Magento

vs. Shopify
A Comparison Guide
Contents
The Importance of Choosing the Right Commerce Platform ....................................................................... 3

Experience Driven Commerce .................................................................................................................................... 4

Plan for Future Growth, Today ...................................................................................................................................... 5

Delivering and Managing Your Commerce Experience ................................................................................... 6

Performance Considerations ........................................................................................................................................ 7

Getting the Right Assistance When You Need It ................................................................................................ 8

Learn More ............................................................................................................................................................................ 9

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How Important is
Choosing the Right
Commerce Platform?
Finding the right digital commerce platform for your
business can be a real game-changer. A flexible,
all-in-one cloud solution will give you the power to
deliver irresistible customer experiences, bring your
vision to life, and drive phenomenal growth.

In this guide, we’ll explore the five key areas you need to
consider when shopping for a commerce platform.

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Experience Driven Commerce
A winning customer experience is critical in today’s market. Consumers want to buy experiences
not products. With a flexible platform, you can customize your user experience and delight your
customers. Don’t choose a commerce platform that restricts and limits your creative freedom.

MAGENTO SHOPIFY

• This flexible, open platform allows you to • Shopify experiences are built using a standard
quickly bring to market the innovative, set of templates. This limits your ability to
differentiated experiences that your customers innovate, making your store look like every
demand. other Shopify merchant.

• Pre-integrated modules from technology • While some elements can be changed, certain
providers activate with a single click (e.g. Shopify experiences cannot be customized
payments, tax, shipping). You can choose (e.g. the most important part: checkout.)
from over 3,600 extensions in the Magento
Marketplace. • Limited Extensibility and integrations with 3rd
party solutions.
• A large network of partners and developers
provide additional resources to further your • Shopify has a much smaller network of
innovation, and help you create commerce partners and developers with limited global
magic. support.

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Plan for Future Growth, Today
Choose a platform that can grow and evolve with your business. Don’t let your commerce
platform limit your future growth. Choose the solution that meets your needs and your customer’s
needs from day one.

MAGENTO SHOPIFY

• This flexible, endlessly customizable platform • Many successful merchants often quickly
does not limit what features and functions you outgrow Shopify’s basic plans and are then
can add in the future. Merchants retain full forced to upgrade to more expensive Shopify
control over their Magento environment. Plus plans.

• The Magento Marketplace provides over 3,600 • Features required by large and growing
high quality, vetted extensions to quickly add companies—such as order management,
and expand store capabilities, often with just complex product catalogs, subsite
one click. functionality, etc.—are not supported.

• Magento integrates with a wide variety • Few large, global companies use Shopify.
of third-party solutions (e.g. marketing
automation), allowing you to integrate other • Shopify was engineered for B2C, and not B2B,
digital tools to further enhance the customer so their templates and apps are not capable of
experience. handling the complexity of B2B transactions
and workflows.
• Whether you sell to businesses (B2B), direct-
to-consumer (B2C), or both, Magento is
engineered to support your commerce needs.
Start with one channel and expand into the
other without re-platforming or adding another
niche commerce platform.

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Delivering and Managing Your
Commerce Experience
Your commerce platform should enable you to build your commerce experience according to
your business needs without limitations.

MAGENTO SHOPIFY

• Merchants can quickly deploy and manage • While Shopify announced expanded support
multiple sites, in multiple languages, accept for multiple languages, currencies, and
multiple local payment methods, and interface localized payment methods, each instance
with many global shipping providers, all under can only support one language and currency.
a single Magento instance and accompanying Multi-country or multi-brand merchants must
license. purchase costly additional licenses for each
country or brand.
• The Magento worldwide community of 60,000
developers and over 300 Solution Partners are • For aspects of their experience that can be
constantly producing new, innovative solutions to customized, Shopify uses a proprietary coding
further enhance Magento-powered sites. language that has limited developer support.
This makes finding developers to assist with
• Easily add on capabilities via the large Magento projects and maintain sites much more difficult
Marketplace, with high quality, vetted extensions and costly.
that enable merchants to quickly add and expand
store capabilities, often with one click [over 3,600+ • Shopify’s smaller app marketplace means less
extensions available covering a wide variety of use coverage of use cases, requiring more custom
cases and capabilities]. coding and added costs.

• The flexibility of Magento allows merchants to roll • Shopify has limits on product attributes and
out their commerce experiences in phases and catalog size, limiting its ability to service
continually evolve their experiences over time. merchants with large and complex product
sets or unique selling requirements
(e.g. configurable goods).

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Performance Considerations
Delivering great experiences 24/7 requires a platform that is robust, reliable, and scalable.

MAGENTO SHOPIFY

• Global cloud infrastructure and services • Shopify’s multi-tenant architecture means that
ensures 99.99% operational uptime and peak demand on one merchant’s store can
scalability no matter where customers are degrade the performance of other Shopify
located. You can deploy your sites wherever stores, meaning yours.
your business operates. Magento Commerce
runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS). • Shopify throttles the data exchanged between
its core app and add-ons apps, which could
• Merchants retain total control over their significantly slow your site performance during
Magento environments. Optimizations and high traffic periods, degrading the overall
integrations can be tailored to the specific customer experience.
needs and business goals of individual stores/
branded sites. • Shopify’s technology stack is locked down,
leaving the merchant with no way to monitor,
• Powerful business user tools help larger, manage, or optimize site performance.
more complex stores save time and improve
business agility. • Shopify powers 10 of the Internet Retailer Top
500 companies.
• Magento powers 315,000 sites around the
world with support and representation in all
major geographies. Magento powers 70 of the
top 500 companies on the Internet Retailer
Top B2C eCommerce 500 list and 40 of the
top 300 B2B customers on the Internet Retailer
B2B eCommerce 300 list.

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Getting the Right Assistance
When You Need It
Merchants may require different levels of help when implementing, maintaining, and extending
their commerce experiences.

MAGENTO SHOPIFY

• A large global community of Solution Partners • Shopify has just a small partner community,
offers a vast range of design and implementation located mainly within North America, with
services with expertise in a wide variety of less experience in implementing commerce
verticals, segments, and geographies. They’re experiences and providing merchant services.
ready and willing to help you no matter what
stage you are on in your digital commerce • Shopify’s use of the proprietary Liquid
journey. language leaves a limited pool of developers
equipped to help on projects.
• With more than 260,000 developers worldwide,
you can easily find resources to help with projects
of all sizes.

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Learn More

Questions?
We've got a team of friendly commerce experts ready to answer them! We want to help you grow
your business.

EMAIL VISIT SEE A DEMO

[email protected] magento.com MAGENTO.COM/SCHEDULE-A-DEMO

CALL
North America 1-877-574-5093 | Europe & Middle East +353 1800 200567 | Latin America & Asia +52 800 1239537

Stat Sources
1. 2018 Internet Retailer Top 1000 Report 2. 2017 Internet Retailer Top 300 B2B Report

About Magento Commerce

Magento, an Adobe company, is a leading provider of cloud commerce innovation to merchants and brands
across B2C and B2B industries and was recently named a leader in the 2018 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital
Commerce. In addition to its flagship digital commerce platform, Magento boasts a strong portfolio of cloud-
based omnichannel solutions that empower merchants to successfully integrate digital and physical shopping
experiences. Magento is the #1 provider to the Internet Retailer Top 1000, the B2B 300 and the Top 500 Guides
for Europe and Latin America. Magento is supported by a vast global network of solution and technology partners,
a highly active global developer community and the largest eCommerce marketplace for extensions available for
download on the Magento Marketplace. More information can be found at www.magento.com.

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