Magento is an open source PHP-based e-commerce platform. Magento manages the functionality, appearance and over-all look of the e- Commerce store. It have various robust features and provides extraordinary flexibility to e-commerce store owners.
Magento e-commerce solution is relatively old software. Later it is an acquisition by eBay Inc. It indicates Magento's potential, future improvements and new opportunities in the system. It is laced up with a perfect administrative interface to robust search engine optimization, effective marketing, and inventory management tools.
It offers customers with the ultimate e-commerce solution by providing an efficient combination of scalable design and an extensive support network. Its return on investment is very high. The dynamic interface of Magento based e-commerce store is capable enough in selling, compelling and providing a joyful experience to its visitors.
Why Magento Is Better Than Other eCommerce Platforms?
- Simple and easy-to-use features
- Updates the website automatically. This unique facility is usually not available on other e-commerce platforms
- Functions of Magento Ecommerce Platform is very simple, quick, and versatile. Visitors can browse easily, buy comfortably and enjoy services conveniently
- It supports multiple websites to promote services and products, across domains
- It helps in creating scalable websitesIt helps in scaling up existing websites
- Magento was recognized as the most popular eCommerce platform in the world, in the year 2013
- In the year 2014, in-spite of having the tough and increased competition, the market share of Magento is among 30 most popular eCommerce solutions. It is approximately 30%.
- It is very popular and have very long history. Therefore, plenty of information is available for users as well as developers.
- More than 200 000 online retailers have chosen Magento as an e-commerce platform for their business.
How Magento Is Beating The Competition?
How Magento Is Better Than Woocommerce?
As Magento is an open-source e-commerce platform. The Magento software has a lot of features because of which it runs multiple e-commerce stores through a single installation. If your company is big and you want to gain profit from the very first day of your of using an e-commerce store than Magento is best for you.
- In Magento, customers can filter your product list by color, size, range, etc. This shows that Magento comes with advanced navigation.
- In Magento, with the same domain name, you can freely set-up more than one e-commerce store through a single back-end panel. This shows that Magento has multiple store views and websites.
- In Magento, you can also get the feasibility of having multiple websites under a single installation.
- Magento has impressive selling tools. Magento comes excellent options for upselling and cross-selling of products. Additional features of Magento includes discount coupons, customer group based pricing, etc.
- In Magento, you can manage your products very effectively. You can display specific prices for a specific group of customers, add multiple images for products and you can control all this by using simple options.
- The stock management in Magento is possible in a very impressive way. You can set an alert each time one of your product stock goes below. This option saves you from ‘out of stock’ situation.
- “Rich out of the box” feature of Magento helps in increasing sales conversion. This feature supports cross-sells and up-sells. Magento also provides filtering functionality and more robust product organization without plugins.
- When you look at the numbers of the top 1 million sites on the internet, Magento hosts about 10k.
Points To Prove Why Magento Is Better Than Woocommerce?
Difference On The Basic Of Dedication and Plugin: Magento is a dedicated, standalone eCommerce platform. On the other hand, Woocommerce is the Plugin of WordPress. It is just an add-on to the content management system of WordPress.
Difference On The Basic Of Hosting: Hosting related needs of each platform are different from each other and these effect costing. One can host both the platforms at their own. If you want to flourish your e-commerce business than rather spending time on issues related to infrastructure, server and maintenance, assign someone else to handle this, which can be done effectively in Magento.
Difference On The Basic Of Content Management: Although you are setting your e-commerce store, the fact is that an e-commerce site firstly and fore mostly is a website. The meaning of this is that you too have to manage the non-product content like informational pages, homepages, landing pages, etc. This is called content management, and in addition to this, each platform provides different capabilities.
Magento is an e-commerce platform. So, for content management, you are needed to add extensions. Setting up basic pages, and navigation, etc. But, if you do not have much non-product content, then Magento probably works well with your need. Woocommerce too suits well with the content management functions of your online webstore. This is advantageous for someone who is taking blogging seriously.
Difference On The Basic Of Ease of Use: Obviously, ease of use is very important from the user perspective. It is said that Magento is hard to use but more robust when compared to Woocommerce.
Why WooCommerce Is Not Better Than Magento?
- It is not good for an e-commerce store which is meant to sell hundreds and thousands of products
- What the reason of WooCommerce store fall is the extensive load on web server due to extensions, plugins, themes, etc.
- You need to add multiple pulls for making your WordPress website behave like an e-commerce website
- Scaling too is not simple with WooCommerce. The range of plugins installed in a WooCommerce supported website pose as a problem when the site needs to be extended to suit new requirements. The reason is maximum resources are being consumed by these plugins.
