Magento Or Shopify: Which Is The Best Ecommerce Platform?

When you’re setting up an online store, the most important decision you have to make is which ecommerce platform you’re going to use. If the process of buying isn’t easy or customers don’t trust that it’s safe, you won’t get many conversions. There are a few different things to consider when deciding which one to use. The first is which device are people most likely to view your site on? More people use mobile devices than desktop computers in general, but if you’re targeting an older demographic, they’re probably going to be on desktops. Then you’ve got to think about how many countries you’re going to be selling to because some platforms are better for international sales than others. Once you’ve answered those questions, you can decide which one suits you best. These are some of the most popular ones on the market at the minute.

Shopify

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Shopify is one of the biggest ecommerce platforms out there right now and it’s updated regularly to meet new demands. The main benefit of Shopify is that it’s optimized for mobile transactions and has a lot of great social media features. It allows you to connect your shop to your Facebook profile and sell directly on there, without customers having to come direct to your site. If you’re using a lot of Facebook ads to market your product it’s perfect because they can buy it there and then as soon as they see the advert. They also work well with app developers so if you’re building a dedicated app for your company and you want to sell through it, Shopify is a good way to do it.

It has good support should you ever have any problems and there are a lot of add ons available if you want to add advanced features to your store. It’s perfect if you’ve only got basic requirements but if you’ve got quite specific or unique ideas for your shop, you might want to look elsewhere.

Magento

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Magento is the main rival to Shopify and has the business of a lot of huge companies, including Burger King. It’s known for its reliability and if you want to scale up your business in a big way, it’s easy to do with Magento. You can also use a CDN for Magento which cuts down loading times during the purchasing process which is a big deal for customers. It also has social media selling functions but, unlike Shopify, it’s not limited to Facebook.

However, the cost is significantly larger than Shopify; where Shopify will cost you between $29 and $299 a month, the premium package of Magento can be up to $1,600. You can get the cheaper version but you lose a lot of functions. Magento is best for larger companies with a high volume of sales so it might be best to start out with Shopify and graduate to Magento later on once you’ve seen some growth.

Overall, both platforms are good at what they do. Shopify is more suited to smaller business that are just starting to grow, whereas Magento is more expensive, but it can handle the larger volumes that bigger companies need.