Magento vs Shopify – Top Ecommerce Platforms to Run Business In 2020

Jul 28,2021 by Manoj Yadav

Well, it is the year 2020 and if you have not started an online business yet, you are leading yourself towards bankruptcy. We recommend you start comparing the various ecommerce platforms (Magento vs Shopify) to kick-start your online business before it is too late. This article will acquaint you with the necessary statistics of online business while comparing the top ecommerce platforms simultaneously. So, buckle up because the next few pages will convince you why must an online business.

Online Shopping – The Growing Craze

64% of small businesses have websites. 32% of businesses who have report losses last fiscal year were those that have no website. Could not having a website be the reason behind these companies incurring regular losses? A report from New York Times says, “Yes”. In another report, businessmen who did not believe in digitalization are the ones benefitted the most post migrating their business to the internet. Is not that cool?

Of all the items added to cart, only 30% are checked out, the rest are left to sit in the cart for months, even years, until the user finally empties it. Also, most people who make a purchase actually come looking for something else. Interesting!

28% businesses have setup a website in less than $500 – that is like cheaper than buying racks for your shop. But what’s more worrying, 12% owners did not visit their website even once in the last quarter. Sick!

T-shirt is the most sold item in ecommerce. In fact, ecommerce has such great craze for selling T-shirts, most ecommerce sites only sell fashion stuffs, and nothing else.

Fashion items also happen to be the hotspot of visitor’s attention. By the way, did you ever notice how regardless of what item you search, you always get fashion recommendations? It is the industry’s smartest trick that websites have now started implementing. Buying any fashion product, especially online, requires close inspection of colour, material, design, size, and illustration. So, as a visitor, one would spend 5 times more time inspecting a T-shirt than he would spend on any other product. This drastically increases user’s time on site.

What is Time on Site?Time on site is an important factor in Google’s ranking algorithm. The greater the time spent on site, the better your website will rank.

Do I really need a website for my business?

The most common phrase we hear from our customers over the phone is “I want a website for my business”. While there are some who have not had their moment of eureka and look for free business website. As a matter of truth, you cannot create business website free of cost, unless Uncle John Doe is sponsoring you covertly.

Now back to what our headline says, “Do I really need a website for my Business?”

Yes, you do.

How much money do you normally spend marketing your products in a year? Say, $10,000. What is the percent return you get out of this? Say 200%. Your marketing is really not worth it unless you are able to sell 5 times what you spend in marketing, says Google itself. It would really not matter if you cut $500 off your total marketing budget and spend it in creating your website.

Having a website will open up an arsenal of weapons for you, especially in the field of digital marketing. You can then run a number of multi-dimensional marketing strategies, targeting different locations and different age groups, something you always struggled with in print-media marketing.

Here, a special mention must be mentioned to email marketing. The average return you get running email campaigns is around 37 times the investment (37:1, o 3700%), says Google too.

Now it is up to you to decide…

Magento vs Shopify

Having made your mind to setup a website, the next thing you are left with is deciding which ecommerce platform you should have power your website with. There are several top ecommerce platforms that you can make use of here (we will discuss in later section in this blog). The most notable and trusted of them all are Magento and Shopify.

A Quick Glance at MagentoFirst off, Magento is an open-source ecommerce platform to it is free to use, just like WordPress. It is a very powerful platform with tons of features. Almost anything that can be done in a programming language can be done in Magento. But, for an average user Magento will involve significant learning curves. So, it is great if you are hiring a developer to work on your ecommerce platform but working yourself is going to be a nightmare.

ShopifyShopify has been especially crafted to enable anyone to build his ecommerce store. It features an easy to use theme and intuitive interface with drag-and-drop functionality. Unlike Magento, Shopify is neither free nor allows unlimited functions. You can only do so much as included in Shopify, and nothing more, although it is perfect for any beginner.

Magento vs Shopify – What Stats Say?

Before we delve any deep into our subject, let us first take a look to what statistics have to say.

