Best eCommerce Platforms 2020- Magento vs WooCommerce vs Shopify vs Opencart
Image Credit — Magento
Currently, Magento is one of the most popular as well as one of the most sought-after ecommerce platforms among merchants across the world. Magento offers 2 editions according to the business needs of merchants: Magento open-source edition and the Magento commerce edition.
Not many individuals know that through the Magento platform, merchants from across the world have sold goods and services worth 155 billion dollars which is a staggering figure. When it comes to offering performance, security, and stability at one single place, the Magento ecommerce platform has the trust of millions.
The best part about the Magento platform is it releases new versions on a timely basis to upgrade the platform functionalities and fix loopholes in security. Let’s state the comparison attributes for Magento vs WooCommerce vs Shopify vs WooCommerce vs BigCommerce.
1. Platform Functionalities
Image Credit — Merchantmaverick
- Merchant can integrate different channels, and sell both to businesses and consumers from a single platform.
- It allows merchants to integrate ERP, progressive web application studio, inventory management, shipping, order management, customer service, business intelligence, and the list go on.
- The Magento platform is open and customizable. You can deploy cloud, scale-up platform’s performance, integrate APIs, and scale up the platform’s performance.
2. SEO
On an average, the Magento platform boasts an SEO score between 90 to 95 which is brilliant from the SEO point of view. After Shopify and WooCommerce platforms, Magento SEO score is the second-highest one. The key reason which Magento platform SEO score is ridiculously high is, it is extremely SEO optimized in advance.
Moreover, Magento offers a myriad of SEO settings like meta tags optimization, image optimization, edit robots.txt file, canonical tags for products, etc.
Image Credit — Shopping-cart-migration
3. User-Friendliness
Image Credit — Merchantmaverick
Earlier versions of Magento like Magento 1.X and 2.2.X were not as user-friendly as Shopify is. However, the pristine version of the Magento platform that is Magento 2.3.3 is way more user-friendly and easy to comprehend. Magento is seamless to use for those individuals who have significant technical knowledge. If you want to get conversant with the Magento platform, unlike Shopify, you need to devote a good chunk of your time.
4. Pricing and Additional Costs
If we talk about the pricing of the Magento platform, there are two options for merchants. As we know there are two editions of Magento: community edition and Enterprise edition. The community edition or better say open-source edition of Magento is free to download and use. However, the attributes in the open-source editions are quite fettered. This edition is an ideal choice for small-scale businesses.
Another edition is the enterprise edition which is an exemplary option for large-sized businesses. The pricing of the community edition depends upon the size of your business. Apart from the platform costing, there are hosting charges and plugin charges that you will integrate later to amplify your e-commerce platform performance. Overall, the cost of running an e-commerce platform on the Magento instance is budget-friendly.
5. Customer Service and Support
The degree of customer support varies from Magento’s open-source edition to the Magento commerce edition.
As Magento community edition is free to download and use, its customer support is quite fettered and low. Magento community edition users don’t get full-fledged official support. However, they can find relevant information on the developer’s forum.
But, if you are using enterprise addition, you will receive par excellent customer support and services from Magento technical support.
Pro Tip: If you are using Magento open-source edition, you should have a competent developer to take care of your platform’s security and maintenance because no external support will give by Magento for community edition.
6. Security and Performance
The latest Magento 2.3 version has commendable security and efficacious performance rendering ability. In the new Magento 2.3.3 version, a significant number of security changes and up-gradation have been made to make the security unassailable and impeccable.
Magento 2.3 New Security Features
The newly released Magento 2.3 version boasts top of the line performance. A gargantuan number of enhancements have been made to ensure deriving maximum efficiency and stability from the platform.
Magento 2.3 Performance Features
In a nutshell, you don’t have to worry a bit about the security and performance aspects if you are choosing the latest instance of Magento for running your e-commerce store.
7. User Ratings and Reviews
Image Source — Google
As you can see in the picture, customers have given incredible ratings to Magento products on renowned platforms like Merchant Maverick and Apptha. The ratings and reviews clearly describe the utmost customer satisfaction. Hence, we can say that Magento products are worth-considering for running small and large scale e-commerce businesses.
8. Themes and Designs
Image Credit — Magento
Magento marketplace offers a colossal selection of riveting, highly responsive, and user-friendly themes that are way too exemplary to put on your website. All the themes listed in the Magento marketplace are customizable, affordable, and highly responsive. Apart from the Magento market place, there are other sources like ThemeForest from where you can purchase the coveted Magento theme at a reasonable price.
9. Pros and Cons
Image Credit — WooCommerce
Presumably, WooCommerce is the most utilized and most efficient ecommerce platform in the world. Not many individuals know that WooCommerce is neither a complete content management system nor a complete framework. In actuality, it is a plugin powered and developed by Wordpress and free to use.
