What are the reasons to choose Magento over Shopify? Selecting a perfect eCommerce platform is a risky job. You’re going to invest your hard-earned money and create your business on this platform, and it’s going to describe your business online for the next numerous years.
Tension is coming! But don’t worry. I’m going to try and simplify it for you in this article.
I will give you five reasons to choose Magento over Shopify.
Pull yourself up a chair and let’s talk about. Choosing an e-commerce platform can be a subtle, nuanced process. It often comes down to the smallest difference or feature that makes one direction better than another. There’s no way we can go through everything in a single article.
This article is not a feature comparison. It’s more of five big things that you can look for that if they apply to your business, can make your decision a lot easier. With that in mind, it applies to Shopify, Shopify Plus, Magento Open Source, or Magento Commerce.
This particular article outlines five reasons that Magento might be better for you than Shopify.
Anybody who tells you they’re unbiased is just lying to you. I have my favorite platforms. We’re Magento partners don’t so much with Shopify. However, I’m not going to steer you wrong either. I want you to end up on the platform that is 100% best for you and your business.
Now, these are in no particular order so let’s just get into it.
1. Robust Stability of Magento
The first amazing reason to select Magento over Shopify is if you’re in a controversial or high-risk industry. If you’re an industry, where laws or public sentiment is constantly evolving the open-source nature and flexibility of Magento is going to give you the stability that you can never have on Shopify.
Shopify has a history of allowing businesses to invest and build on their platform only to change their mind and give them weeks to find and migrate to another option, You don’t want that kind of worry and risk.
You need to be thinking long term and that risk is a constant distraction and is not healthy for your business. If you’re in a controversial or high-risk industry like a firearm or vape products, the flexibility that Magento provides, like being able to move to a different host or select a new payment provider, means that someone can’t just tell you no.
Basically, you have options and there’s not just one provider that can completely shut you down.
2. Magento Gives You a Powerful Control
The next reason to choose Magento over Shopify is control. Sometimes you really need control and other times you really just want control. If you’re in heavily regulated industries like pharmaceuticals, it may be necessary for you to have full control over your technology stack.
Perhaps there are certain technologies you want to use like AWS or Azure or you have your own system administrators and want full control over your hosting stack. That makes Magento a no brainer versus Shopify.
I also often talk to merchants that just don’t like or trust SaaS platforms. I don’t really know where this deep-seated hate comes from. They just don’t care for the business model at all. Regardless of any benefit, just not a fan.
3. B2B ECommerce
The next reason to choose Magento over Shopify is b2b. B2b e-commerce is a whole different animal than b2c. Negotiated pricing, quotes, corporate accounts are all things that are the bare minimum to meet customer demands.
The flexibility of Magento also allows you to craft custom user experiences specific to your industry and products if you really want to do b2b right. Magento also has the flexibility needed to handle the most complex data needs.
You can tie it into whatever poorly thought-out and archaic back-office systems you may have cobbled together over the last 20 years.
4. Magento Gives You Flexibility And Scalability
And the next reason to choose Magento over Shopify is flexibility and scalability.
Most e-commerce platforms are designed to provide middle-of-the-road functionality that appeals to a large collection of merchants.
In some cases, that may not provide everything you need to execute on your e-commerce vision. If you’re going to step outside of the norm and build something extremely custom, then you have more options with the flexibility that comes with the open-source nature of the Magento platform.
As far as scalability goes you can build an empire on Magento. Now, before we get into this, I know someone is going to bring up some merchants like Kylie Cosmetics which is a shopping shining example of scale on the platform.
What I’m talking about in this section is not about pure sales. Kylie Cosmetics is a unicorn and is not representative of your business. It has a scale without complexity.
They’re doing hundreds of millions of dollars online with like four employees. Now that may be what you wish your business was like but it aren’t you.
What I’m talking about is the complexity of scale and providing a unified eCommerce experience across that business.
Do you have a chain of physical stores and need to integrate your website’s order management and inventory across these locations? As in, your customers can see the inventory in their local store, order it, and pick it up this afternoon.
Magento can do that. Do you have five or ten international brands that all need e-commerce experiences that are optimized for multiple languages and fully integrated with your back-office systems?
Magento can do that, on one installation. If your business objectives are world domination or your brand has tons of complex issues then Magento will be a perfect choice
5. Innovation, Innovation, Innovation
The next reason to choose Magento over Shopify is innovation. If you want to be ahead of the curve of technology or user experiences then you’re going to need the flexibility that an open-source platform provides.
A big example right now is progressive web apps and headless commerce. There are ways to build a PWA on Shopify. However, unless your needs are basic you’ll eventually run into some feature that needs to be customized or custom-built depending on what it is.
If you’re on a SaaS platform like Shopify, then you may not have the ability to do that customization. So, if you desire to be a leader then open-source is going to be better for you than SaaS, so Magento is going to win over Shopify.
There are a ton of features that you need to consider to ultimately decide which platform is best for you. Hopefully, however, these five things, if they apply to you, make that call just a little bit easier.
Intelvue can upgrade your store from Magento 1 to Magento 2
Magento 1 is reaching its end of life (EOL) as of June 30 2020. We have published an overview guide including Magento official migration tools which helps you to plan your store migration from Magento 1 to Magento 2.
So, are you exhausted from slow functionality, low conversion rates, and pinched features of Magento 1 or don’t have an opportunity to make use of all services provided because of the out-of-date version of your E-commerce store platform?
Make a change and benefit from higher quality features, intensified functionality, and other boosted characteristics of Magento 2.
Intelvue will migrate your online store from Magento 1 to Magento 2 migration service. our team is always ready to help you with this challenge.