	Magento	Shopify
Websites Powered so far	250k	600k
Apps and Add Ons included	5k	2.4k
Monthly Price	$0 (excluding themes and add Ons)	Starting $4 and upto $ 270
Themes Included	Yes	Yes
Number of Themes	12	100+
Theme Price	$0 to $499	$0 to $ 18

Note – the above table only gives a rough idea. Prices may vary from time to time.

Cost

One big factor that greatly affects your decision is the amount of money you are willing to spend in your website. The price for the two varies as per your needs even though Megento, as a platform, comes free, it will require you to include a web hosting service to host your ecmmerce. Choosing web host can be baffling in itself. It not only requires extra money but also efforts and time. This can be a big turn off as assembling individual parts is seen as more troubling than buying pre-assembled package, however expensive. Shopify, on the other hand, is a complete package, inclusive of everything you would need to setup an online store. The price can be a little off-putting, though; especially while working in a shoe-sting budget. Also, the individual components offered might not suit well to our need. Say, you need dedicated servers but the plan offers only shared hosting. Unlike Magento, Shopify will recur its bill every month. This bill will include everything from support to themes and web hosting.

Search Engine Optimization

Once you have a store the second most important thing you will want is to get it ranked in Google and get customers.Both Magento and Shopify score similar points on the scale of Search Engine Optimization. Both platforms offer the functionality linked to making websites SEO friendly. In both the platform the content management system will allow you to take necessary steps in making your website more readable in eyes of search engines.

These steps include –

Adding Meta tags, page title, blog title and page description to make webpage more readable and comprehensive.
Adding alt text to images to help search engines know what the images are all about.

Magento vs ShopifyWhat is Search Engine Optimization?Search Engine Optimization means deployment of tactics and techniques to make the website friendly for search engine crawlers to read. The more readable the site, the higher it will rank in search engines. Higher the rank, the more is the traffic.

Apps and Themes

The best ecommerce platforms will only do as much as get you started. There are a number of other things you must take care of to first lure users to your ecommerce store and then lure them into buying – a great User Interface and User Experience will help. To achieve this you need apps and themes, both of which are present in abundance in Magento and Shopify’s web store. When broadly viewed, Magento’s store is twice as big as Shopify’s and include tons of free and paid apps. Though Shopify, too, has all apps you would find in Magento’s store, Magento offers more options to choose from.

Top ecommerce platforms to Run Business in 2020

Magento and Shopify are without doubt the most popular ecommerce platforms so far but there are some other less popular options as well. Below, we have compiled a list of the best ecommerce platforms you can try dabbling with before launching an online marketplace.

BigCommerce

BigCommerce is very industry specific and also very flexible when you want to switch your theme. Our ratings indicate it does not perform so well as other ecommerce platforms but has the game when it comes to value and performance and multi-channel selling.

Overall Rating	4.3
Performance	4.5
Integrations	4.2

3dcart

When compared with Shopify, 3dcart has better blog features. Thus, it is easier to write engaging contents and drive traffic to your website using 3dcart. It has tons of integrations and even better business management tools. Though there are a few downsides as well, especially with templates. Users have often complained that templates 3dcart offers look dated.

Overall Rating	3.9
Performance	3.0
Integrations	4.3

WooCommerce

Woo was designed keeping in mind the deployment of SEO strategies. To date, WooCommerce happens to be the best platform that ever existed for SEO. It has a lots of service providers and enables deployment of one-click selling apps.

Overall Rating	3.8
Performance	3.1
Integrations	4.1

Volusion

Volusion probably has the best help center. It is tailor made for selling and is extremely Server Message Block (SMB) friendly. Our results have showed it lacks up selling and cross selling features and has loads slower than other ecommerce platforms.

Overall Rating	3.4
Performance	2.9
Integrations	3.5

Upshot

It might still not be late to launch a website. There are a number of options you can look into. To make things simpler for you, Go4hosting offers Magento Hosting plan, from where you can start building your website without worries about incorporating web hosting with Magento. Magento is the best ecommerce platform you will ever come across; however, as we are aware that different users have different tastes, we provide web hosting integrated with all platforms.

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