How Magento Is Better Than Prestashop?
Magento and PrestaShop both are Open Source eCommerce platforms. Both offers a wide range of features. Both are quality frameworks. But still Magento is better than Prestashop.
Why…?
Magento vs. PrestaShop
Magento and Prestashop, both are open-source programs. Both are customizable but in different ways. Magento, on one hand, known as the leader in eCommerce shopping cart solutions. It provides customization, tools and a huge variety of features. It also provides better SEO benefits with targeted promotion and merchandising, than any other shopping cart available in the market. Magento also allows for multiple payment and shipping option.
What Magento Offers You?
Magento provides plenty of features with all kinds of flexibility. You can change the content, look, and function in Magento. One can use Magento for search engine optimization purpose as well as a catalog-management tool too.
As it was founded in 2001, so it have wholesome of experience. Partnership with eBay makes the system more powerful and adds more developers to the community.
Magento provides to its users all kinds of features, modules, and extensions. It is preferred best from technical support perspective too. It is suitable for professional online stores.
What PrestaShop Offers You?
PrestaShop too has plenty of features and is another open-source eCommerce solution. The basic setup of PrestaShop can be used free of charge. But yes, you are needed to purchase the themes, templates and modules for taking most of the advantage out of it. It was launched in 2007 and suitable mainly for small to medium business for making their online presence effective. It also does not provide an official support team.
Comparison Between Magento And Prestashop
They both are good e-commerce solutions. But still we are giving you points which will showcase why Magento is better than Prestashop:
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Magento
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Prestashop
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Number Game
Launch: Magento was created in 2001 while, PrestaShop was initiated in August 2007.
Versions: Magento has 15 versions while PrestaShop has seven versions.
Plugins And Extensions: Magento provides 1,500 plugins and extensions while PrestaShop provides more than 25,000 plugins and extensions.
Clients: Both have almost same amount of online stores. Magento has clients like Nike AU & UK while Prestashop has clients like The Fab Shoes.
Social Following: Magento is ahead as compared to PrestaShop in the Twitter world with three times as many followers.
SEO - Magento overall offers more SEO benefits and features than Prestashop.
Who To Choose Magento?
We had given you wholesome information related to Magento and Prestashop both. From the above discussion, we can say that both the system meets the requirement of different types of online stores.
Although. Still Magento is perfect for those who are looking for full control over the customization of their online store. Larger businesses or those who have plans to grow quickly will find the features of Magento a better fit than PrestaShop.
Why Prestashop Is Not Better Than Magento?
Expensive: Most modules of Prestashop, which is required for a fully functional shopping cart website are very highly priced. Customers also face upgrading issues that reflect negatively on the software itself.
Scalability: Scalability is minimum in PrestaShop. It is suitable for small to medium businesses but creates not suitable for big scale shopping store. It also does not have a multi-store feature. This again proves a big hindrance full-scale projects.
Design Attributes: Design attributes is very poor in Prestashop. The product catalog and default skin need improvement very much. They are also not professionally designed as that of Magento. If we compare the statistics system for PrestaShop, with Magento, then it is also unfavorable.
Marketing: Prestashop does not focus on marketing. There is no any opportunity to cross-sell products and input attributes. This option is normally available in other e-commerce platforms.
Thus, we can say that PrestaShop is not perfect. It should be developed further on attributes, scalability, and modules.
Start From Here
Whatever platform you choose, starting with the right hosting is very important. The best hosting is found at GoWebBaby.
How Magento Is Better Than Shopify?
