For the longest time, Magento has been the go-to platform for ecommerce brands. You might have opted for it before, but it might no longer be an ideal choice for your growing customers, interaction, and transactions. Therefore, migration to other platforms, such as Shopify, could be an obvious choice.
Though it is one of the popular ecommerce platforms powering almost 200,000 ecommerce stores globally, Magento is far from perfect. As Magento-to-Shopify migrations occur, marketers have witnessed first-hand the advantages offered by a SaaS program like Shopify Plus. A report claiming that 65% of ecommerce businesses prefer Shopify stores for selling their products or services is big proof of this ecommerce revolution.
Why Has Shopify Plus Become a Preferred Choice?
The reason behind the migration could be the ease of operating on Shopify’s manageable platform, incorporating:
- More API integrations
- Access to theme code
- Exclusive apps
- Analytics reports like Customer Lifetime Value, Average Order Value, Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate, Bounce Rate, and Click Through Rate
Thanks to its ease-of-use, Shopify is ideal for ecommerce businesses for businesses that have just begun. With Shopify Plus, the users get a similar solution, so it pretty much retains its core application but adds more robust features such as API resources, customizable resources, organization admin, etc. For numerous reasons, Shopify has become a better option in a fast-growing digital space. Before we dig into the ‘whys’, let us quickly explore the difference between the two platforms.
What is the Difference Between Magento and Shopify Plus?
Magento is an open-source technology ecommerce platform featuring built-in PHP that offers programmers to create ecommerce websites. In addition, it provides online merchants the liberty of customization, search engine optimization, robust marketing, and catalog-management tools for the efficient functionality of online stores.
On the other hand, Magento has some nice digital tools, but Shopify is more scalable and can change as online retailers grow and expand or change their approach over time. We’ll expand on these details below.
Shopify’s monthly costs are significantly lower than Magento’s fees. For example, Shopify’s Basic plan costs $29 per month, while Magento’s Community Edition is free, but the developers need to develop it from scratch, so the cost of development and maintenance is high, demanding additional expenses. As a result, Shopify is more affordable in the long run.
To give you a better understanding, we have made a table that points out the differences between the two in terms of features and price:
| Parameters | Shopify Plus | Magento |
|---|---|---|
| Customization | Available via custom applications | Fully customizable platform |
| Support | Includes IT Support | Brands offer their own |
| Web Hosting | Included | Brands offer their own |
| Multi-shop Inventory Capabilities | Not Supported | The Same catalog can be used across several stores |
| Baseline Cost | Starts at $22,000/- per year | Starts at $24,000/- per year |
| Transaction Amount | 0.15% per transaction via third-party payment | None |
| Additional Cost | Set-up, transaction cost, app development | Set-up, hosting, development, maintenance |
What Are the Reasons for Magento-to-shopify Migrations?
If you see the difference between the two, you will see that the highlight of one is customizability while the other is user-friendliness and scalability. So why do online brands switch from Magento to Shopify (or Shopify Plus)? A few reasons, actually, and that is what we will decode!
- Business Scalability
As online transactions have skyrocketed, ecommerce businesses are experiencing unimaginable development. In order to cater to the increasing demands of consumers of today’s digital world, they want a platform that can flex and evolve and grow over time to handle the ever-changing flow of ecommerce traffic, but without interfering with the ongoing flow of business in the meantime.
Using Magento requires businesses to make a prediction of the highest traffic that their website might come across and upgrade the site based on that. Shopify doesn’t need site owners to do anything like that. Instead, it provides a broader bandwidth, allowing the platform to accept around 10,000 orders within an hour. Apart from that, site owners can downgrade or upgrade their website’s capacity depending on the traffic, something that Magneto does not allow.
Site owners can also get several important plugins via the Admin dashboard. With a wide range of API offerings by Shopify, it is natural for businesses to shift from Magento to Shopify Plus as Magento doesn’t have plugins and API offerings.
- Option of customization
Although Magento uses experienced designers that allow retailers to have a nice-looking website, Shopify allows customization on most aspects of your website. As a result, it provides more opportunities for business to tailor their websites directly to their target audience.
- Community Support
While both Magento and Shopify Plus consist of teams of efficient developers and designers, the latter offers businesses the chance to use the Shopify Plus Partner Program. It helps businesses to get in touch with the experts directly for questions and help topics.
For a busy ecommerce business, the basic version of Shopify offers convenience and user-friendliness. Therefore, it does not demand much development work compared to the basic versions of other platforms such as WooCommerce and BigCommerce.
In the partner program, businesses can access shared resources such as forums, expert commentary, retail strategies and other helpful information that might help them with the challenging decisions they might be facing. Whether those decisions are about when or how to scale, how to re-design a site or other areas of interest. Shopify has a well-researched and carefully curated system, with each app vetted by the platform to ensure it is reliable and available.
- Convenience of Usage
Magento is outdated and requires more hands-on work. On the other hand, Shopify is more up-to-date and easy to use, saving companies time and money on the development side of the equation.
Moreover, with Shopify Plus, your online business store won’t take long to develop and can be operational in less than three months, thanks to the availability of pre-built themes. So, even someone with no coding abilities can set up a store. On the other hand, with Magento, it takes around six to twelve months to build a store on the platform and demands proper coding knowledge. So, it can be a long and exhausting process.
- Better Data Security
Along with all the perks that the digital revolution has brought, it has also brought the rise of cybercrimes which is why there is always a constant threat of data breaches. If studies are to be believed, small and medium-scale businesses are the primary target of almost half of all cyber attacks, while one-third of all attacks are focused on ecommerce stores.
For all these reasons, having a trustworthy security system for your business has become pivotal. Simply put, for any growing or sustainable ecommerce business, security is a natural priority. Shopify wins here, too, because its security offerings are better than Magento because Shopify comes with Built-in fraud protection, a free SSL certificate and PCI-DSS compliance.
There you have it! Now you know the crucial information about migrating from Magento to Shopify Plus.
Concluding Two-cents
Magento is an ideal PaaS, especially if you have a large enterprise business with a big budget and need unlimited customization features. However, Shopify Plus is a good SaaS solution for small enterprise businesses with limited budgets.
Now that you know how both platforms are, you can opt for the best one to help scale your business and prosper in the future.
For those newer to ecommerce or who want to have hands-on in customizing their website, Shopify Plus is an ideal solution. It is affordable, convenient to use, and quite challenging to break.