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How eCommerce Evolved - Magento Vs Shopify Vs Bigcommerce - Which One to Select and Why?

There is no wondering; today the eCommerce drives the world’s economy. But, this radical overhaul does not happen overnight. Over twenty years, e-commerce has changed entirely the retail culture. Ever since the inception of the World Wide Web in 1991, the revolutionized online shopping practice was lurking through the opening far away. From Pizza hut offering first ever online orders on their websites and Jeff Bezos selling his first ever book on Amazon in 1995 to mobile phones taking charges to initiate online purchases and PayPal introducing first ever online payment gateway services, the journey of ecommerce traits is going firm and still to grow larger.

Scopes of The eCommerce Evolution

According to U.S Commerce Department, Americans spent nearly $ 341.83 billion alone in 2015 in online shopping. That’s not all. The scopes of eCommerce were limited a few years back. But, today, it is beyond that spectrum. According to Statista, eCommerce is estimated to be worth $146.2 billion in the second quarter of 2019. Among the various categories of products, clothing, shoes and consumer electronics remain the highest preferred products for the online shoppers in the US trade.


Figure 1: US consumers most preferred Online Items source: Statista.com

The trend is prevailing in every continent. The European eCommerce market is worth of 534 billion Euros with Amazon and eBay moving ahead with their opulent varieties of product offerings on their sites. The Australian eCommerce market is estimated to be valued at 27 billion USD by 2023. Latin America sees a steady growth in eCommerce despite having economic turmoil. On the other way around, India’s eCommerce market size grows exponentially with a bevy of new entrants joining hands. The eCommerce giants like Paytm, Flipkart, Myntra, and Pharmeasy are ruling the Indian market with a surplus of products.

That’s not all for eCommerce services across different geographies. With the advent of Smartphones, eCommerce is evolving faster. Users are more open to personalized and enhanced customer experiences these days. For instance, business today uses AI driven parameters to influence their buying decisions with preferred recommendations on their business sites. Besides, different fashion businesses allow their users to custom design their products using a range of tools on the site dashboards. Simultaneously, smartphones trigger a boost in eCommerce sales with a higher capability of personalization and high end user experience. As much as 56% of online shoppers are eager to use personalized eCommerce services, while they also reject a website with no relevant information about their product interests.

As you run your store and want to go online to increase your reach, it is imperative to creating better user connectivity that offers better conversion rates and ROI. The secret is how responsive and compatible is your eCommerce site to be engaged with the users. It always works when you work with the best eCommerce platform for your store. The market is overwhelmed with the abundance of website platform software. It is not an easy task to choose the best one for you in case you are not updated about it. We are bringing an extensive analysis among the best eCommerce platform contenders including Magento, Shopify and Bigcommerce to you. Each of the platforms is unique in their approaches to product showcase capability, flexible payment gateway and other sophisticated functionalities. Choose one which is appropriately equipped and customized to enhance the sales of your products and services.

Overview: Magento Vs Shopify Vs BigCommerce


Figure 2 Magento Vs BigCommerce Vs Shopify

There is a common misconception about Magento, Shopify and BigCommerce. It is misunderstood to have similar features and functionalities. Even though the purpose is the same, it is different from every angle. It involves their core structure, functionalities and capabilities.

Magento- an open source platform is very popular among users, facilitating site building for over thousands of online stores. Hosted solutions such as Shopify and BigCommerce offer economic eCommerce website building solutions with dynamic features. These three platforms are hugely popular among its merchants, and there are some reasons too.

Features Magento Shopify BigCommerce
User Friendliness Yes Yes Yes
Loading Time Self-Hosted Hosted Hosted
Payment Gateway plug in Unlimited Limited Limited
Theme and Templates Paid Free & Paid Free & Paid
Hosting On-site, Third-Party , Cloud based Cloud Based Cloud Based
Extension Free & Paid Paid Paid
Security Depends on your capability Secure Secure
Cost Free Starts from $29 Starts from $29

Figure 3: overview of Magento Vs Shopify Vs BigCommerce service capabilities

User Friendliness

It is ideal to check if it is easily compatible with backend for system administration and frontend for marketing activities.

Magento :

It seems Magento is quite complex to learn its usability. Magento does not come with the feature of on-site developers to help you build your site. However, it offers merchants a lot of flexibility with customizations. With its customization tools and other add-on features, you can get along well with the site development, provided you have those Magento skills.

Shopify :

Shopify is instinctive with lots of features available in a drag-n-drop customizable interface. No matter if you don’t have any site building skills, it is easier than what you can imagine. However, if you want additional apps, you need to possess coding technicalities.

BigCommerce :

It is highly compatible with the beginners with no coding knowledge. It allows you to launch your ecommerce site within minutes, but with no customization. Hence, if you want to add any custom plugin or pop-in, you must go for additional help.

Loading Time

Users are whimsical. They are not intended to wait a long time for websites to load. If it takes longer, you are bound to lose a good prospective client. This is where speed and performance matters for eCommerce stores.

Magento :

Magento offers robust performance and speed with comprehensive hosting and control flexibility. However, if you want, you can use your own server to boost the performance of this self-hosted platform.

