Magento vs. Shopify: Which Is Best For Your E-commerce Store?

Published on: 11 June 2019 Last Updated on: 12 September 2024

The first quarter of 2019 has almost passed, and it has been predicted that 18% of the purchases will be made online by 2040. Further, 95% of the orders will be facilitated by e-commerce store.

Considering the above statistics, it comes as no surprise that the fate of your online business is dependent on how your website works. But did you know that all your website operations rely on the choice of your e-commerce platform?

Now, as the online store owners narrow down the choices, they are only left with two main platforms as the contenders- Magento and Shopify. While both platforms can create a one-of-kind e-commerce store, they differ in many areas.

To start with, Shopify works best for smaller businesses. On the flip side, Magento is aimed at enterprise businesses. This post is going will give you an in-depth insight on Magento and Shopify and help you decide which is an ideal platform for your e-commerce store.

Magento and Shopify in a Nutshell: e-commerce store

Magento:

Launched in 2007, Magento is a self-hosted e-commerce platform that powers a number of web stores. The platform is open source and comes with two versions including community (suitable for developers and small businesses) and enterprise edition (best suited for mid-sized and large e-commerce stores). The usage of the platform is free, but you’ll have to pay an amount for premium apps, themes, and hosting.

Irrespective of the price you have to pay, this platform is best known for its flexibility, ability to customize, and scalability.

Shopify:

Shopify is a hosted e-commerce platform that allows single-step order fulfillment and lets you set up a store with a custom domain and a theme.

This platform comes with an easy-to-use interface and is more for beginner developers. Moreover, it comes with a 14-day free trial, allows integration with over 70 payment gateways, and is available in almost every language.

Although there are numerous Shopify alternatives available across the web, what sets this platform apart from others is its ability to set up a dynamic store in no time. You will have to pay for the platform after the free trial, but the Shopify team takes care of all the technical tasks.

Magento and Shopify: What Numbers Say!

Description	Shopify	Magento
Number of Websites	600,000	250,000
Number of Extensions	2,400+	3,000+
Number of Themes	60 (external purchase is allowed)	12 (external purchase is allowed)

Now when you are aware of what these platforms are, here is a feature comparison of Magneto and Shopify.

1. Basic Functionality and Ease of Usage:

Both the e-commerce platforms have all the basic store functionalities that are easy to use and maintain.

But if we compare both the platforms, Shopify is a drag and drop website builder. Magento has a steep learning curve, and you will have to learn some technical terms to get through the e-commerce store development process.

With Shopify, the developer can add the products; customize the look and feel of your store and set up the payment process in no time. The best part is you can make the entire e-commerce store without any technical knowledge.

In Magento, you have to learn some code to develop an entire e-commerce store. Not to forget, they have comprehensive user guides that walk you step-by-step through various processes. They also have a forum from where you can learn some tricks of the trade.

2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

When it comes to SEO, both have great search engine optimization capabilities. However, you’ll have to leverage extra plug-ins in the cases for both platforms. But in the case of Shopify, SEO features are automatically built into the website, even in the product pages.

3. Themes and Templates Availability:

In terms of themes and templates, both platforms offer highly-functional customization capabilities. They let you edit the raw code directly and give you full control over the design and appeal of your e-commerce store.

Coming to the differences, Shopify offers a wide variation of mobile-optimized themes. Although many of them are free, if you go for the paid ones, your store gets a professional look and gets equipped with great sales potential. You also get the option to add new pages, change the color palette, move or resize the elements, and integrate the social media feeds.

When it comes to Magento, it has 12 themes. Out of 12, 10 of them are fully responsive. This platform does have free themes, and the paid ones also start at just $1.

With this platform, you can also create your theme or template from scratch. You have the option to add a slide, newsletter, and animation to the website.

4. Inventory Management:

All Shopify plans allow unlimited products in the store. Magento also allows you to add or create an unlimited number of products on the website.

But Shopify is one step ahead in this point due to its integration with drop shipping inventory apps such as Oberlo. Further, in Magento, you have the risk of slowing down your website.

5. Hosting Features:

Your website’s performance, storage, security, and speed are dependent on the hosting you choose. Did you know that 40% of people will abandon a website if it takes more than three seconds to load? This will result in a loss of customers as well as revenue.

As Shopify is a hosted platform, it takes care of your entire domain and hosting needs; offers you 24*7 support, and let you concentrate on your business.

Magento comes with two hosting options, including Open Source and Cloud. In Open Source hosting, you have to buy your domain and hosting. But in the case of Cloud, your e-commerce store is hosted and maintained by Magento.

