The digital market is constantly charging through continuous innovation, and eCommerce platform migration is being forced upon eCommerce business owners.
To gain a bigger stretch of success, companies will have to identify issues that may be jeopardizing their online business. At the same time, they have to discover and adapt to quick technological advancements or risk being obsolete. Although the process of migrating one’s eCommerce business can be daunting, the pros outweigh the cons. Because migration can help mitigate costs and risks to ensuring your businesses remain competitive.
Still on the fence about which platform to migrate to? We’ve got you covered. We pit Shopify vs Magento, two eCommerce giants, against one another in terms of pricing, features, capabilities and more. We will also highlight a third option – custom web development to further address your doubts. This article will assist you in determining which choice is best for your company.
Identify your need for eCommerce migration
It is critical to first recognise the needs and issues that are pushing your eCommerce business for an upgrade. Here are some common issues you may be facing:
- Slow page loading speed. Keep in mind that a page’s loading speed can directly impact bounce rate. Research has shown that the average bounce rate for pages loading within 2 seconds is 9%, and it surges to 38% immediately after loading between 3-5 seconds.
- Insufficient integration in your current system. Eyeing for some special features such as an AI chatbot that could further benefit your business? Then it is a sign to urge for a new solution.
- Poor architectural scalability. With the rise of online shopping, customer expectations have grown from wanting basic features to needing a site with the ability to load thousands of orders per minute with no down-time.
- Lack of mobile friendliness. The convenience of mobile shopping has changed consumer shopping habits and has shown its potential to become the next major shopping channel. Now more than ever, businesses should invest in mobile-friendly UI/UX designs to retain their customers.
- Poor CMS function. Having the right CMS platform can directly impact and boost your SEO rankings. Factors such as crawlability, indexability, customizability and more are critical in determining your site’s SEO functionality and performance.
A brief overview of Shopify and Magento
What is Shopify?
So you don’t have any web developing certification? Fret not. Shopify is a fully-hosted, all-in-one commercial product. It enables any business owners to design and construct professional online stores without requiring any experiences. Shopify has a reputation for user-friendliness, and provides a menu-driven mechanism for changing basic shop elements.
Here’s the intriguing part. Because it is a subscription-based service, it saves you the hassle of piecing together various web development elements. Elements including a domain name, third-party hosting, outsourced theme and more. Your Shopify subscription pack includes all the necessary tools you will need to operate your online stores.
What is Magento ?
With nearly 200,000 websites registered under Magento, it is easily one of the biggest eCommerce platforms around the world. The platform is carried by an open-source technology. It encourages freedom in controlling and maintaining their online stores’ style, functionality, and content, as well as shopping cart flexibility.
After its release, Magento quickly met its roaring success and continued to prosper due to its flexibility. The platform includes multiple built-in tools and offers plenty of prominent plug-ins, themes and extensions. This allows users to have complete flexibility over the functionality of their websites.
In short, whatever you can imagine, it’s probably possible in Magento.
Wondering how Magento (Adobe commerce) is where it is today? Two years after its release, the gigantic company eBay made an investment deal to give 49% ownership to Magento. The company then acquired Magento in the following year. At the same time, as eBay also owned PayPal, eBay began to tightly integrate PayPal into the platform. However in 2015, Magento became a separate corporation once again when eBay and Paypal parted.
This continued until Adobe eventually acquired Magento for $1.68 billion in 2018.
Advantages of Migrating to Shopify
a. Ease of use and Fast loading speed
The general consensus is that Shopify has a more user-friendly interface. Its wizard mode and drag-and-drop tools allow users with no development experiences to effortlessly change any elements. Because it is fully-hosted, you will only have to provide your business’s products and information to set up the shop and customize it to your liking.
Besides that, Shopify takes care of your entire server’s security and software updates and the costs are all included in your subscription pack, saving you the time to gather different website elements, to pay separately, and potentially facing cyberattacks and lengthy system maintenance.
