Magento Commerce vs. Shopify Plus Comparison: Which Is Better For Your eCommerce Business

There are many ecommerce platforms available in the market such as Magento 2, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, Prestashop, Shopify, Magento Commerce, etc. Among these platforms, Magento Commerce and Shopify are considered to be amongst the best platforms for a large business. Both the platforms come with very exciting which can be overlapping as well as mutually exhaustive. While Magento Commerce is paid from the beginning, Shopify is initially free to use but you may have to pay later as your business will grow. In this article, we are going to discuss both the platforms and will try to know which platform would be best for your business. So, lets dive into the comparison of Magento vs Shopify.

Introduction to Magento Commerce

Nearly 4 years ago, in 2016, Magento announced its Commerce Cloud Offering. Since then a huge number of Magento Commerce Customers have signed up to launch on Magento’s cloud, and a great number of stores are already live. We have seen an astonishing adoption in this Magento Cloud service. Currently, more than half of the new customers are choosing Magento Commerce to deploy instead of deploying on 3rd party providers. Some of the popular features of the Magento Commerce are:

• Ece-tools package for managing & deploying stores
• Seamless configuration deployment & configuration workflow
• Increased speed of production deployment
• Simplified build/deploy process management
• Local development template to ease cloud deployments

Shopify

Shopify is another popular platform for developing ecommerce stores. It is a hosted platform and comes with high flexibility to fit with varied industries and markets. Whether you want to sell handmade items or expand your established brick and mortar store, developing ecommerce on Shopify would be the best solution. You will get hosting, order management, and whatever you require to sell your products online.

There is a 14-day trial version of Shopify in which you can easily develop your Shopify Store and can check out the Shopify apps. For Shopify Lite plan, the pricing starts at $9 per month while Shopify Basic version costs $29 per month.

What to know while competing with Shopify?

1. Shopify comes with great brand recognition and merchants who want an easy to set up an online store with low TCO

• Rich set of features and merchant tools at a lesser price in comparison to the other ecommerce platforms
• Go-To-Market backed by huge marketing, social media availability, ad spend, demand gen activities.
• Easy and smooth onboarding of even non-technical users for creating ecommerce stores. This reduce time-to-value
• Huge repository of “how-to” materials (videos, forums, online guides) for boosting an entrepreneurial approach

2. Most of the customers of Shopify are SOHO and SMB, but also with Mid-market targeting and Enterprise with Shopify Plus

• Shopify Plus comes with better scalability, increased customization ability, better support plans, and features for large enterprises.
• Shopify has B2B capabilities but doesn’t come with any solid or projected timeline
• It is extending the platform for spaces such as integrating marketing automation tools, attracting leads, and prospects to its platform.

3. White label services and there are apps on its marketplace to extend the default capabilities of its platform

• Apps for payments, shipping, and retail POS solutions
• Free and paid tools for merchants to manage and customize commerce experience as well as integrations with 3rd party service providers.

Shopify Pricing Rates, and Product Portfolio

The Shopify Lite plan is priced at $9 per month. You can sell on social media, in person, or on an existing website with Shopify Lite. The other plans are in this table.

Shopify Plus

Base Fee

• For less than $800K per month sales is $2K per month + rev % share for incremental GMV above $800K/month.
• Else +0.15% of Sales through Shopify Payments or if you another payment gateway then 0.25% of sales

The transaction fee will be calculated further.

Shopify Plus Exclusive Features

• Get unlimited bandwidth and sales: There is no hard bandwidth cap and you will get up to 10,000 checkouts per minute.
• Greater Customer Support: Customer support available 24 x 7 on phone and e-mail with a dedicated launch manager and success manager
• Sell products on multiple channels such as Facebook Marketplace, Amazon, Instagram, Kik, Pinterest, eBay, etc.
• Clone your stores (up to 9): You can copy & paste the structure of a reference store and theme into another Shopify store.
• Support Multi-language, multi-brand, and multi-site rollouts
• Lesser Transaction Fees
• Customizable Frontend
• 3rd Party APIs integration
• Responsive and customizable themes
• SDKs and Script Editor
• Wholesale Functionality
• Access to Tax Services through Avalara
• Addition of up to 100 themes within the account

How To Beat Shopify?

There are 4 main key strategies for beating the Shopify:

• Analyze the prospects on solution gaps and trade-offs merchants must make when using Shopify
• The Magento Open approach should be key to merchants for delivering differentiated commerce experiences.
• Center the value, total costs, and ROI
• Position Magento and its extended ecosystem as a core differentiator

We will discuss each of these mentioned strategies in more detail.

1. Analyze the prospects on solution gaps and trade-offs merchants must make when using Shopify

• Limited Shopping Experience due to the template-based approach
• Narrow selling use-cases for “Easy to Use” feature set
• Limited Domain Knowledge of B2B, Enterprises, and B2C beyond simple selling use cases
• Multi-site, Multi-brand, Multi-language, needs implementing and managing different instances
• Bridge capability gaps and low licensing costs

Also Read: How To Migrate from Magento to Shopify: Complete Guide

2. Magento Open approach should be a key to merchants for delivering differentiated commerce experiences.

• In Magento, merchants have control over the platform without restriction, unlike Shopify in which there are certain restrictions to the merchants of delivering innovations.
• Magento is able to grow and scale. It comes with high flexibility by which the merchants can scale overall e-commerce experience as the business will grow eventually. They don’t need to re-platform later on.
• 3rd Party Integrations: A Magento Commerce user can leverage the pre-existing connectors and integration with a huge range of 3rd party systems such as ERP, CRM, etc. whenever required.

3. Center the value, total costs, and ROI

• Consider the Future Growth: Online retailers should consider future requirements in their current platform to avoid a costly migration to another platform in the future.
• Capability Gaps can overshadow initial cost savings, limiting growth: There are necessities of costly add-ons or heavy modifications in Shopify for meeting business requirements. This increases the cost to a huge extent.
• Richer Ecommerce features: There are many advanced features in Magento which are not present in Shopify and can address a great variety of use cases.

4. Position Magento and its extended ecosystem as a core differentiator

More or less,  when we think in terms of magento vs shopify, the Shopify ecommerce platform is best suited for a simple and small-scale B2C business model store. While Magento is an optimal choice for a more complex and large scale ecommerce store.

Also Read: How To Develop A Shopify eCommerce Store: Complete Guide

How Analysts View the Competition of Magento vs Shopify?

Learn More: Magento vs WooCommerce vs Shopify vs Opencart: Best Ecommerce Platforms 2020

Conclusion: Magento vs Shopify

In the debate of Shopify vs. Magento Commerce, we find that Magento Commerce is more reliable for large-scale potential businesses that are looking in the future to expand their business. While Shopify wouldn’t be a bad choice for the startups. In Emizentech, the best ecommerce development company in India, we are having expertise in developing ecommerce stores on almost every popular ecommerce platform such as Magento, Magento Commerce, WooCommerce, Shopify, BigCommerce, Shopware, etc. Let us know your requirements we will help you hire magento developers as well as shopify experts..