WooCommerce is a very convenient, affordable, and a low-key option for those merchants who don’t want to spend a fortune in developing a full-fledged e-commerce platform. One of the key reasons why WooCommerce is massively popular among merchants across the world is its utter simplicity. Any layman can build a website on WooCommerce from scratch and develop an alluring ecommerce store.
According to the 2018 survey conducted by a leading consulting agency, WooCommerce covers 30% of overall ecommerce market share which is a staggering number.
1. Platform Functionalities
Image Credit — Easy-Office
2. SEO
After the Shopify platform, WooCommerce has the highest SEO score. Thanks to the wide range of plugins and customizations, WooCommerce is SEO friendly to a great extent.
As WooCommerce is completely built on the Wordpress platform, it offers immeasurable SEO potential. The SEO score of the WooCommerce is monstrous 97%.
3. User-Friendliness
When it comes to user-friendliness, WooCommerce is second to none. It boasts a par-excellent level of user-friendliness as it is a plugin, not a complete framework. The real challenge in the WooCommerce platform is configuring its store settings and that is quite a strenuous task.
If we talk about the ease of use, WooCommerce is way more easy to use than Magento and Shopify platforms. WooCommerce has quite a seamless and powerful interface that renders users visually breathtaking user-experience.
4. Pricing and Additional Costs
Image Credit — WooCommerce
From the above comprehensive cost-structure of WooCommerce platform hosting, you can find out which plan of WooCommerce hosting is exemplary for you. But, is that it? NO! You totally forget about the WooCommerce plugin and SSL certificate charges. For those who don’t know, the official price of the WooCommerce extension is 29$.
5. Customer Service and Support
Like the Magento community edition, there is quite a limited supported for the WooCommerce ecommerce platform. All merchants and developers get access to the source code, and from there, they can strive issues and raise a concern to WooCommerce support.
Don’t worry, WooCommerce also allows merchants to “submit a support ticket” to get WooCommerce official support for critical issues.
6. Security and Performance
No merchant would like to compromise a bit when it comes to the security of their ecommerce platform.WooCommerce platform offers commendable security features to protect merchants’ data and other crucial information. However, sometimes, you can witness severe vulnerabilities and human errors which can be easily rectified if given proper during the initial stage of problems.
7. Themes and Designs
Image Credit — WooCommerce
WooCommerce definitely has upper hands over Magento and Shopify when it comes to responsive and captivating themes and designs. By using merely, a plugin, you can set your coveted themes on the WooCommerce shop in no time. Moreover, you can also utilize any Wordpress theme with the right plugin.
WooCommerce offers a colossal selection of themes and beautiful templates that are easy to implement in your store. If you don’t want to purchase a theme, not an issue. You can also utilize the WooCommerce own default theme named Storefront which is quite efficient and eyeballs grabbing like any other theme.
8. User Ratings and Reviews
Image Credit — Wordpress
It is quite clear from the images that a great chunk of the users has given excellent reviews to WooCommerce and its services. Highly recommended!
9. Pros and Cons
Image Credit — Shopify
Shopify is one of the leading ecommerce companies in the world. By many, Shopify is acknowledged as the best platform for running the ecommerce business and retail point-of-sale system. Currently, Shopify ecommerce platform services are utilized by more than 1,000,000 business owners worldwide and the numbers are rising at a staggering rate.
Shopify renders you full control over all your website coding (HTML and CSS). Moreover, Shopify is heavily preferred by business owners because of its unique and efficacious functionalities. One of the striking features of Shopify is it has recently integrated with Amazon which allows merchants to sell products on Amazon through Shopify Admin Panel.
1. Platform Functionalities
Image Credit — FinancesOnline
2. SEO
When we talk about the best SE0 score of prominent ecommerce platforms, Shopify is second to none. Shopify has an outstanding SEO score of 98–100 that is way above all the prevailing ecommerce platforms.
Moreover, the Shopify platform encloses all the SEO features like the inclusion of Title tags, meta tags, ALT tags, Page URLs optimization, image optimization, and the list go on.
3. User-Friendliness
By leaps and bounds, Shopify is the most user-friendly ecommerce platform among all. Shopify has the most seamless user-experience, drag and drop options, easy to edit a theme that allows merchants to create par-excellent user-experience for their customers.
Shopify has an engulfing and easy to navigate admin panel for merchants. For the users, the shopping experience is as good as any goliath ecommerce platform.
4. Shopify Pricing and Cost
Image Credit — Shopify
Shopify offers 14 days of free trial for merchants to get conversant with the Shopify platform before using it in a full-fledged manner. The best thing about the free trial period is you don’t have to feed any payment information to utilize the free version.
The basic plan of Shopify ecommerce begins with 29$ and it goes up to 299$ for the advance version. Considering the attributes in Shopify’s different pricing plans, the amount is worth investing in setting up a Shopify ecommerce store.