Before discussing why Magento is better than Shopify, first understand some reasons why Magento is most preferred and most appreciated e-commerce platform:
Status
- association with eBay
- huge list of successful e-commerce stores created on Magento
- big companies are using Magento to encourage their online sales
Functionality
- open source code allows high customization capabilities
- without compatibility issues, easy optimization for different devices and platforms is possible
- specific products target specific segment of customers, which proves its marketing capabilities
- from a single account, multiple online stores can be managed which proves its multi-store functionality
- theming engine is excellent
- receiving elements from one theme to another
- excellent free themes for a smooth start
- huge collection of 5000+ free and paid extensions, that too of high quality
- API
- minimum purchase order amounts setup
- MySQL database management system
- eBay order import and listing integration
- FedEx, DHL, UPS, USPS shipment tracking integration
- supported by 20 payment gateways
- alternative checkouts supported such as Amazon FPS, PayPal Express, Google Checkout
- subscriptions
- taxation
Development
- Zend framework PHP-based e-commerce solution
- legacy setup
- MySQL data storage
- use of MVC pattern
- XML configuration system
- Ajax usage
- lots of reusable objects and API interfaces
- Brilliant usage of namespacing, which avoids conflicts between modules
- neat, clean and systematically documented code
- perfect scalability for wide product catalogs and thousands of orders per day
Hosting
- downloadable open source solution
- easy scalability to multiple servers
Administration
- product control capabilities
- access control
- multiple product types
- attribute sets and configurable products
- multi-website and multi-store functionality
- powerful special offers management
- WYSIWYG editor
- product import- export
- statistics
- stock control
Security
- access control list
- PCI compliance (Enterprise Edition)
- staff actions log
- form CAPTCHA
- PA/DSS Certificate (Magento payment bridge)
- SSL certificates
Consumer experience
- multi-language localization packages including currencies and taxes
- guest account
- newsletter
- category filters
- newsletter
- polls
- the straightforward shopping process
- sitemap
- integrations with third party payment gateways
- complex products handling
- promotions from the CMS
- configurable and auto-generated on-page SEO components
- buyer testimonials
- featured products
- image enlarge
- product rating
- product image attaching
- product reviews
- search cloud
- search tool
- plenty of free and paid consumer-oriented extensions
- real-time search suggestions (search as you type)
- popular products
- tell a friend
- re-ordering
- product return
- customer segmentation with a possibility to apply different discounts to each segment
- gift certificates
- wish list
- membership only categories and products
- coupons
- membership discounts
- special offers
- private sales for valued customers
Support and community
- active community on multiple third-party forums
- possess fast-growing online forums with well-established online community support options, free and paid both
Various people criticize Magento on the platform that it is the technically advanced e-commerce solution. In-spite of this, it is the first choice for big-size online store owners because of its flexibility and scalability.
As Magento is open-source software, so one can download it for free. Also, your online store looks perfect by using its pre-built components and custom coding.
The Magento community of Magento is offering a wide range of extensions. These extensions help in optimizing selling and marketing processes. Magento Connect is Magento’s extensions marketplace with 5000+ modules. With its help, thousands of vendors worldwide, add new features for making sales process smooth and provide better user experience. All sorts of extensions and features are available in Magento like loyalty discounts, email marketing, automatic translation tools, backups, product management tools, accounting, reporting features and much more to add.
Top Companies And Brands Are Using Magento
There are almost 60 competitors exist in the e-commerce market. But still, Magento remains on top in the chart. This is due to its power and flexibility. Therefore, Magento has gained some powerful clients. The top-most clients of Magento are enjoying the capability of the system and adding advanced custom functionality to their stores.
Below mentioned are few top companies using Magento to enhance their retail stores:
- Ford
- 20th Century Fox
- Olympus
- Vizio
Why Shopify Is Not Better Than Magento?
As we all know, there is no perfect e-commerce platform. Every e-commerce platforms have its set of pro and cons. The main drawback of Shopify are:
- monthly subscription fees for using the system and each paid add-on installed by a vendor
- website data is not fully controllable by the e-commerce store owners
- customization is limited
- simple content management system
- Use of Ruby-based template language “Liquid”. Many developers are not familiar with this language
There is no meaning, spending money to customize and deploy your online store. Even a non-technical person can setup his Shopify store in few hours. He can also make some customization without knowing any single detail of technology that how it works and sells can be made. And that too on the fee of $14/month (which is very nominal for setting up an online store), after 14 days of free trial. However, it seems that the Shopify’s subscription model will sooner or later ask customers to pay for everything that Shopify developers have created for them.
With the growing business, the necessity of expanding functionality also felt. This refers to adding new add-ons. Shopify can make available some great paid add-ons but here begins the problem. The each installed plugin requires a monthly payment. This way, to keep the online business running with Shopify, the majority of vendors start paying hundreds or even thousands per year. Using Shopify is something like getting a loan. You pay monthly installments of the loan, in the same way if you want your store to run and exist, you have to pay a monthly charge. When you take a loan, at least, you know how much interest rate will be charged. Nut here, even you never know how high the interest rate is or will be.
The lifetime subscription payments are the another major drawback of the Shopify platform. Shopify is a fully hosted e-commerce solution. So, the online vendor cannot choose a hosting provider for their store. Shopify only uses their proprietary hosting services. Your all data will get stored by Shopify. So, your online store database is not fully yours because you can’t change the hoster without changing the whole e-commerce platform. This can be a huge problem for big online stores. If someday when you want to shift from Shopify platform to some other platform, than either you will bite your tongue or go through the ordeal of transferring your Shopify-hosted database to another platform to restart your business with a new website. Even special tools that automate the migration are not perfect. So ultimately, you need the help of savvy developers.