Shopify :

It is a hosted solution, therefore no worries about its performance and speed during site loading. Simultaneously, it does not offer any flexibility to supervise the server and hosting ecosystem.

BigCommerce :

It is also a hosted platform. But, it offers a great level of reliability for being associated with AWS hosting infrastructure. It is clear it loads faster and performs better. But, one loggerhead is there It does not allow for customization and hence it is often not the right fit for large enterprise.

Payment Gateway plug-in

Payment flexibility is one core element to enhance the shopping experience for users.

Magento :

Magento offers a wide array of payment gateway options to enrich the capabilities of your online stores. With a range of payment plugins such as PayPal, Sage pay, Stripe and more. Besides, you can find configuration to build your own payment modes.

Shopify :

Shopify allows an easy integration of payment gateway such as Authorize.net, PayPal, Stripe, PaySimple and Adyen etc.

BigCommerce :

BigCommerce features the same payment gateway flexibility like Shopify. It also offers custom solutions to facilitate shopping.

Theme and Templates

How engaging and attractive does appear your eCommerce store depends on the theme and templates. A theme and template speaks a thousand words on behalf of you by adding a visual element to it. It is an important aspect.

Magento :

Being native software, it has no bouquet of themes. It allows for a third party integration to select themes for your business.

Shopify :

Shopify has free as well as purchased themes on offer for your business needs. They are mobile responsive and optimized.

BigCommerce :

BigCommerce has plenty of customizable themes integrated with SEO and design capabilities. From the landing page to the shopping cart, you can design every element of your BigCommerce website.

Hosting

How your website is hosted is a key concern.

Magento :

Magento offers different options for hosting. It includes on-premise hosting, third party hosting and cloud hosting. You can choose that suits you better. But, since it is not a SaaS and a PaaS, you must take the responsibility to host it.

Shopify :

Your subscription services come with the hosting flexibility since it is entirely a cloud based product.

BigCommerce :

It offers its hosting on cloud available with its subscription services. BigCommerce boasts of enhancing system uptime by 99.9%.

Extensions

A comprehensive range of extension is available with Magento that gets well along the backend team. With enhanced functionalities of CMS and features, you can enhance the usability of your eCommerce Site without any knowledge of coding.

Shopify does not feature much of the extensions and add-ons. The installation process is easy and it improves the appearance of online stores.

In case with BigCommerce, the basic version does not have any add-ons. Once upgraded to the premium version, you can work with different add-ons like cart abandonment, API access and omnichannel sales features.

Security

Security is key to ensuring the safety of users’ personal data and information.

Magento :

It depends on you to bolster the security of eCommerce store. From SSL certification to site maintenance, it is all your responsibility.

Shopify :

Being a SaaS product, your service provider is responsible to keep your ecommerce store safe. The SSL certification is taken care of the hosted site developer.

BigCommerce :

Equipped with different security features such as DDOS and SSL certification, BigCommerce is highly secured eCommerce Platform.

Cost

What affordability to possessing an eCommerce platform helps you narrow down your preferences. It involves every aspect such as site build up, maintenance and hosting.

Magento :

The pricing varies as what Magento Software you want to use. Even though Magento open source is free, other services such as site customization, maintenance and hosting are chargeable. Given its Enterprise Edition, it is expensive since it includes support features, which is missing from the Community Edition. The pricing depends on the size and service of your business that may cost you between $22,000 and $125,000 annually.

You can also check with their cloud edition, offered as Platform-as-a-service. However, it does not include all the features included in software-as-a-service. However, the Cloud Edition is quite pricey and annual prices ranges from $ 40,000 to $125,000.

Shopify :

This platform offers a number of flexible pricing options. With the Basic plan costing $29 per month, the more advanced range costs between $79 and $299 per month. For large enterprise, Shopify Plus costs around $2,000 a month. But, still this platform is affordable.

BigCommerce :

Its pricing model is the same as Shopify with an easy availability of different plans. Its basic range starts BigCommerce Essentials starts with $29 monthly. Advanced plans costs between $75 and $$249 per month. Depending on the business nature, the enterprise plan includes native features available at a competitive price range.

Which one to Choose?

Each eCommerce platform is unique in its own way. Not every platform can include each and every element to suit the multifaceted needs of a business complexity. But, still if you are to choose one among the three, it has to be based on your budget and requirement.

Magento is always highly preferred by the big enterprises with lots of resources that have a team to look after the site maintenance and development. It offers a lot of customization options to suit your store capabilities but that too against a high caliber of technical expertise. You are free of regular transaction costs and enjoy scalability with this robust platform.

Shopify is always the best fit for the new entrants in the market with a limited budget. It offers site building flexibility and gets the business going. However, don’t overlook its service charges that may interfere with the growth of your estore.

BigCommerce follows the same suit as Shopify. But, it is equally adept at managing big stores besides small stores with SKUs. But, both these platforms have limited scopes for customization.

Takeaways

Magento, Shopify and BigCommerce are the leading eCommerce platforms. Based on your business needs, all three platforms can enhance the growth of your online store. It’s absolutely your decision which one to choose. Take cues from this comprehensive analysis, and make your decision.

For all type of ecommerce application development services contact at Bytes Technolab. We have a team of highly expert and talented developers. We create ecommerce web and mobile applications for all over clients.

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