Hosting

6. Payment Processing:

Shopify platform is already equipped with a payment processor, which is known by the name of Shopify Payments. If you use Shopify Payments for your e-commerce store, you won’t be charged any transaction fee. Moreover, it comes with the support of 60 external payment processors.

For Magento, you will have to download the extension of the payment processor that you want in your e-commerce store. You can look for these extensions in Magento’s marketplace. However, some factors that make Magento worth the consideration are international market coverage and support for multiple languages.

Summing Up:

When it comes to choosing an ideal e-commerce platform, there are lots of factors to consider including interface, scalability, number of themes, templates, speed, load time, cost, search engine optimization, and more.

Is Shopify worth it? If your considerations are ease of usage, availability of themes, not wanting to pay the transaction fee, and having the hosting and bandwidth taken care of, look no further than Shopify. It is user-friendly, has a payment processor, and comes with an array of themes to help you get started.

But if you are technically savvy and want to build an e-commerce store for a large enterprise, go for Magento. With this platform, you will also have to find your hosting provider, which can become expensive, as your business scale. Moreover, there is a chance that you might have to invest some time as well.

If you are still stuck on the decision, skim again through the comparison of features, weigh their pros and cons, and make the best choice for your business.

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Creating A Successful Call To Action In Your Business Emails: Here Are 5 Tips To Consider

Email marketing is an amazing digital marketing strategy to drive more sales and retain customers for a longer time. And every SEO reseller uses it in their strategy. It’s among the most ROI-driven marketing practices that bring significant results when performed right. However, as we are moving towards a highly digitized era where customers’ inboxes are generally flooded with promotions, standing out becomes difficult. To entice your prospects to open your email and click on the CTA to take any action, you need to rethink how you have been performing it. Hence, you need to pay closer attention to details and improve it as your customers want to see them. In this article, we will have a look at the top five tips for creating a successful call to action in your email to drive maximum revenue. If you are just starting out, these tips will help you take the lead and grow your business. Importance of Creating a Successful Call to Action in Your Business Emails Email is still one of the most effective tools when it comes to business communication. It does not matter whether you are communicating with your colleagues or customers. Ensuring the right implementation of emails is crucial. Despite the rise of a plethora of messaging apps and other communication platforms, most businesses prefer emails. Moreover, when it comes to email, you need only fewer resources for optimum results. The following are some of the reasons why creating a successful call to action in your business emails is important: Email is effective because it has universal access. Moreover, they are also interoperable across a variety of platforms. Thereby, you can ensure seamless communication between stakeholders. Email is one of the fastest and most efficient ways of sending messages. Whether you want to send an email internally or externally, you will get real-time results. Moreover, with the help of emails, you can respond to customer inquiries better and faster. Hence, with this instant access to information, email has become a valuable tool for businesses. When you compare emails to other communication methods and platforms, you will find that the former is more cost-effective. Furthermore, you also do not need excessive business resources to succeed with effective communication. Email comes with high-profile security options. These include transport-layer security (TLS) and others. Hence, when you send confidential information, it remains safe and secure. Tips for Creating a Successful Call to Action in Your Business Emails The following are some of the major tips you need for creating a successful call to action in your business emails: 1. Keep It Real: To generate trust and improve the overall click-through rate, you need to keep everything real. Also, you must ensure there are not any gimmicks or excessive terms and conditions. Be very clear about what you are offering and what benefits the readers will get if they click on the button. For example, you can highlight text like there are no hidden charges, you pay what you see, and more like them. These types of text not only help you improve the call to action but also help you gain trust faster among your customers. This thing applies to every section of the email — be it the subject line, body text, or the main CTA. Also, you must ensure there is no misleading clickbait that will increase the bounce rate or unsubscribe rate. 2. Short And active: Ask your copywriter to draft every email in an active voice with very short and crisp sentences. It makes no sense to write long lines or paragraphs, and it is the main reason behind it. Many people check their emails on the go from their smartphones, and if the email is lengthy, they might skip it and save it to read later. However, as an average user receives a lot of emails a day, the probability of opening the email is very low. That’s why you should keep the email text as simple and short as possible. However, make sure it’s conveying the entire message that you want to present to the readers. You can keep the email body text within 100 – 150 words as it’s easier to read and incite users to take the desired action. 3. FOMO Works Creating a sense of urgency using the fear of missing out technique works if you implement it correctly. No one wants to miss out on great deals, especially when they need that product or service. You need to make your audience feel they will miss out on something really great if they don’t take action right now. You can specify in bold text that it’s a time-sensitive offer only, or you can run a counter on the landing page. This technique will bring a higher CTR and will make your call to action more prompt and active participation. You will find a lot of free FOMO templates to make your copy more exciting and click-worthy. 4. Use The Right Colors: This trick sounds ordinary, but it brings extraordinary returns and improves your business email's overall call to action. Pick the colors that reflect your brand, and don’t change the color theme frequently. Your readers should register a common theme so that when they open your email, it will remind them of your brand. Apart from colors, don’t overdo animations as they might load slower on some devices due to any reason. Keep the color scheme simple, attractive, and clutter-free. You can use email marketing tools and pick any premade campaigns if you are not into designing them. 5. Creativity: Smart creativity is the key when it comes to a successful call to action in your business emails. Be creative because you need to stand apart from the rest and attract your busy readers’ attraction in a limited time span. You need to understand that people’s attention span is very limited, and you need to make every aspect click-worthy without getting spammy. Instead of using a free stock image, ask your graphics team to create bespoke images that can match your custom offer and improve the CTA. Create A Successful Call To Action Now Hence, you can see that creating a successful call to action in your business emails is not very difficult. Follow these simple steps to create a successful call to action and drive more sales to your business. Email marketing is not hard, and it can drive substantial results for your business strategies. However, if you are not into emails, it’s the right time to get started and drive additional traffic and revenue to your business. Keep experimenting with different formats to check which works best for you. Read Also: Online Marketing: Selling Your Product And Services How to Integrate Email Marketing With SEO 3 Easy Ways to Grow Your Email List Best Way To Earn Passive Income In 2020: Email Marketing