That being said, the platform also caters to professional developers as it comes with full access to CSS, HTML and Liquid (Shopify’s templating language).
Shopify is also known for its page loading speed. Instead of solely relying on manual work like compressing your images, choosing lightweight themes, reducing extensions, Shopify contributes effort in increasing the speed with you. The platform’s success in this originates from leveraging a quicker global network and content delivery network (CDN), along with the effort of converting all images to Webp automatically. Note that Webp is typically 30% smaller than JPEG, while maintaining a similar quality, reducing the site’s loading speed.
b.Themes and Mobile-friendliness
Shopify offers a wide range of amazing and fully customizable themes to choose from, and they are relatively easy to assemble. Many sleek themes are industry-specific. Most are free to help you get started, while some cost money.
With the rise of mobile usage for making transactions everywhere, many platforms including Shopify have introduced mobile-friendly user interface (UI) or responsive themes to their platforms, ensuring that their themes are able to fit into various screen sizes to cater to different users and stay competitive in the SEO rankings.
c. Payment Processors and SEO
There have been numerous instances where customers are faced with scammers or unsafe checkout processes, and this experience can easily tarnish one’s business reputation. Therefore, it is important to make sure that all transactions are done safely to avoid bad checkout experiences for your customers.
Shopify not only provides the common payment processors such as online banking, debit and credit card payment, they also have at least a 100 other integrated options, including its very own payment gateway called Shopify Payments. Upon using this option, you will be able to eliminate transaction fees that you would otherwise need to pay with other payment processors. On top of that, you can also easily activate SSL, the “HTTPS” protocol recognised security system, to your Shopify site to contribute to your site’s authority and trustworthiness.
Furthermore, if you are an avid sales person for your business, then ensuring the ease of organic search for your online stores via Google is very critical. Research has shown that almost 88% of shoppers search for their desired items online, and more than 70% don’t scroll through anything beyond the first page of results.
In this case, Shopify offers tons of SEO-additions and marketing tools to assist you in achieving a greater site performance. The tools allow you to discount coupons, link your products to other social media networks, and generate SEO-friendly keywords. Let’s take a look at some of Shopify’s glorified SEO features :
XML sitemap
This tool gives the search engines a better insight to the structure of your digital stores, allowing the search engine bots to have an easier time crawling and indexing your site. The XML sitemap will be automatically generated for your site, and all you have to do at this point onward is to verify your domain and submit your sitemap to Google Search Console.
301 redirect
When your site’s URL has achieved a good ranking on the search engines, it is important not to make any changes to your link as the name will be removed from the ranking list. However, if you have broken links that pose potential harm to your business, you need to redirect them to new URLs with more attractive content. Here’s where Shopify excels in providing a super simple redirect tool for you to use.
Robots.txt file
This tool instructs search engines on which pages they should crawl and which they should ignore. To achieve high search engine rankings, you must ensure that each indexed link is resourceful and unique, and if they are not, then search engines will not recognise the need to crawl. The Robots.txt file is automatically generated by Shopify, so that novice users will not have to worry about it. You can check it out at domain.com/robots.txt
Other SEO plugins:
- Image optimization
- Fixing broken links
- Copywriting SEO-friendly blogs
- Meta tags checker
- Creating HTML sitemaps
- Writing image alt tag
- Control your indexing
- Keyword checker
Migrating to Shopify : Problems to expect
While it may be great to have a platform to automatically generate all the necessary tools you need, there are some downsides including the lack of customization in Shopify. Let’s skim through some of the disadvantages to the platform:
- Can’t edit the sitemap.
- Limitations in customization. Keep in mind that Shopify uses proprietary coding, meaning the themes that they offer aren’t very tweakable.
- Limited blog post feature. Blog posts are the core attraction to generating organic traffic, in fact, the majority of SERPs are blog posts. Shopify fails to provide useful blogging features such as gallery uploading, share buttons to social media, comment sections, map and CTA button insertion and no-follow tags for outbound links.
