E-Commerce – Enhance your business today
Amid the novel pandemic better known as COVID-19, hundreds of business have started to shift their medium of sales. More and more people are now preferring E-Commerce websites. We all saw this coming 10 years ago, but never thought digitization would have been so needless.
Moreover, selecting the best E-Commerce platform for your website is one of the most important things you’ll do. Your IT specialist should be well aware of which platform would be best for them. There are several platforms which you can use without having any prior knowledge of coding and some platforms that require you to have essential knowledge of coding. Coding can be hard and over whelming, you cannot choose to do it unless you’re already an expert, or you might end up screwing your website.
There are many business owners who are confused between several platforms such as Magento, Shopify, WordPress, Woo Commerce, Big Commerce, 3dCart, etc.
All platforms have their own uniqueness, and somewhat follow the same pattern. It is completely up to you to decide the most suitable platform for your business. Keep in mind whichever platform you go with, it should be robust enough to make sure things never get out of your hands.
Magento – The Open Source E-Commerce Platform
Magento is an open source E-Commerce platform that thousands of businesses are currently using from all over the world. Companies such as Nike, Gartner, and Shoebacca are using Magento for their online stores. However, there are things that you need to understand about these platforms and the tools they offer to boost your business.
First of all you need to make sure where your business lies. You need to be aware of the amount of money you’re willing to invest in your E-Commerce store. If you have a nice strong budget for your E-Commerce website, it is best that you hire a professional and let them do their job. There are a lot of things that you can outsource.
However, with Magento, you can build a strong website that caters to all your needs. They have three packages, the Enterprise package is for corporations who have huge allocation of budget for their website. It is best that if you own a small business, you go for the normal open source platform. You just need to buy the domain and hosting, and you’re good to go.
Magento helps you build strong E-Commerce stores that give you features such as; add to cart, build a new form, inventory management system, automated emails, synthetic and robust themes, notifications, and much more. Nonetheless, you need to have some coding experience while dealing with Magento. As in Magento it is not easy to manage tags. If you need to edit premium themes, you will always find yourself trying to code your way through your desired website.
One drawback of Magento is that people say it costs a lot. Here me out. At first, it doesn’t cost you much, $29 and you’re set to go. But buying plugins and themes can really exhaust you. Nonetheless, Magento is one of the best platforms to build an E-Commerce store.
Shopify – The Growing Mind Field of Online Businesses
Shopify was founded in 2006 and is one of the most used E-Commerce platforms all around the world. Unlike Magento, Shopify is not open source, but the benefits are countless. You can do all you want and imagine with Shopify. Even if you have prior knowledge of programming, you can still utilize facilities offered by Shopify. Shopify is a platform that doesn’t require you to code that much. When it comes to placing tags and codes within your website, you can always refer to tutorials available online.
Shopify starts from $29 and ranges to $299. If you’re new to the E-Commerce community, it is best that you start as a beginning, not as a professional. However, if you have the budget for it, you can always choose to outsource your website to a good software house.
One of the major difference between the two platforms is the availability of SSL certificates. Shopify will allocate you a free SSL in all packages; however in Magento you need to purchase the SSL certificate separately.
Similar to Magento, you can upload unlimited products, get free hosting, create robust sales channels, send automated gift cards, professional reports, and much more. Shopify is one of the most trusted E-Commerce platforms.
Moreover, user reviews suggest that Shopify is thousand times easier to use than other E-Commerce platforms. When it comes to forums that let you drag and drop to create your own website, having coding experience is not essential.
WordPress developers can back me up with this – WordPress might be the most famous tool to build a drag and drop website, but to master it completely, you need to be an expert to make the most out of your website. WordPress Plugin Customization requires a lot of energy, and integrating a blog with an E-Commerce site is always a trouble. However, the beauty of Shopify is that you can easily do this in just one click! That’s how powerful Shopify is!
User-friendliness
As discussed earlier, user friendliness matters a lot when you’re trying to focus more on your business rather than your website. Selecting the best theme, integrating your business, and coming up with a marketing strategy is a lot of work, which companies are already working on. You wouldn’t want to be burdened with developing tools for your website or constantly editing style sheets. You’d want to update your website time to time and make most out of it.
In such cases, it is important to understand that it depends on your budget. Adobe Magento offers countless robust solutions to users, but it is not really user-friendly – you need to be equipped with coding knowledge if you want to build a nice website. However, on the other hand, if you’re using Shopify, you need little to no knowledge of coding. You can simply read through their notes and guidelines and you’ll easily build a strong website for your business. Hence, we can say Shopify is more user friendly than Magento.
Themes
In order to find the best themes, you need to have a keen eye. You need to do some research. Keeping in mind your needs and select the theme accordingly. If we compare the both platforms when it comes to themes; we can safely say that both platforms have hundreds of amazing themes that you can integrate with your website. Professionals and IT experts like to buy premium themes and then customize them to their own needs. In case you’re not hiring an expert to do the job, it is best not to meddle with codes.
