Are you ready to create your eCommerce website, but confused on where to start?
E-commerce platforms are there to aid you with the website building. But again, how would you choose the best eCommerce platform to create your website.
The top contenders of this domain are Magento and Shopify. They both are reputed eCommerce platforms that provide the best solution to help you create your eCommerce websites. So before you start with your eCommerce website building, are you confused on what platform you should choose – Shopify or Magento?
Here’s a brief account on what each of the platforms has to offer to let you create your eCommerce website. Let’s get started with the most reliable eCommerce platform that makes creating your eCommerce website easier than ever – Shopify!
Shopify eCommerce platform
Shopify is a complete eCommerce website building platform that comes with all the features that enable a nontechnical person to create his/her website. Basically, they lend you their infrastructure to create your website on. So, all you need to do is to sign up for their service, pay the determined fee based on the plan you choose and start creating your website.
Moreover, Shopify is self-hosted. You won’t have to go around looking for hosting service to host your website. They let you create a secure and safe website effortlessly. Their platform is dedicated to hosting small and large eCommerce website, so they can guarantee you the best performance for your eCommerce website.
When you subscribe to Shopify, you get guaranteed support and assistance from their support executives. This means that you have assured help while you set up your website. Their basic package starts at $9 per month and the advanced Shopify costs around $299 per month.
However, for enterprise level solution, you have the option of Shopify Plus.
The main features of Shopify Ecommerce Platform
- Shopify is Self-hosted (software as a service)
- Lets you create PCI compliant websites hasslessly
- 14 days free trial to test the platform and experience the dashboard
- Optimized performance for your eCommerce sites
- The price range starts from $9 up to $300 per month (includes hosting and security)
- Ideal for small to medium or even large businesses
- 24×7 dedicated support through phone, mail and live chat
- More benefits if you subscribe for annual or biennial plans
Shopify Plus
Shopify Plus is the enterprise level solution for creating your eCommerce website. There’s no fixed pricing for Shopify Plus, unlike Shopify. You can contact them and tell them your requirements, and ask them for price quotation.
Even though it works well for any kind of eCommerce website, Shopify Plus mainly targets large eCommerce firms with a larger number of products and customers. It is also a self-hosted eCommerce platforms that provide you with the framework to build your website on.
You can just pay the pre-decided fee, and start creating your website right away. It allows you to create a level 1 PCI compliant eCommerce websites.
The main features of Shopify Plus Ecommerce Platform
- All the features of the grand Shopify platform
- For large eCommerce firms with growing customers
- Ideal for high volume eCommerce firms
- Ability to handle constant growth of your website without affecting the performance
- Pricing available through quotes
- 24X7 expert support to help you out
- 6 months of free service for those who migrate from Magento to Shopify
Magento Community Edition
Magento Community Edition is an eCommerce platform that is a free and open source. It is developed keeping small businesses who want to climb upstairs and take their business to a new height with their eCommerce website.
Magento is flexible and you can create a website with features and functions you like. The Magento program can be downloaded for free. But Unlike the most popular eCommerce platforms, Magento Community Edition is not self-hosted. So when you start off with your eCommerce website, you need to first subscribe to a hosting service.
Magento is good for small to medium businesses. It provides you with all the opportunities that you will require to kick start your business of online selling. And the cherry on the cake is – the fact that it is open source and uses PHP. So a programmer can easily change the files and make it work the way you want.
Adding any kind of feature is, therefore, possible with Magento. If you are prepared to hire a programmer to get your site created, Magento Community Edition is ready to provide you all the flexibility you want.
Even though Magento is an eCommerce platform and it basically means that it is for non-techies, Magento can be a little bit difficult for newbies.
So, how good is the Free Magento?
- Free to download, open source
- Needs you to acquire the hosting service
- Needs you to install the service and
- Intuitive dashboard options to let you set your website, your way
- Extensible, as long as you host is able to handle the requests
- Lets you edit raw HTML/CSS to customize your website
- Thousands of themes and Magento Apps to choose from
Magento Enterprise Edition
Magento Enterprise edition is for the eCommerce websites that perform on a larger scale. It is a fully hosted Paas, Platform as a service. The pricing of this platform is provided based on quotations. It solely depends on the size and volume of your eCommerce business.
It is a very flexible platform that can fit the requirement of any size of business. You can contact the sales representatives at Magento and get an estimated cost for your eCommerce website.
One of the best things about Magento is the availability of the themes and apps to extend the features of your eCommerce website. Magento provides you with this guide to help you with the setup of your website. You also get telephonic and email support.
Magento Enterprise Edition is, really feature rich. But sometimes, it may get difficult to understand and deal with those features. It may sometimes need you a little time to know the platform’s control and get the features working. But along with that, you get the best services, maximum uptime, good page load speeds and a secure website.
Summary of the Paid Magento platform
- Feature rich, self-hosted
- Thoroughly customizable PaaS
- A big market of Magento themes and apps
- Price available as quotation
- Ideal for small, medium as the large businesses
- A reliable Support service
Magento Enterprise Cloud Edition
Magento ECE is the most efficient service yet. It focuses primarily on faster and a better performance of your eCommerce website. To do so, it uses the cloud solutions to make your website immune of traffic upsurge.
Magento ECE ensures you that your otherwise smoothly performing eCommerce website does not suffer when the traffic increases substantially during the holidays, sales or occasions such as Black Friday, etc.
Magento ECE is completely performance oriented and targets speed and efficient services. It uses the best of technologies to provide the best services.
This platform uses AWS (Amazon web services) cloud services to provide your customers with quick and excellent services. Everything just gets faster with this service.
Platform.sh for faster hosting and platform management, New Relic tools for measuring and managing the performance, Backfire.io, again for automated performance management, and Fastly CDN for faster delivery of content to the end user regardless of the client location.
The pricing for this service will be decided based on the requirements of your business.
Cloud-based Magento for enhanced eCommerce services
- A cloud-based service to let you create efficient websites
- Uses some of the best technologies to enhance your site’s performance
- Cloud and CDN based service for quicker response time
- Optimized for faster and better performance
- Pricing based on quotations
What should you choose – Shopify or Magento??
Shopify and Magento both are leading eCommerce platforms that you can use to create your eCommerce website. They both provide you with the tools and techniques vital for the design and development of your eCommerce websites. They let you create a secure eCommerce website in minutes.
In terms of pricing – Magento is the free and open source. You can just download it, and install it on the server. However, you will have to subscribe to the hosting service. However, Magento Enterprise Edition is self-hosted. But when you use the free version of Magento, you will have to look for a reliable, secure and affordable hosting service.
On the other hand, Shopify is affordable. It has different plans for the different level of vendors. Both the platforms provide you with all the facilities to expand and add new features.
You can choose the best eCommerce platform based on your site’s requirement. For large stores with increasing volume of customers, Shopify Plus proves to be the best.