- International SEO limitation. Shopify only recently invested efforts into international SEO, adding simple features for international subdomain, ccTLDS along with various XML sitemaps and JSON.file support systems. Despite having all these, Shopify is far from having global SEO as their strong suit. On top of that, Shopify is very reliant on 3rd party integrations for not only SEO, but other advanced functionality as well.
- Price and fees. Although the platform offers free themes, Shopify is a software-as-a-service (SAAS) and ultimately not free to use. You are only entitled to a 14 days free trial, and then the costs go by monthly subscriptions, payment for themes and transaction fees if you are not using Shopify Payments on your store. You can choose between 3 subscription plans and the higher the opted plan, the lower the transaction fee percentage. For example, you will have to pay 2% in Basic Shopify, 1% in Shopify, and 0.5% in Advanced Shopify.
Advantages of migrating to Magento
a. Improved performance
After the departure of Magento 1, Magento 2 took the stand with a better overall performance while offering the following features:
- Php 7 support
- Use of varnish caching
- Reduced unnecessary browser operations on the client’s side with minimized and bundled Javascript.
- Built-in tools for image compression
- Improved browser caching for static contents
b. User-friendly checkout and mobile-friendliness
Compared to the old system, Magento 2 offers a checkout process that is now 38% faster, and has the ability to handle a larger number of orders at a time. Research has shown that more than 20% of shoppers tend to leave if they’ve encountered complicated checkout processes, and to avoid this possibility, Magento 2 now allows its users to opt for a less time-consuming guest checkout or to simply create an account from the checkout page.
Magento 2 offers numerous responsive templates that are adaptable and optimized for different screen sizes, similar to that of Shopify, ensuring that the platform’s CMS is touch-friendly and mobile-friendly. According to Insider Intelligence, by 2024, mobile eCommerce or mCommerce sales are expected to account for 42.9% of eCommerce. This alarming factor should be taken into consideration as the use of mobile devices is evidently increasing each year.
c. Customization and payment processors
As we all know, open-source software allows nearly endless platform customization. If a certain feature isn’t available natively, there’s a strong chance a 3rd party developer may have already written the extension and is ready to be installed, and if the functionality is nowhere to be found in any existing extension, then you are encouraged to create your own extension or tweak the existing functionalities to your liking.
Magento 2 now comes with more than 150 payment gateways. Other than the common default methods, the platform has also introduced a variety of integrated secure payment processors such as Paypal, Braintree, Authorize.Net and other global payment. Additionally, Magento integrates gateways without transaction fees or addons.
d. Improved admin interface and SEO
Magento’s new admin interface simplifies online store upkeep. It’s far more user-friendly, simple to understand for new users and less time-consuming with a quicker product import capability.
Admins can now personalize the admin panel so that essential company information is easily accessible. This makes each admin panel distinctive, resulting in increased productivity when handling orders and customer information. Over and above that, the convenient drag-and-drop tool is now available in Magento 2’s admin interface. This means that altering the appearance of your online store will not require substantial coding knowledge and effort.
On the other note, having responsive web designs create possibilities in delivering an overall better experience in mobile and desktop shopping, making it necessary to integrate them. With the roaring success of mCommerce, Google has also been active in evaluating the responsiveness of your stores when it comes to search engine rankings.
Magento 2 has many SEO customization tools, including index management, which lets you determine which links Google receives. There are multiple discoverability methods available, prefixes and suffixes, as well as canonical tags and other significant SEO features including:
- Meta tags for products and categories pages
- Meta tags for Home page
- SEO-friendly URLs for products and categories
- Image optimization
- HTML and XML sitemaps
- Robots.txt and meta robots
- Rich snippets
- Google analytics and Google AdWords integrations
- Better layered navigation optimization
These capabilities, when combined with SEO best practices, helps you achieve higher ranking in the SERPs from the day you launch your online store. There will be no requirement for additional extensions or modules because Magento’s built-in SEO tools will sufficiently boost your store’s ranking.
