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Years ago, if you were looking for an all-singing, all-dancing e-commerce website for your company, you’d be faced with assembling an team of web developers to build you something from scratch.For those of you looking to get up and running fast and cost-effectively, we’ve moved on from there. Nowadays, there are plenty of great platforms available for small and medium businesses that help them to better serve their customers. Two of those platforms are Shopify and Magento Go – and here we’ll pair them off against each other. Here’s how they measure up:
Price
Happily, both Shopify and Magento Go offer a free trial (for 14 days and 30 days respectively) so you can try before you buy. After these periods, both charge monthly fees – Shopify from between £19 and £115 a month and Magento from £9.99 and £79.99. Shopify charges a 1 or 2% transaction fee on all but its most expensive tariff but with unlimited bandwidth, while Magento Go has no transaction fees but a bandwidth limit of 4gb.
Features
We all know that it’s the little things that make a website. And while Magento Go offers a range of slightly more advanced and unique features for reporting and marketing promotions, Shopify is much more simple to use, with a built in blog function that Magento can’t match. So, if you’re looking to tinker loads and want all the backend features, Magento may be best , but if you’re looking for something that gives great results with little effort, Shopify comes up trumps.
Speed
As we’ve just hinted, simple Shopify takes home the bacon when it comes to the rapidity of the system. And thanks to its unlimited bandwidth, it doesn’t matter how much data you upload. When it comes to installation, Magento Go also takes longer to install and set up than its adversary, which utilises its web-based shopping cart to start a store immediately.
Design
Here, Shopify starts to come into its own. Designers and purveyors of all things aesthetic love Shopify as it’s much more adaptable and easy to design for than Magento Go and it allows you to alter HTML, CSS and scripts whereas Magento Go only lets you modify CSS. But while Magento Go offers a thousand more individual themes than its rival, Shopify boasts better quality design bases. Check out Inspired Magazine’s collection of 40 stunning Shopify sites for evidence of how great their themes can look.
Customer service
Unfortunately, things can go wrong with any ecommerce platform and, when they do, you need to speak to experts to alleviate the problem. Shopify is great for that reason – its customer support teams are quicker and tend to offer more detail than Magento Go, while its active online community of like-minded e-commerce users are an absolutely valuable resource if you have a problem.
And at the end of round 5…
Pairing easy, quick usage with great design, Shopify is probably the better option for those small business owners who have neither the time nor the inclination to develop their website into a market-leading model. It may sometimes lack all the bells and whistles found on Magento Go, and lack strong analytical tools (although nothing you couldn’t enjoy with help from Google Analytics), but Shopify is the best option for a small business.
You may have noticed, but here at TheGenieLab we’re passionate about Shopify and what it can do for small businesses. If you’d like a Shopify website that looks great and works well, talk to us today about how we can help. Tweet us @thegenielab, send us a note or call us on 01633 415 364 today.
