable you to run your online store successfully. While Shopify, being a hosted and well-managed platform, can provide ease of use especially for small businesses, Magento offers more customizable solutions to large scale businesses. So, before selecting an e-commerce platform, you must evaluate your requirements and choose the platform that fits your unique needs.

Want to improve your e-commerce website’s performance?

At Grazitti Interactive, we offer best-in-class website development services using advanced technologies such as Magento, Shopify, PHP, ASP.net, AJAX, JavaScript and more. Companies like Tidemark, Appcelerator, Cloudwords, Feverbee, Egencia, DCG One and many others trust us with their development needs. For more information about our development services, feel free to reach out to us at [email protected].