Has Magento Go outshined Shopify?

January 11th 2013

The tech savvy world of today has made it possible for individuals to virtually establish any kind of online business through the internet. But to carry out your business successfully over the internet, launching a web portal is not enough. You need to do a lot of homework before choosing the right eCommerce platform for your Business. A fully functional web portal makes the brand identity of your business, hence if it is in the infant stages, then choosing the right platform with the right functionality plays a significant role in making your online presence a huge success. The two widely used eCommerce platforms, Magento Go and Shopify offer a wide range of advantages to its customers apart from boasting of some great features. Both the platforms excel in their respective positions. However, a comparative study between them can give you a clear perspective on deciding which of these platforms will suit your online business the best.

Power of eCommerce solution

A few years ago, developing a web portal was a painstaking job for the web developers. Building a website from the scratch was time consuming as well as costly. But, thanks to the development of eCommerce solution, which has made it quite easy for them to make an eCommerce portal in a limited span of time. You can easily purchase and customize the eCommerce elements for your eStrore instead of wasting your efforts in developing them from the grass root level.

eCommerce sites can be of two types: the SaaS solutions and the self hosted solutions

The SaaS based websites undoubtedly enjoys many benefits over the self hosted ones as it does not need any separate hosting providers, but several renowned eCommerce solution providers like, Magento and Shopify have used the self hosted platform to host their websites by making certain changes under its hosting environment.

Similarities between Magento Go and Shopify

The top notch eCommerce solution providers, Magento Go and Shopify are self hosted solutions that share some common features apart from some similarities in security as well as consistency. These features include:

One can easily manage the products of one’s e-Stores through both the platforms by adding, removing or editing them from the backend.
Both the platform offers easy and flexible shipping options that could be put down by setting the weight, price or quantity of the products.
Both Shopify and Magento Go allow its users to add additional pages to their web portal which might not be related to shopping, for instance the pages for About Us, Our Services, etc.
By using these given platforms, one could track the inventory of one’s eStore as well as check out the reports related to the sales.
Both the platforms offer an array of free and paid themes for developing customized web portals.
By seeking eCommerce solutions from Magento Go and Shopify, the online traders can keep track of their costumers’ details.

As both the solutions have a number of same features it is quite hard to determine which is the best one. So, to analyze it further, let us go a step ahead in finding the differences between the two, that might prove helpful in seeking the right platform for your eStore.

Website layout:- As compared to Shopify’s 16 free themes, Magento Go offers only 11 themes for free. However, it has nearly 1900 premium themes that can be purchased from Magento Connect store, while Shopify has only 100 paid themes to offer to its users, which can be bought from the Shopify theme store.
Pricing:- One can avail the services of Shopify at a minimum price of 29 USD per month along with a bonus amount of 2% as its transaction fee, while Magento Go provides its service at a monthly subscription of 15 USD without any additional transaction fees.
Customizations: Shopify offers more flexibility to its customers as compared to Magento Go. When it comes to modifying the store design of Shopify one can easily access through its HTML and CSS files along with other scripts, whereas Magento Go provides access only to its CSS files for modifications.

Magento Go supports custom URLs with customized tags of titles, product description or for keywords, but in the standard version of Shopify, there is no scope product specification or keyword insertion.
Newsletter:- Magento Go features an inbuilt newsletter which makes it easy for the business owners to send updated information to its customers from time to time, while Shopify does not include it.
Consumer Accounts:- One can create a purchaser account with Shopify based websites only when any purchases from the site is done, but with Magento Go, the consumer can create his account whenever he / she wishes regardless of making any purchases.

Conclusion

From the above analysis, we get a balanced view about both the platforms. But, it is for you to decide which of these platform will serve your purpose.