E-commerce websites are the ideal junction of buyers and sellers. Businesses and sellers now don’t need to worry about how to expand their products and services to the maximum audience as websites are accessible beyond boundaries and customers can also buy their choice of products by placing an order from anywhere at any time.
The craze of e-commerce websites has led to the rise of a challenging situation among the developers to choose from thousands of e-commerce platforms available in the market. The primary condition of an online store is to develop the proper functionality to make the site user-friendly.
Among so many options available in the market, developers are in praise for two most trending platforms Shopify and Magento for developing online retail websites.
Let’s focus on some in-depth characteristics of these two platforms that make them unique among others.
Shopify
Advantages:
• Shopify is considered as the most reliable e-commerce website for building an easy to use online retail website.
• Shopify offers easy coding in HTML and CSS.
• Website built on Shopify platform is user-friendly with easy drag and drop interface and many such simple features that offer the user a seamless user experience.
• Shopify powered e-commerce sites offer the customer uncomplicated experience in buying and checking out.
• Shopify takes few minutes to set up a complete e-commerce store.
• The platform is ideal for non-technical people and small businesses as it is a hosted platform one don’t need to update the modules or worrying about the technical complications.
• With the simple interface, Shopify offers the retailers to easily create and manage categories, to add products without causing any major complications.
• For SEO optimization Shopify is the ideal among all other platforms in the market. It offers the SEO professionals to edit ‘title’, ‘tags’, ‘meta description’, ‘pages’ etc.
• Shopify offers 24*7 active customer support. Customers with issues can reach the support team anytime through e-mail, chat, and phones.
• Retailers also get guided by Shopify to keep their website in a good form.
Disadvantages:
• Though Shopify offers more than thousand themes and templates but the price range of premium theme is quite high.
• The advanced plan of Shopify though provides the retailers to make promotions and offers, the basic plan does not support discount and sales.
Magento
Advantages:
• Magento is ideal for tech-savvy online retailers for creating unlimited opportunities.
• Magento offers the retailers to manage the servers on their own where they can make changes according to the requirement.
• Magento offers the most cost-effective options in choosing themes and templates which are quite a user- friendly and responsive to any designs.
• The basic version of Magento helps in making better sales by offering cross-selling, up-selling and product comparison features.
• Magento is extremely SEO optimized.
• Magento is ideal for large businesses and requires a one-time investment on server and store development.
Disadvantages:
• For non-technical people choosing Magento is a total thumb down as the platform is not that user- friendly.
• Magento is free but one may have to bear extra cost for the plug-ins in addition to paying monthly fees to the hosting provider.
• The major drawbacks of Magento are the lack of active customer support system. One may find it difficult to resolve technical issues or may have to partner with a Magento forum or may have to solve the problem on their own.
Developing an attractive and user-friendly e-commerce website will always be the priority for the developers and engineers and choosing the right platform is the ultimate key to whooping success in online retail business.