5 Times DOOH Helped Companies Reinvent Their Marketing

Digital-out-of-home advertising continues to speak to us in the most innovative language that everyone can understand and comprehend. That is why companies approach DOOH product marketing with excitement and now one plays it safe. DOOH is highly impactful, remarkably creative and, unlike most of the traditional ways of advertising, is literally impossible to block or ignore. Thus we’ve figured it’s just the right time to make the top 5 list and pinpoint the times DOOH helped companies reinvent their marketing. Listed below are the most inspiring, engaging and entertaining ways DOOH is used for effective marketing. A friendly warning: please refrain from any marketing reinventing through DOOH until you’ve found a digital signage software provider that fits your brand. Establishing a fully-functional digital signage network is a challenge, so my suggestion is: make a 5-10 key qualities list for DS and go from there. Honestly, there are staple requirements that will help you to make the most out of each display. Your DS soft should be able to play key media formats, integrate another innovative tech, and play interactive content. DS should allow you to seamlessly run a growing network, have a good health system in place, etc. The designs have to be exciting and up-to-date, and there is always a very important matter of quality customer support. Whatever it is for you – list the key requirements and start your search. We’ve spent a good couple of months searching and testing out DS soft, fortunately, we are pretty happy with our Kitcast digital signage software (check them out at https://kitcast.tv/). Best Examples of DOOH Advertising: i) That time we all wanted a Burger King Whopper. Calling me a Burger King fan would be a bit of a stretch, what I am though is a huge fan of their marketing. So, let’s talk about the impressive BK DOOH campaign, their digital-out-of-home pièce de résistance called “The traffic jam whopper”. The amazing never before attempted DOOH campaign in Mexico aimed to end hunger in all traffic jams. They used dynamic DOOH and promoted services in gridlocks bases on real-life data by locating the potential buyers in traffic. Traffic info and real-time data analysis were used to adjust the content of the billboards. Burger King ran messages displaying the time left in traffic and tracked and displayed time left before receiving the order. Additionally, mobile ads with campaign promotion were sent out as soon as cars entered traffic and were in close proximity to billboards. The cars were tracked with Google maps API to pinpoint the exact car position in gridlock. This was the first time ever anyone has attempted a delivery to drivers on the move and it was an outstanding success: the campaign boosted Burger King’s delivery service and the orders for food delivery increased by unbelievable 63%. ii) That time Kylie Jenner won programmatic. The latest Kylie Jenner’s billboard campaign was an ode to programmatic DOOH and has finally shown all of its power. I’m pretty sure that the new Kylie Skin ad campaign was to biggest programmatic campaign to date. Just imagine, it took 1 300 screens in more than one thousand cities across the US to make this digital-out-of-home marketing campaign a success. But, hold your horses, we haven’t gotten to the most impressive part yet! It has been reported that the whole programmatic digital out-of-home campaign was carried out with unimaginable before speed: it was conceived and made public across the US all in just under a week. From idea to Kylie’s face appearing everywhere - from the Times Square to a shopping mall in West Covina – all in just under a week. Jonathan Gudai, Adomni’s CEO said, and I fully agree, that Kylie Skin was absolutely groundbreaking DOOH marketing campaign: “To run that many ads on that many boards, with that minimal effort, is truly a remarkable thing” – stated Gudai. iii) That time McDonald’s teamed up with Met Office. It is getting harder to impress and engage consumers, but, last year Leo Burnett came out with a pretty amazing and a rather simple way to grab people’s attention with a DOOH marketing campaign for McDonald's. They’ve presented a digital outdoor campaign that turned McDonald's famous and highly recognizable menu items into weather icons of the five-day weather forecast and brought all of it to life on giant screens. iv) That time Pepsi brought us the HD live-feed AR 3D “Unbelievable bus shelter” DOOH campaign to scare the life out of us on the way to work. This award-winning campaign is hard to forget: Pepsi MAX has shown us an amazing and unbelievable experience with their innovative DOOH. Life-like lions, aliens and UFO’s, meteors, and people getting dragged underground by octopuses were all appearing before people’s eyes on a morning bus stop. We urge you to watch the promo video for Pepsi MAX - more than 8 000 000 people did! It is one of the most watched ads on YouTube. It was high-tech, creative, entertaining and to this day one of the most unforgettable DOOH marketing campaigns out there. v) That time the Emoji Movie digital-out-of-home won London. Let’s end our list with a really bad movie and a remarkably great augmented reality and DOOH marketing campaign. Sony Pictures has brought a very creative and fun campaign to the streets of London with just a billboard, augmented reality and facial recognition soft. Advanced soft was used to turn the passersby’s into emoticons, it was able to identify gender, emotions and facial expressions with a very impressive speed thus managing to bring AR experience to the high-foot traffic street. The campaign’s reach and “shareability” was up there with the best of them. Read Also: Effective Ways To Utilize Digital Marketing Avoid These 5 Mistakes Before Starting An SEO Signs Your Traditional Marketing Campaign Is Working A Guide To Running Your Instagram Marketing Campaign

