Shopify Review and Alternatives Suggestions

Selecting the most suitable e-commerce platform for creating, managing and maintaining an e-commerce website is critically important, as it can be the factor responsible the success or failure of your business. Choosing the proper e-commerce platform can be challenging as today’s market offers thousands of options.

To make your store highly profitable you have to pick the shopping cart that meets your initial needs and also gives you the required functionality to develop. To relieve you of burden of choice, we prepared the top trending e-commerce platforms comparison: Shopify, WooCommerce and Magento However, out of all the listed platforms Shopify offers one of the best e-commerce website templates and platforms when you take pricing, template options, customer support, and ease-of-use into consideration. (The photo above is from <https://static.pexels.com/>)

Introduction

Shopify: It's the first entrant to the list because of its huge popularity among the ecommerce developers. It's one of the simplest and most used platforms that allow setup an online store effortlessly. It's quick installation; functions, flexibility, fast loading speed and secure payment gateway stand it apart from others. Along with this, it automatically generates an XML sitemap and allows titles or Meta Tags to prevent duplicity to make an SEO-friendly website. (Photo above is from <https://commons.wikimedia.org/>).

WooCommerce: It's a second best option for your ecommerce website, which is totally customizable and offers you a shopping cart and payment gateway, to make purchasing easier for buyers. It's one of the most used WordPress Plugins, which is absolutely free to use and offer countless benefits for your online storefront. (Photo above is from <https://www.flickr.com/>).

Magento: It's the world's most popular ecommerce platform, which can easily get fit into the needs of small or large enterprises and make it the most scalable platform on this list. It's an open source platform and therefore, free to use, which increase its reputation among many developers around the world. Moreover, it'll give you the best solution, which you're looking for your online store with its countless benefits. (Photo above is from <https://www.whatech.com/>).

OK now, let’s take a look at Pro and Cons of each platform to find out why Shopify is mostly preferred.

User-friendliness

Shopify is super user-friendly. It’s drag-and-drop interface, simple tools, easy theme editing will ensure a seamless user experience even to eCommerce newbie. Polished and stylish, Shopify admin panel is a good example to be followed by other eCommerce market's solutions. Talking about customers, their buying experience is seamless with uncomplicated steps to check out too.

To be honest, Magento, unlike Shopify, isn't so user-friendly. With the release of Magento 2.0 the platform became much more comprehensible, it's still a rather an obscure (roughly speaking) solution. Magento isn't the best option for those who have only basic or limited tech knowledge, but if you choose it, be prepared to spend some time learning the basics of this platform.

WooCommerce can boast of its high level of user-friendliness and ease of use on a daily basis. However, it’s a bit more challenging than Shopify, while setting a store. WooCommerce is a plugin, not a subscription-based solution like Shopify, which means that you need to handle a couple of things before you getting to work with WooCommerce itself. After all, WooCommerce is less complicated and easier in use than Magento.

Prices and extra costs

Shopify offers 14-day free trial, after that you need to buy a monthly subscription, where the prices start from <$29 for basic plan>. It’s worth mentioning, that you have to pay the credit card rate; maximum is 2.9%+30 cents per purchase. The other option is to use online payments. You’ll pay nothing for transactions via Shopify payment system, yet you'll need to pay up to 2% using external payment gateways e.g. PayPal. It's going to be a bit expensive to maintain a store since monthly fees will scale up with the revenue growing proportionally.

When it comes to pricing, Magento can offer two options. There is Magento CE (Community Edition), which is free for download and use. Furthermore, you don’t need any monthly subscription. It's the perfect choice for small or medium sized businesses. Another option is Magento EE or the Enterprise Edition. It's ideal for large businesses and the price depends on the size of your business. To find out the specific price for your store, you have to contact with Magento specialists to request for a quote. Magento is free, but considering the fact that lots of the plugins are available for extra cost, you'll have to fork out. Furthermore, you'll need to pay monthly fee to your hosting provider. Considering Magento's resource intensity, it won't cost you cheap, probably.

WooCommerce is a free eCommerce plugin with free updates. But if you need more than just basic options, WooCommerce offers priced extensions for SEO, more payment gateways and and others. WooCommerce official extension pricing starts from $49 per one.

SEO Friendly

SEO is every success to ecommerce. Shopify is highly SEO-optimized. It includes main needed SEO features in all plans: editable title tags, meta descriptions, pages URLs, ALT tags for images, customizable image file names, etc. According to a research carried out by <ecommerce-platforms.com>, Shopify SEO score is 98 out of 100.