When it comes to adding custom features, Shopify is much less flexible than Magento. If you are a small-sized entrepreneur, then it is fine, but you can feel a little bit restrictive for powerful vendors wishing to add unique features or customize their stores to offer advanced services to online shoppers.
How Magento Is Better Than Bigcommerce?
Magento is the king of e-commerce and therefore supported by global brands like Northface, Nike, etc. Hosted solution of Magento – “Magento Go” is capable enough of competing with Shopify and BigCommerce. Template library of Magento Go is also pretty. Magento advanced version is expensive. You need to be conversant with Html /CSS to customize as this is the platform by developers for developers.
BigCommerce
BigCommerce themes are not that much attractive. Also, BigCommerce does not force to learn their unique programming language to customize. Bigcommerce built-in templates are not appealing enough. Customization requires more effort and third party app support is also limited.
Why Magento Is Better Than BigCommerce?
- Magento is an open source e-commerce web application and best e-commerce solution in the world. Big Commerce does not offer the same level of customizability or anywhere near the amount of third- party modules for site owners.
- Skills of Magento is very good. It is good in tried and tested but BigCommerce is not.
- Big Brands are using Magento, but no big brand is using BigCommerce.
- Magento is customizable,
- Magento has huge template library. It has more than 1,000 templates the quality of which is more alluring than Big Commerce.
- Magento has advanced reporting and analytics while BigCommerce lacks all these. Reports can be generated in Magento in very less time.
- Design features of Magento offer a more wide-ranging solution with more available add-ons while Big Commerce is relatively simpler. You have more options in the layout and operation of your store if you decide to use Magento.
How Magento Is Better Than osCommerce?
Both Magento and osCommerce are 2 of the most reputed e-commerce solutions widely used by a large number of people to set up online businesses. However, Magento is the better option for e-commerce. Learn details in the following parts.
Update: Compared with osCommerce, Magento is a pretty new software for eCommerce, and its developers go further to enhance their creation with new and important features. Therefore, the program's updates keep coming every 10 to 15 days. However, the updates of the osCommerce are much longer.
Cost: Both Magento and osCommerce are open source software free to install and use. In Magento, you can use the community version for free.
Multiple Stores: In this aspect, Magento surpasses the osCommerce because with it users are allowed to manage multiple stores in multiple languages with different approaches to different kinds of customers. Nevertheless, with osCommerce, people can build and manage only one store to sell their products.
Payment Gateway & Discounts: Magento allows users to receive payments from their online sale via almost all payment methods. So, it has huge advantages over osCommerce, when it comes to the payment gateway. Also, it is easier to find discounts and special offers with Magento offering SEO, URLs, coupons, product summary and additional features.
How Magento Is Better Than ZenCart?
Online Shopping is a form of Electronic Commerce. Here, consumers buy goods & services with the help of internet. To set any e-commerce store, one needs an e-commerce platform. Magento & Zen Cart are the two most favorable platforms anyone would search to open a web-store or online store.
Among all e-commerce CMS platforms, Magento and ZenCart are the most powerful content management systems.To find this that why Magento is better to use for eCommerce website, let’s take a look:
Magento
Magento is the powerful open-source e-commerce solution. It is designed to customize, manage, set-up and run online portal. It provides maximum flexibility, scalability, and control. The feature rich e-commerce platform of Magento provides the wide range of feature list which helps in building a completely scalable online store.
Zen Cart
Zen Cart is an online store management system. It is user friendly and based on PHP open source e-commerce platform which was started in 2003. Zen Cart uses HTML components along with MySQL database.
Magento V/S Zen Cart
Both Magento and Zen Cart are e-commerce platforms, which run on the LAMP environment (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP).
- Both Platforms are the free and open source.
- Zen Cart supports single store whereas Magento supports multiple sales outlets.
- Magento supports iPhone and major mobile platforms whereas Zen Cart does not support them.
- Magento offers complete hold over content management whereas Zen Cart has certain limitations.
- Magento offers template management system for emails on the other hand Zen Cart does not have this feature.
- Magento has better security standards in comparison to Zen Cart.
- Magento has user-friendly navigation. Zen Cart’s Navigation is also good but is far behind that of Magento.
Why Magento Is Better?
Magento wins the race between Magento and Zencart. Comes out to be first when compared to Zen Cart with outstanding functionality & features, with its ability to create beautiful stores. However Zen Cart is also a good option, but it lacks in some areas when compared to Magento. So, Magento has more to offer and appears extraordinary than Zen Cart. Moreover, Magento is not easy to customize unless expert website developers are involved.
There are several other reasons for why Magento is chosen to be superior CMS for e-commerce websites like it is good for marketing, have customizable themes
