6 Jun 2013

Magento Vs Shopify

Years ago, if you were looking for an e-commerce website for your company, you’d be faced with assembling an team of web developers to build you something from scratch.

Nowadays, there are many great platforms available for small and medium sized businesses that make them able to better serve their customers. Two of these platforms are Shopify and Magento – and we’ll compare them. Here’s how they measure up:

Price

Both offer Shopify(14 days) and Magento Go(30 days) a free trial so that you can try before you buy. After these periods, both charge monthly fees – Shopify from between £19 and £115 a month and Magento from £9.99 and £79.99. Shopify charges a 1 or 2% transaction fee on all but its most expensive tariff but with unlimited bandwidth, while Magento Go has no transaction fees but a bandwidth limit of 4GB.

Features

We all know that it’s the little things that make a website. And while Magento Go offers a range of slightly more advanced and unique features for reporting and marketing promotions, Shopify is much more simple to use, with a built in blog function that Magento can’t match. So, if you’re looking to lesser loads and want all the backend features, Magento may be best, but if you’re looking for something that gives great results with little effort, Shopify proves to be the best.

Speed

Shopify takes home the Oscar when it comes to the rapidity of the system. And thanks to its unlimited bandwidth, it doesn’t matter how much data you upload or download. When it comes to installation, Magento Go takes longer to install and set up than its adversary, which utilises its web-based shopping cart to start a store immediately.

Design

Shopify starts to come into its own. Designers love Shopify as it’s much more adaptable and easy to design, far than Magento Go and it allows you to alter HTML, CSS and scripts whereas Magento Go only lets you modify just CSS. But while Magento Go offers thousands of more individual themes than Shopify, Shopify has better quality design bases.

Customer service

Unfortunately, things can go wrong with any ecommerce platform and, when they do, you need to speak to experts to solve the problem. Shopify is best for that reason – its customer support teams are quicker and tend to offer more detail services than Magento Go, while its active online community users are an absolutely valuable resource if you have a problem.

Author: Harshal Shah

Harshal Shah is CEO & Founder of Xhtmljunkies, Located in Gujarat, India, XHTML Junkies is one of the best companies that offer unique eCommerce solutions by the virtue of its dedicated professionals. Our professionals are extremely proficient in offering development services pertaining to eCommerce. You can find Harshal on Google+ and Twitter.