Magento is extremely SEO-optimized and offers extensive SEO functionality. You need to be familiar with the optimization principles; nothing goes "preconfigured" with Magento. Lots of SEO settings are available in Magento out of the box. Among them are meta tags for products and home pages, images optimization, canonical tags for categories and products, edits of robot.txt files, etc. According to <ecommerce-platforms.com> research, Magento SEO scores 100 out of 100, which is an amazing result!

WooCommerce is totally SEO-friendly, thanks to a wide range of customizations and access to a source code of your store. WooCommerce simply takes advantage of WordPress content integration, or what's available through third-party plugins. As a result, WooCommerce gives you extremely SEO-specific options. It's mostly due to the fact that WooCommerce is built on top of WordPress, which offers unlimited SEO potential. According to <ecommerce-platforms.com>, WooCommerce SEO scores 98 out of 100.

ECommerce Templates and Design

Shopify has a big, imagery theme store where you can find beautifully designed and responsive e-business templates. Still, because Shopify is a hosted shopping cart, you'll have limited customization options. Currently, Shopify offers you 9 Free Website templates and the prices for paid themes start from $140.

Due to its popularity, Magento has wide range of templates. The main parts of theme in <Magento extension store> are user friendly, customizable and responsive design to any devices. Currently, there're 121 themes available for free on Magento Connect and, what's unbelievable, the prices for paid theme extensions start from $0.01. The average price is $80-$100. By the way, you can get amazing free or paid Magento templates from other template marketplaces e.g. ThemeForest or Template Monster. In addition, you can find beautiful templates in places like ThemeForest. There're thousands of Woo designs.

To be honest, WooCommerce has a serious advantage over Shopify and Magento when it comes to designs. What does it mean? Setting aside specific WooCommerce themes, you can make any WordPress theme work with your plugin. There're tens of those templates on the web. Therefore, in most cases, you're able to select any WordPress theme you want, and make it work together with WooCommerce. The best option is to start your WooCommerce store from Woo’s own default online store theme called <Storefront> (available for free). This theme is really efficient creation that puts focus on all important elements of an eCommerce store. It helps you sell more effectively.

Customer Support

This is where Shopify standout among other platforms It offers 24/7 responsive customer support to its users. You can reach the support team via email, phone or <live chat>. If anything happens, you'll be sure that someone is going to solve your issue. In addition, Shopify helps the merchants to maintain the platform in good shape through different guides and tuts available on the website. I want to mention that the Shopify live chat is super useful, you can ask any question and get back the answer in a second from a real person, after it, they'll keep contacting with you via email in case you need further help.

Using open-source platform implies that you're familiar with many problems that can occur. Moreover, you can find the needed information on developer forums. Because of the free and open architecture nature, Magento CE users don't have access to official support services of platform. Thankfully, Magento has an extensive developer community. And nearly every platform-related question is already answered. However, users of paid Enterprise Edition, may count on Magento provided technical support. It'll help to avoid searching answers in the infinity of community forum threads. Again, if you choose Magento, you need to take care of your personal or your developer’s capability to maintain the platform without official support. Though, Magento provides special free and paid educational courses, which could be helpful in understanding platform’s features better.

There's only some limited support from Automatic due to the plugin’s open system architecture. Similar to Magento, you can edit the source code and try to solve issues on your own or you can appeal to WordPress forums. However, WooCommerce enables you to “submit a support ticket” at WooCommerce.com and get support there.

Conclusion

Sorting through these different e-commerce platforms and their features, it seems that Shopify and Magneto go head-to-head. Both are cheap and have a free trial version. Although the Magneto E-commerce plan sounds like a big winner but due to the popularity of Shopify among online stores users and its friendly feature to operate as well as modifying designs makes it dedicated to helping online stores.

Magento has the capacity to be a really fantastic shopping cart, depending on your needs. Magento offers strong features and customizability at a very low price. Once you get over the learning curve and enormous implementation headache, Magento smooths out impressively. The features and scaling potential of Magento makes it a top pick for plenty of mid-sized and large businesses around the globe. If you have room in the budget for a kick-butt web designer, Magento will open up nicely. And if you have web experience under your belt, Magento may be the right choice for you.

However, I can't comfortably recommend Magento to you. Magento is considerably more difficult to set up and maintain. Many users may find that they’re overwhelmed in the process. If you’re looking for a totally user-friendly cart with solid design, Shopify is just a better fit. Shopify covers all the bases, from tech to aesthetics, so you have the freedom to run your business and not your website.

If you’re ready to know more, take <Shopify> and <Magento> for a trial run to see which cart is the better fit for your business.

So ready to sell online but no idea on what to sell? Check out my another blog post <Terapeak Category Research Function for Amazon and eBay eCommerce Marketing>, it can help you figure out.