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How to Choose: Magento 2 Vs Shopify Plus for E-commerce Store Development?

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    April 12, 2021
How to Choose: Magento 2 Vs Shopify Plus for E-commerce Store Development?

Are you launching your e-commerce store? Do you wish your e-commerce platform to make a huge profit every year? It is high time you will consider building or migrating the existing store to an enterprise-level platform.

An e-commerce platform is a digital application allowing the processing and management of online sales. These serve to be virtual storefronts wherein consumers are able to purchase a specific product or service online. With the help of these website development services, online merchants are capable of building and hosting the respective website, managing the respective products, prices, and promotions while personalizing the sales and services. As an e-commerce business becomes larger and more profitable, wherein higher volumes are expected to be handled, the e-commerce strategy usually requires a strong platform.

Enterprise e-commerce platforms become viable solutions for larger organizations and bigger brands. For enterprise-centric e-commerce store development, Shopify Plus and Magento 2 serve to be the best options. Let us know about them in detail.

Introduction to Magento 2 and Shopify Plus for E-commerce Development

Choosing the right e-commerce platform for your online business can either make it or break it. If you are confused about choosing the right e-commerce development platform for your enterprise-grade e-commerce store, then here are two effective options:

  • Magento 2 Commerce –Enterprise version of Magento. It serves to be a popular e-commerce platform that Adobe acquired in 2018.
  • Shopify Plus –Pro version of Shopify. It is an e-commerce development platform that is publicly listed and has been serving retailers across the world.

Shopify Plus

What is shopify plus - It is a leading platform for the development of e-commerce stores. It is a hosted e-commerce development platform offering higher flexibility when it comes to fitting with multiple industries as well as markets. Shopify plus features - whether you wish to expand your well-established brick & mortar store or sell handmade products online, developing an e-commerce store on Shopify turns out to be the best solution. With this platform, you will get access to hosting solutions, ensure order management, and manage products that you aim at selling online.

Shopify also comes with a 14-day trial version through which you are easily capable of developing your e-commerce store. At the same time, you can also check out Shopify apps. If you wish to make use of the Shopify Lite Plan, its pricing begins at $9 on a monthly basis. On the other hand, the basic version of Shopify is available at$29 per month.

Benefits of Using Shopify Plus for Your Store

For accommodating the wide range of businesses using Shopify, the platform offers its customers a wide number of plans and service options. One of the most advanced plans is Shopify Plus. As you would upgrade to Shopify Plus, it will offer you access to advanced features. To top it all, it allows you to exercise more control over the functionality and general appearance of the e-commerce store.

Some important benefits of Shopify Plus for your e-commerce store are:

  • Custom Checkout Page: Shopify Plus is famous for its overall ease of use. The entire store and shopping cart have been designed and coded. For opening an e-commerce store, the users are just required to customize the respective settings while applying a theme to fit your brand and populating with content & products. Then, you can launch.

 

  • Innovative Launchpad: The given tool enables you to ensure easy set-up while tracking automated events like product launches and flash sales. With the help of the app, the user of the Shopify Plus platform can schedule tasks like sales for a limited time with proper price changes.

 

  • Script Editor Access: Shopify Plus is known to take customization to another scale by including Script Editor Access for its users. The Script Editor feature allows merchants to develop as well as write scripts hosted & run by the platform. Using this feature, you can go forward with creating customized business logic for enhancing the shopping and checkout experience.

 

  • Mobile Store Builder: The creation of a mobile-first e-commerce experience is crucial for ensuring the success of your online store. This is because mobile devices have become quite popular in recent times. With Shopify Plus, the presence of a mobile store builder feature allows the merchants to develop interactive Android and iOS apps without any coding experience or prior knowledge.

There are lots of shopify benefits. The Shopify Plus platform is powered by a proper template system for ensuring store customization. This enables merchants to create top-performing mobile-based store apps with the help of customizable themes.

  • Providing Access to Shopify Flow: As your store starts growing effectively, it becomes difficult to manage little tasks. The management of individual changes like checking customer status is a highly time-consuming task when you have to deal with multiple customers. Shopify Flow serves to be an automated tool for merchants for creating and managing automated workflows for such situations.

