Whether you own a small business or looking for some ways to grow your huge business by exploring new options, the decision of picking the right eCommerce for your eCommerce store should not be taken lightly.
If you are curious to know how to set up your eCommerce business, just remember that you should pick the best and suitable eCommerce platform. Comparing Magento vs Shopify vs BigCommerce is an amazing edge to start, after all, these eCommerce platforms hold their unique value propositions.
Magento For Your Ecommerce Store
Traditionally, a better option for giants, Magento offers enterprise-level features right outstanding. It provides a customizable, comprehensive solution to assist businesses to develop the site they need. With Magento Commerce, you will be required to have entire control of your eCommerce website. Routinely, Magento updates its platform, so one can expect to perform manual patches and the bugs updates, periodically.
Magento Open Source is targeted at offering basic performance and the features required to run an eCommerce store. Functionally, it is limited, but you are allowed to purchase extensions to meet your unique requirements. Remember that while Magento Open Source is free to use, it needs some technical knowledge to install and run it.
Shopify For Your Ecommerce Store
An amazing option for business owners with no technical and coding experience, Shopify is easy to set up. As compared to others, Shopify is less customizable, but lets you know that coding is often needed to completely personalize an eCommerce store.
As it is much easier to set up, the businesses can achieve faster time to market. Moreover, it holds a complete App Store with the tools that you can integrate to strengthen the functionality of your store.
Bigcommerce For Your Ecommerce Store
One more, easy-to-use platform, BigCommerce can be customized further that demands some technical understanding and a little higher learning curve. BigCommerce can assist the complex and large catalogs for the stores with extra products. Furthermore, it permits customization of the metadata for strong SEO performance.
Breakdown: Magento vs Shopify vs BigCommerce
Today, we are here to offer you a brief about these eCommerce platforms (mentioned above), so let’s get deeper to know about their details and get the information you require to emerge with the right decision.
Pricing
For an eCommerce platform, your budget will assist in contracting your choices as some eCommerce platforms are much more expensive than others. When attempting to decide, remember to consider the cost, not just the starting price but also security, maintenance, and hosting cost also.
Magento – Expensive
Magento Enterprise Edition comes with a support package but is much more expensive. Your quote will rely on the complexity and size of your business along with the annual pricing ranging between $22,000 to $125,000.
Shopify – Affordable
Moreover, Shopify holds several pricing models that depend on the complexity of the business, but its Basic Plan starts at $29, which holds the fewest features. Whereas, the advanced plans range between $79-$299 a month. Designed specifically for larger businesses, the Shopify Plus plan starts at approximately $2000 per month.
BigCommerce – Affordable
One more affordable eCommerce platform, BigCommerce comes with various options at distinct prices. BigCommerce Essentials, the basic plan starts at $29.00 per month, and the advanced ones range between $79 and $249.
Ease of Use
One more essential factor is how easy is the eCommerce platform to use for you and your team. Your team needs to be well-versed with the platform quickly, get about how to use its features, and make complete use of it.
Magento – Complex
The learning curve of Magento is quite steep, but it’s because it is crafted to offer flexibility to the merchants and fit best in various customization scenarios. Being an owner of a large store, you are required to have the required Magento skills to use it.
Shopify – Easy
In customization to leave behind all the restrictions, Shopify offers user-friendliness to its users. Furthermore, it permits you to easily alter the basic attributes of the online store with its easy tools and drag-and-drop interface.
BigCommerce – Easy
A beginner-friendly eCommerce platform, BigCommerce is like Shopify. With BigCommerce you can launch your store within minutes. Just remember that it doesn’t permit any sort of customization.
Theme Selection
After the ease-of-use and pricing factors, let’s now move onto theme selection concern. The first impression is the last, so be sure that your store is fully functional and clean.
Magento – None On-Site
Magento doesn’t offer any themes as part of the native software. Also, it doesn’t come with a selection of themes for the customers to choose from.