Five Ways to Help Your Trade Show Booth Stand Out From the Crowd

Have you ever attended a trade show with boring displays and unenthusiastic salespersons? You probably walked out uninspired and disappointed that you wasted your time. Don't be a vendor that fails to make an impression on interested attendees with a dull trade show booth. Grab a visitor's attention and get them excited about your brand and what it has to offer. Here are five tips to help create a striking trade show booth that'll stand out from the crowd: Target Your Audience You'll be most successful if you have a trade show booth that matches the trade show theme. Attending Comic-Con? You'll want to be modern and edgy. A flower and garden show? You'll want to show your softer side. You may want to rent a booth instead of owning one. When you own a booth, you are limited to one design, but with a rental, you can choose from multiple styles that allow creativity and flexibility for different trade shows. Create a Crowd People are attracted to trade show booths that have a crowd. Help create a group by staffing your booth with friendly and enthusiastic employees who can welcome people into your exhibit. Offer light snacks or coffee so people will linger and browse your products. Make sure your staff knows how to manage the booth so they can generate leads and connect with both new and old clients. Create an Eye-Catching Display You have one chance to make a first impression, so make it a good one. Create a presentation with your company name prominently displayed so everyone can see it. Use lights and multimedia—think videos or music—to get people's attention, but don't go overboard and deter visitors because your booth is too loud or distracting. You should always look to invest in your trade show displays. This helps build credibility for your brand, attracts the right audiences, and improves chances for sales queries and conversions. Make sure you are setting up the displays to make it customer-friendly, informative and aesthetically pleasing. Use short, simple headlines to convey a bold message that'll pique visitors’ interests. Lastly, don't forget to publicize your social media links so people can connect with your brand both during and after the event. Turn It Into an Experience Bring a product demo so event attendees can experience your product firsthand. If you can't bring in a product demo, then create an experience for your attendees. For example, if your product helps eliminate odors in a workspace, create a space with perfumes, colognes, food, and other typical office smells. People can step into the enclosed space, try out your product, and have a sensory experience they won't forget. Use a Contest or Prize to Create a Buzz Everyone loves to get something for free, so don't hesitate to give away swag or have a raffle. Use brightly colored stickers, light-up bracelets, and other eye-catching trinkets to get your brand noticed on the event floor. Giving out swag with your brand name extends your reach beyond your booth. If your swag is good enough, people not only wear it on the event floor, but they also may bring it home with them. You can further your engagement by offering a door prize to those who wear your promotional items during the show or share them on social media. Don’t just fill up space at a trade show—let your brand make an impression! Keep these tips in mind as you prepare your booth and staff for your next trade show. Read Also: Top 8 Advantages Of Effective Web Design And Development Execute the Perfect Expo with This Trade Show Checklist How to Plan For a Successful Trade Show Exhibits?

Magento vs. Shopify: Which Is Best For Your E-commerce Store?

Magento and Shopify in a Nutshell: e-commerce store