Shopify Plus Exclusive Features

  • Getting access to unlimited sales and bandwidth
  • Improved customer support
  • The capability of cloning the e-commerce stores –up to 9 stores
  • Supporting multiple languages and multiple brands
  • Customizable and responsive themes
  • Customizable front-end
  • Third-party API integration
  • Addition of around 100 themes within the account
  • Wholesale functionality
  • Script Editor and SDKs

Read the blog- Why Choose Magento 2 for E-commerce Development?

Magento 2

Magento serves to be a complex CMS to set up. Still, it offers tons of features for e-commerce development. It is an open-source platform featuring an extensive network of more than 315,000 developers. The ultimate goal of releasing Magento 2 has been to improve the overall user experience. When compared with Magento 1, Magento 2 offers access to advanced features for allowing larger enterprises to deliver top-quality online shopping experiences to the customers. Magento 2 is known to be faster to load, delivers access to improved security features, is customizable, and easier to use. Sometimes Magento 2 migration also required as per the requirement.

With thousands of developers all across the globe, the platform has been tested extensively while being improved over several years to deliver tons of benefits for e-commerce development.

Benefits of Using Magento 2 for E-commerce Development

As per a recent study report, it is estimated that that are more than 100,000 websites across the globe using Magento 2 as the e-commerce platform. Here are some of its benefits:

  • Improved Scalability and Performance: Magento 2 offers improved performance in comparison to Magento 1. The latest platform features an advanced indexer for speeding up query performance. The indexer works towards updating data regularly –including users, catalog data, store, and prices, for improving the speed of the online store.

Magento 2 makes use of the advantage of core integration using Varnish Cache –its leading technology for HTTP accelerator. The technology offers access to caching for a full page on the online store while ensuring that web pages load quite fast.

  • Effective Customer Persuasion: Another major benefit of using Magento 2 for e-commerce application development is that it offers provisions for several cross-sells and upsells for enhancing the overall shopping experience of the users. It also helps with improving the potential for order value. The merchants can leverage the feature of cross-sells and upsells along with free coupons & gifts, price countdowns, and stock availability.

In addition to cross-selling and promotion offers, Magento 2 also offers easy features for including rich media like videos for expressing products in ways to attract more customers. For the best outcomes, hire Magento developers from reliable agencies.

  • Powerful Platform: Do you wish to set up a massive e-commerce store with thousands of products? Magento 2 serves to be powerful enough for handling all your e-commerce requirements –along with the ability to process multiple orders simultaneously. The all-new platform is powerful enough to be capable of processing 39 percent more orders in comparison to Magento 1.
  • Mobile-friendly: With an increasing number of shoppers choosing mobile as the platform for shopping online, companies should ensure that the online stores are accessible for mobile-based users.

The Magento 2 platform offers access to a responsive design. Therefore, you can look forward to creating and executing designs that can be viewed across all devices and across different screen resolutions effectively. Overall Magento’s admin panel is touch screen-responsive. This makes the management of your e-commerce store a seamless process.

  • Advanced SEO Features: Research has it that the main source of driving traffic to e-commerce stores is organic search. Magento 2 offers access to advanced SEO features that you require. One of the major features of Magento 2 is that it is designed by keeping SEO in mind.

This allows merchants to create SEO-friendly URL structures, introducing rich snippets, meta-implementation across the website, setting up & optimizing XML, and providing access to several marketing features for helping with search engine rankings.

  • Customizable Security Features: With the help of Magento 2, you are able to customize several levels of advanced security permissions. Right from login screens with the help of Google reCAPTCHA to prompting the secondary password feature, PCI Data Security in the standard form, and so more –there are several security features that developers can leverage with the help of Magento 2.

When you make use of advanced security features like 2-way authentication, you can include an additional layer of protection to the Magento store. Magento 2 helps in offering tools as well as documentation for helping developers and merchants to ensure that the online store is safe.

