Magento vs Shopify vs WooCommerce vs Drupal Commerce – Which one is Better for your Business?

Let’s imagine you have started a business, you want to expand it that is why you move towards adopting Digital Marketing strategies to take your brand online. At an advanced level, that strategy would include developing an E-Commerce website for your business which would complement the online customer journey for your business. To cater to this rising demand, several E-Commerce development companies in the USA and around the world have come into existence.

However, building an E-Commerce presence for your business is not easy as it seems the process involves multiple steps and is very extensive. The daunting task here is to choose the right framework to design your E-Commerce platform. Here we try to understand the 4 most popular E-Commerce frameworks Magento, Shopify, Woo Commerce, and Drupal Commerce in detail to find out which framework suits your business the most.

1) Magento

Magento, an open-source E-Commerce platform developed by Varien Inc. was launched in March 2008. It is written in PHP language, includes the Zend framework, and uses the MYSQL system for database management. Magento is the most suited E-Commerce platform for small and large businesses. You can start by adding 10 products to your website to an upper limit of 10,000 products.

Pros

• User-friendly customization process for your E-Commerce store, you can do almost anything with your website while using Magento.
• Conducting your SEO using Magento offers you a higher extension and ranking on the Google search results page.
• Online merchants using it have entire control over the code, design, functionality, appearance, and content of the website.

Cons

• You require deep knowledge of coding and computer programming to get your hands on the Magento platform.
• It is an open-source platform but your website hosting will need to be done from other platforms.
• As there are no themes for your website, you will need custom-developed themes either made from scratch by yourself or by third-party developers.

2) Shopify

Shopify was founded in 2004 as an online E-Commerce store development platform. With a global presence, Shopify can be used to develop your website as well as to use the platforms to sell, ship, and accept payments for your online products. It is a SAAS (software as a service) platform as well as a hosting website. Shopify also provides its own payment gateway and is ideal therefore proves to be a great support for brands with physical stores.

Pros

• This platform has 24*7 customer service available by live chats, email, or even phone.
• Shopify consists of 100+ mobile-friendly storefront themes that are pre-designed and easy to navigate across.
• More than 25 different types of payment gateways to provide multiple payment options to your customer, including cryptocurrencies. Yes, Shopify supports accepting payment in Bitcoins or Ethers or even DogeCoins!

Cons

• Although there are more than 100 themes available for the end-user only 10 themes can be accessed free of cost, the rest are paid.
• Unlike other platforms, Shopify charges transaction fees for every sale made through its dedicated payments gateway.
• Shopify only has three different product attributes which do not help in creating a diverse product portfolio.

3) Woo Commerce

WordPress was primarily developed as a blogging platform, but with time it has now become the CMS (Content Management Services) that could be used to develop several websites. It has a wide range of available plugins or E-Commerce platforms, the most popular among them being Woo Commerce. It is such an easy-to-use, simple management, and user-friendly platform that it demands no or very little technical knowledge and expertise to use it.

Pros

• Dozens of website themes to choose from specially designed, and developed to support websites using the Woo Commerce platform.
• Unlimited customization is available. You can create an entire store on this platform with its own personal identity.
• SEO-friendly website which allows you to keep an eye on the rankings, performance, metadata along with well-sorted reports according to their category.

Cons

• This platform lacks proper customer support.
• It cannot be used on websites that do not use WordPress for their content management.
• The base program is free to use but add – ons and extensions can prove to be very costly especially for small and local businesses.

4) Drupal Commerce

Drupal Commerce is a fast and robust CMS platform that has now updated itself to be a user-friendly E-Commerce platform. It gained popularity for its built-in generation tool which has since then made it one of the most desired CMS platforms among designers and developers. It is the best option for an organization that aims to create a trading website from the scratch.

Pros

• The content management system allows you to re-use the same type of content for different types of web pages.
• The platform is complete in itself, therefore you do not need to install add – ons, extensions, or modules for any type of E-Commerce website.
• Allows managing users from the control – panel which enables you to create access points, user groups and easily edit user permissions.

Cons

• The development activities on Drupal Commerce might be difficult to conduct for freshers-level developers.
• It has a complex understand user – interface, and does not have an intuitive CMS which sometimes makes it difficult to master.
• Drupal has very high system – requirements therefore, before switching on to Drupal be prepared for higher hosting charges and forget free or cheap hosting facilities.

Conclusion

There is no doubt about it that given the popularity of it Shopify is one of the most desired E-Commerce platforms you can use to develop your businesses’ E-Commerce website for guaranteeing an overall user shopping experience. Then comes Magento with its unique features but could be quite tricky on some occasions. Therefore, you need to hire a Magento development company to develop a Magento-based E-Commerce website for your business.

If you’re looking for a Magento development company get in touch with one of our advisors today at Perception Systems who have industry-leading expertise in creating Magento-based websites.