5. Customer Service and Support
Here is another pointer in which Shopify has a massive upper hand among all its competitors. Shopify provides 24/7 support to its customers, and they can connect with the Shopify support team via phone, email, chat, or social media channels.
In addition to that, Shopify renders valuable advice to its merchants on a timely basis regarding the platform maintenance and guidelines to ensure your ecommerce store remains free from glitches.
6. Security and Performance
Shopify is as safe as any top-notch ecommerce platform. Not only that, according to the recent research conducted by a leading consulting agency, Shopify is considered to be the most secure ecommerce platform by most of the merchants.
At various prominent platforms, most of the merchants have given no less than 5 stars to Shopify security and performance.
7. Themes and Designs
Image Credit — Shopify
Shopify has a fabled theme store from where you can purchase a highly responsive, SEO-friendly, and enriching user-experience theme for your store out of 100 of themes. Shopify offers approximately 10 free website templates. The price of paid themes in the Shopify theme store starts at $140.
8. User Ratings and Reviews
Image Credit — FinancesOnline
In the above-mentioned image, you can clearly see the average ratings and reviews given by customers to Shopify ecommerce services. This clearly states that customers are more than happy when using the Shopify ecommerce platform for running their online business. In a nutshell, Shopify is a highly recommended platform for running an ecommerce business without much of a hitch.
9. Pros and Cons
Image Credit — Opencart
If you want to run a small scale or mid-size business, none of the platforms can cater to your online business needs as much as Opencart. It is a free and open-source ecommerce platform built on a PHP framework that gives merchants an added advantage. Opencart offers the highest number of customization options as compared to other ecommerce platforms to scale up your business.
The basic installation of the Opencart store doesn’t involve any add-ons. However, to amplify your business growth, you need to purchase the paid version of Opencart that encloses numerous add-ons and attributes.
Not many merchants know that Opencart 2.0 allows merchants to access the admin panel through admin. Approximately, 1 million websites are using Opencart ecommerce functionalities to run their online business in a full-fledged manner.
1. Platform Functionalities
Image Credit — FinancesOnline
2. SEO
Though the SEO score of Opencart is significantly low as compared to other ecommerce platforms, the SEO score of the Opencart SEO score can be optimized by making pivotal adjustments in the title, meta description, keywords, and alt tags in images.
You need a moderate level of technical knowledge to perform SEO optimization in an Opencart ecommerce store.
3. User-Friendliness
When it comes to user-friendliness, Opencart ranks way higher than most of the ecommerce platforms. The interface and user-experience of the Opencart platform are highly engulfing and responsive. The user-friendliness is more than the Magento platform but a bit less than the WooCommerce platform.
Even if you don’t have a smidgen of knowledge of coding, you can still make significant changes in Opencart to configure your store as per your preferences.
4. Opencart Pricing and Cost
Though it is clearly mentioned on the home page of the Opencart website that it is a free and open-source platform, it doesn’t mean every functionality is free to use.
To run the store in a full-fledged manner, you need to spend a significant chunk of money on buying the hosting domain name, hosting, SSL certificate, plugins, and responsive themes.
5. Customer Service and Support
Image Credit — Opencart
To stand apart from the competitors, Opencart renders top of the line and two types of support: community support and dedicated support. If you are using the free and open-source platform, you can get the support for free. However, when using the advanced version, you have to pay for the dedicated support to rectify your technical issues. Opencart doesn’t offer24/7 support to its customers.
6. Security and Performance
For merchants, the security of their ecommerce store is the foremost concern. A single glitch in the overall security can debilitate the website performance in no time. Overall, the security of the Opencart platform is quite satisfactory. However, the major concern arises when you use the Opencart extensions. Most of the Opencart extensions are developed by third-party CMS and have not been much scrutinized by the Opencart technical team. It ultimately puts the question make on Opencart extensions credibility.
The performance of the Opencart ecommerce platform is quite similar to other ecommerce giants.
7. Themes and Templates
Image Credit — Opencart
Opencart offers a towering number of themes and templates as per your business domain. From clothes and apparel to food and beverages, home accessories, tech, and gadgets, you can find a huge number of professional themes at a nominal price on the Opencart theme store.
Both free and paid themes are available that are highly responsive, riveting in appearance, and SEO friendly. You should have a basic knowledge of the HTML, CSS, and Javascript to run the store and implement the themes and extensions properly. In addition to that, you can find an astonishing selection of themes and extensions for Opencart on third party sources.
8. User Ratings and Reviews
Image Credit — Trustradius
9.Pros and Cons
Based on the above stated meticulous analysis, you can easily figure out which platform is exemplary to run your ecommerce business. So, what are you waiting for? Give your business a stellar growth by choosing the best ecommerce platform for 2020.
Originally published at https://www.emizentech.com.