You can always scroll through different themes, adjust the colors and insert different kind of color scheming. Along with themes, it is imperative that you understand that your website should not look mundane. Every website should be attractive along with plugins that optimize your website to offer variety of features. There are specific plugins for automated emails, data collection, tag managers, SEO, and much more.
Open Source and Sales Tools
After analyzing tools offered by both platforms, it is safe to say that both platforms are equal to one another. Magento and Shopify both have robust tools to offer when it comes to sales tools. Magento being an open source platform and yet providing the best sales tools is something that is remarkable. However, some say Shopify has better tools and we can agree to disagree with them. Both platforms offer robust Multi-channel selling along with managing inventory from all your stores such as; Amazon, Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram.
The most remarkable feat of both the platforms, i.e. Magento and Shopify is how they have built their amazing inventory management system. Just set your seller center and establish the grounds you want to work with and enjoy the services offered by these platforms.
However, in my point of view, one drawback of Shopify is that in order to integrate payment gateways such as PayPal and Payoneer, you need to pay them a percentage on each sale. This can be a big drag on your business because most businesses are usually working on limited resources while starting out. Magento does not have this problem, you can easily integrate payment gateways, it might be a little technical in Magento, but you won’t have to pay PayPal every time a transaction is made. The normal percentage is more than enough to bear, nothing more than that.
Marketing Made Easy
When you’re running an E-Commerce business, you would want to have a robust platform that offers tons of marketing tools. You need to market your business, even if you’re Nike, if you don’t keep trying to stay in the game, it is evitable that someone will leave you behind. It is best to choose a platform that offers strong marketing tools.
Shopify on one hand, has tons of built-in marketing tools. With Shopify you can run several email marketing campaigns, along with managing your social media campaigns on forums such as Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and others. However, you need to be well-equipped with knowledge that enables you to use Shopify to its utmost capabilities. You might need to research a lot how to use marketing tools offered by Shopify. With Shopify you can also manage sales and analytics that you receive from your social media account.
On the other hand, Magento does not have built-in marketing tools, you need to be well-equipped with coding languages to make sure that the plugins you buy from Magento’s Marketplace sync in with your website. There are several apps such as Remarkety that allows you to run email marketing campaigns, take over your PPC campaigns, and Google Ads. It is important for every business to get in touch with potential clients and you wouldn’t want to do it with weak campaigns.
People say that the ROI of marketing campaigns depends on how you design them, but it is imperative to understand that engagements matter. If you are not able to reach out to your potential clients, are you really doing a justice to your marketing campaigns? There are countless ways to manage your marketing with Shopify and Magento, it depends on how experienced you are to choose the right time and the right platform.
The Most Important – Search Engine Optimization
When it comes to selling online and getting organic visitors on your website, Search Engine Optimization is a must. Search Engine Optimization refers to uploading content on your website and using techniques that help you rank better on Google. Every online business wants to land on the first page on specific keywords.
Let’s say you run an online store that sells carpets, now you’d want your website to show up whenever someone searches best carpets or carpets in New Orleans. In order to rank better, you need to optimize your site according to the algorithm of different search engines.
Coming back to our topic, Shopify does not offer robust Search Engine Marketing tools. Shopify is more dependent on its apps and add-ons when it comes to Search Engine Optimization. Given that we have been recommending that people who have no prior experience of coding use Shopify and then asking them to get an add-on and optimize it for their own need, doesn’t make sense right? Therefore, it is best if Shopify could offer built-in tools for Search Engine Optimization.
Magento straight away wins this one. According to research, websites built using Magento rank better on search engines. You can simply say that Magento is SEO friendly and there is much more that you can do with Magento. Magento automatically generates SEO friendly URLs and you can customize them easily. You don’t need to download plugins to work on your SEO.
Moreover, SEO is a complicated marketing tool and to completely understand it, you need to hire an expert to explain each and everything to you. It is best that if you have a strong budget, you outsource your SEO because organic clients are valued more than anything. You need to understand that there is a vast difference between people being directed towards you from an advertisement and the people who are searching for businesses like yours.
Magento vs. Shopify
In order to end the debate and just for the sake of argument, I’d say Shopify is better than Magento in several ways. Nonetheless, it completely depends on the user and how good he is with the software. If you are someone who is not a professional web developer, I’d recommend you use nothing but Shopify. In the midst of several E-Commerce platforms such as Big Commerce, Woo Commerce, WordPress, Wix, and much more, you must choose the one that fits your need perfectly.
Choose Shopify when you have no prior experience of coding or web development. You will find that without going through the hassle of changing style sheets and scripts, you can make do with drag and drop.
However, if you are a professional and you know how to code, it is best that you optimize your website using a platform like Magento. The primary objective of using Magento is due to its SEO friendly behavior and to be honest that is what matters the most. Companies are spending around more than 5 grands to get their website ranked on the first page of Google.
We advise all our readers to first analyze your situation, go through the pros and cons of every platform and then decide how to tackle the problem at hand – trust me; life will be hell a lot easier this way!