Shopify – Hundreds
Shopify provides themes that are either free or paid. Such Shopify themes are mobile-optimized and integrated easily with your store whichever you pick.
BigCommerce – Hundreds
Furthermore, BigCommerce arrives with hundreds of templates that are fully customizable, be they free or premium ones.
Hosting
One of the biggest differences that may assist in distinguishing these platforms is hosting. Where does your eCommerce platform host on-site, 3rd-party, or cloud-based?
Magento: On-Site, Third-Party, or Cloud-Based.
Magento can be hosted on-site, and through a 3rd-party, or in the cloud also. Magento is not a SaaS but is a PaaS (platform-as-a-service), that’s why it will handle it on your behalf.
Shopify: Cloud-Based
Completely cloud-based, Shopify’s hosting is embraced with your subscription. This states that you will not be required to search for any third-party hosting and face the challenges of handling it.
BigCommerce: Cloud-Based
Moreover, BigCommerce runs off of the cloud, and best-in-class performance and hosting are embraced with your subscription. You are not required to deal with searching for hosting or even dealing with downtime as BigCommerce needs an industry-leading 99.9% uptime.
Security
eCommerce websites can’t afford to be sensitive to attacks that can also compromise customer data and may also break the faith in their stores. eCommerce websites differ in how much security you will be taking on.
Magento – Rely on your Standards
Well, it depends on you how you make your Magento website secure. Magento is as secure as the developers make it. It will craft patches for common security risks. Although, it depends on your team to keep your website updated.
Shopify – Secure
One of the best parts of a SaaS solution is that it includes security. Shopify attains all six categories belonging to PCI standards and embraces SSL security on their hosted websites.
BigCommerce – Highly Secure
Being a SaaS offering, BigCommerce also offers various layers of robust security for all the websites they host. Moreover, it holds SSL security, DDOS protection, blazing-fast speed, 99.9% uptime sitewide, and is also level PCI-1 compliant.
Features
All businesses will hold distinct priorities and needs. If you are a B2B seller, you may need the options for distinct customer groups or, relying on your industry, you may want to provide many payment gateways or the shipping options to be ahead of the competitors. Let’s go through a quick rundown.
Magento – Feature-Rich
Magento clutches a wide part of features, embracing its support for the large product catalogs along with various variants, upselling and cross-selling, and native product bundles and group features. The users also hold access to add-ons and extensions.
Shopify – Some Native Features
Shopify comes with some native features along with other functionality through 3rd-party apps all through their app store. You should be clear of which features you will need and add up the prices of the necessary apps to accomplish what you need so that you can know your total ownership cost.
BigCommerce – Feature-Rich
BigCommerce provides an extensive number of native features that can completely save money for businesses by not depending on various 3rd-party apps.
Which eCommerce Platform Is the Best?
There exist no one-size-fits-all eCommerce platform, however, some perform for various use cases as compared to others. It’s important to come up with a platform that is best fit for you today, and in your future also.
Magento – Comes with various resources & best for Big Teams
If you hold a well-established business that clutches a large budget to offer eCommerce and many developer resources to put for website set-up and maintenance, then you can pick Magento.
Shopify – Best for small business owners who wants to get online
Shopify provides amazing features for the one who doesn’t hold experience in developing storefronts online. It is best for businesses that only need to take their small business online and keep it up and running.
BigCommerce – Best for both small and large shops
It is the right fit for the all-sized business and specifically for those who are looking to flourish more. This eCommerce platform provides the best eCommerce features, perfect customer support, best-in-class uptime, and strong security.
Wrapping Lines
There are a plethora of eCommerce platforms to pick from, but it’s not like only Magento, Shopify, and BigCommerce are some of the top names in the business.
We hope that our aforementioned guide has assisted you in understanding a few of the important differences and helped you come up with the best fit for your business. You should hire the best eCommerce development company that has the best eCommerce developers who are always ready to create unique and innovative eCommerce stores.