Migrating to Magento : Problems to expect
Moving your entire store to a platform like Magento is far from being quick and easy. There are some of issues that you may face before migration:
- Themes from Magento 1 aren’t portable. Yes, if you’re migrating from Magento 1 to 2, then all of your storefront customization will have to be redone as it is impossible to take your current themes with you. Additionally, some of your extensions from magento 1 will disappear. Extensions from M1 and M2 differ, thus you will need to seek for new ones. However, this process can be made smoother due to the support of Magento 2’s HTML5, LESS, and CSS3.
- High price. Migrating to Magento 2 can cost you a fortune, because you’ll need a decent budget to pay for developers to help with the complex migrating process, making new adjustments, adding extensions and themes etc. While Community Edition is free, just the license for Enterprise Edition has surged from $18,000 to &22,000 per year.
- Steep learning curve. You may have already guessed it, but Magento’s system is large and complex, unsuited for people with no web development knowledge. Since Magento is not a hosted solution, getting your own hosting and setting up your store can be a confusing or inconvenient task for most users to endure.
- Requires powerful hosting. Because the eCommerce platform is rather large and complex, Magento specifies its hosting needs for merchants to only use VPS (Virtual Private Server), cloud, or any dedicated hosting. You’ll also need to handle domain registration, SLL security certifications, and hosting plans. This can be a hassle for novice merchants that lack technological competence or an eCommerce team.
Custom Website Development
Still undecided after reading through the previous points? Worry not. We present to you a third option – Custom web development.
Instead of having to manually tweak a pre-built template, you only have to communicate your special requirements to the web developer, and then sit and watch the magic happen. This saves you the time to search for designs and themes to fit your company’s aesthetics, as well as conducting in-depth research on the many eCommerce platforms available.
Custom solution pricing
Pricing for custom web development depends a lot on things like your business’s needs and goals, hosting, extra extensions and integrations, features and functions, and maintenance, among other things. Here, you have to start by consulting the web developer or respective agency that is responsible for delivering your website solution, and tell them all the necessary information.
Custom solution possibilities
Seeing some features or functionalities you like in Shopify or Magento but still wanting more? Having the right custom web developer can serve you just the same, if not more. Instead of doing all the research yourself, you can talk to your custom web developer and tell them what you need. They may even have good suggestions for you.
Besides that, custom eCommerce development is a good alternative because optimizing a website developed from the ground up is less time consuming. Developers can optimise the website code for search engines and boost its SERP ranking by starting from scratch.
When and How to Migrate
Website migration, also known as website re-platforming is a time-consuming procedure that necessitates some significant thought and planning, usually months in advance.
Here are some important steps that shouldn’t be ignored: Using a migration checklist, auditing and backing up your existing data, importing and verifying your data, and testing your new platform before launching. All these steps will ensure the success of your migration process.
If you don’t want to face manual work, then keep your options open and look out for a custom web developer. Snappymob is more than just your website-migrating developer, we are your dedicated partner; you focus on your brand, we bring the tech to life.
Shopify vs Magento vs Custom solutions – which one is best for your store?
With all that being said, how systems like Shopify and Magento (Adobe Commerce) or even custom solutions can benefit your business will depends on your online goals.
If you are managing a large business with unlimited budget, have the expertise or personnel to run a website, and want to integrate various features and extensions to the platform, then Magento is a good choice for you. On the contrary, if you are a smaller-scaled business wanting to gain more awareness online, and are fairly new to the eCommerce world and website creation, Shopify is the better option.
If none of the above are are your cup of tea, allow us to help! Because it is designed specifically for you, a custom website will definitely stand out from the crowd.
Contact us today to schedule a consultation with our team of experts and discover how we can help your business prosper!