Choosing Magento 2 Vs. Shopify Plus for E-commerce Store Development

You should consider some important factors for choosing between Magento 2 & Shopify Plus for e-commerce store development. Here are some:

#Cost

In general terms, the overall cost of ownership of a website that is built on Shopify Plus is cheaper in comparison to the site that is created using Magento 2. Therefore, for businesses that have lower revenues, Shopify Plus tends to be a better option. Let us define the cost factor in different forms:

  • Build Costs: Shopify Plus helps in building projects that are cheaper in comparison to Magento 2. One reason for the overall cost-effectiveness of Shopify Plus e-commerce development is that it involves reduced backend development (in terms of functionality, database, and so more). Moreover, it also involves reduced integration work in comparison to Magento 2.
  • Rough Build Costs: Depending on the proper functional requirements between the client and the e-commerce development company, the prices might vary for a website building or rebuilding project.
  • Maintenance Costs: With respect to the monthly process of bug fixing & constant updates, Shopify Plus tends to be cheaper. This is because it is self-hosted.
  • License Costs: Both Magento 2 & Shopify Plus requires you to come up with a proper license fee for using the respective platforms. Shopify Plus charges you on a monthly basis while Magento 2 requires you to pay annually. The respective licenses usually depend on how much revenue you would receive directly from the online platform every month.

#Hosting

Shopify Plus is available with hosting. Magento is known to offer two options: Magento Commerce Cloud for hosting directly with the help of Magento 2, and Magento Commerce for choosing the respective hosting partner and working directly with them.

  • Shopify Plus Hosting: From the hosting point of view, you can choose Shopify Plus. Currently, hosting plans come with a monthly fee of $2000. With this, you do not have to worry about SSL certificates, downtimes, security patches, PCI compliance, and others.
  • Magento 2 Hosting: Magento offers a similar hosting package as offered by Shopify Plus. It is also referred to as the Magento Commerce Cloud. The lowest price for a hosting package that you can expect with Magento 2 hosting is $3,333 per month. This is the offer for both license and hosting combined.

#Developer Partner or Development Agency

Shopify features as many as 60 Shopify Plus partners across the globe. On the other hand, Magento features around 256 Solution Partners.

The given number is reflective of the number of years Magento has been in the e-commerce development scenario. If you wish to choose from a wide number of e-commerce development agencies for comparing the respective time to launch, approach, and pricing, and you wish to go for the option of the United Kingdom, then you can opt for Magento Commerce.

For Magento, the overall community is significant. Moreover, there are several regular meetups for Magento that remain open to all. These keep happening all around the world. Shopify global meetups are also increasing in number.

#Offline & Online Sales

Shopify Plus is known for its Omni-channel capabilities –along with its monthly fee. This is contributed to Shopify POS (Point of Sale) for integrating the card reader by Shopify along with a wide range of cash drawers, receipt printers, and an all-in-one POS system. Recently, Shopify announced its wide range of enhancements including online exchange in-store and returns.

As a retailer, if you wish to sync up online & offline sales, then Magento 2 offers two options:

  • MOM –Magento Order Management. It starts with the annual license at $36k.
  • Third-party Extension –These are available at a cheaper rate in comparison to Magento Order Management.

#Business Management and Reporting

Most small e-commerce businesses tend to manage the entire business directly with the help of the e-commerce platform –right from storing inventory data to analyzing sales reports, product-specific media, and the reports related to product performance with the help of the reporting suite of the platform.

The Standard reports by Magento are quite similar since its inception. With Shopify Plus, reporting is slightly better –featuring as many as 13 in-depth sales reports that are included in the monthly fee.

#International Retail

With respect to product maintenance, it has been always easier with Magento. The platform offers access to multiple store views that can be managed with the help of the same admin. Multi-store capability is not available in Shopify Plus. Magento 2 has a major benefit in this domain.

#Scalability

In terms of the overall revenue, conventionally Magento Commerce was perceived as a logical option. However, with the introduction of the advanced website of Kylie Cosmetics –a famous beauty brand on Shopify, the scenario changed.

To Conclude

It can be regarded as safe to say that neither of the e-commerce development platforms will deliver everything that you require for e-commerce development. You would ultimately require the assistance of the best web development company for improved results. You need to hire professional website development services from a reliable open source development company to achieve the desired results.

If you wish to decide between the two platforms, you should design a list of the respective functional requirements. Also, you should prioritize your business needs at the same time.

Every business operating in the market is unique and has its own propositions and perspective to offer to its unique set of audiences. Depending on your unique requirements, you can choose between the two platforms for the best outcomes.

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