Shopify Plus VS Magento Commerce: Complete Guide to Unleash the Potential of an Online Store

eCommerce Development

Comparative Introduction of Shopify Plus and Magento Commerce

The two enterprise versions of Shopify and Magento are aimed at businesses with a particularly high volume of sales. They are not designed to work with freelancers and SMEs, because their very essence is intended to solve complex problems that arise to those who control several more zeros on their invoices.

First of all, Shopify Plus is the big business version of Shopify and opens up a world of new features, integrations, access to code editing, dedicated customer support, direct expert help, automation features, and much more. If what you are still looking for is the usual Shopify even if you have a millionaire business, no problem. The base functions are still present.

The recommended annual billing to contract Shopify Plus is a minimum of $ 800,000 per year. We will see the costs and commissions in more detail below, but this amount serves as a good example to know what type of company it is aimed at.

Magento Commerce (formerly Magento Enterprise) is the enterprise version of Magento. Its normal version differed in that it was a self-hosted platform , that is, hosted by the user himself, who had to be in charge of contracting the hosting and manual updates of the store. The advantage of this greater work and technical knowledge requirement is to directly access all the store code for customization, when Shopify did not allow it. However, we will see how in Shopify Plus, all this changes.

Shopify Plus and Magento Commerce Comparison: Step by Step

Cost

Since the decision to hire one or the other platform depends a lot on the billing of your company, we are going to see the cost first. It is possible that in the basic versions of these two CMS we started by comparing other characteristics, but here the importance of price and initial outlay are paramount.

Starting with Shopify , the standard version is divided into four different plans based on our needs: Shopify Lite, Basic Shopify, Shopify Plan, and Advanced Shopify, all of which range from $ 9 per month to $ 299 per month.

But we can consider Shopify Plus as the icing on the cake. And, being so, its cost amounts to a minimum subscription of $ 2,000 per month. As we have said, the minimum of what you invoice in your online store should be around $ 800,000 per year. If the amount is less, you have to be very clear if the prospecting of your business tells you that you are going to continue growing, because the costs are considerable.

That said, $ 2,000 per month is the minimum to pay, but it starts to rise from $ 800,000 in annual turnover, making up a commission of 0.25% of your store's income , with a cap of $ 40,000 per month. We are going to see a list of examples that will help you see where the shots go.

Billing of up to $ 800,000 per year: you will pay $ 2,000 per month
With $ 1,000,000 per year: you will pay $ 2,500 per month
With $ 5,000,000 per year: you will pay $ 12,500 per month
With $ 12,000,000 per year: you will pay $ 30,000 per month

With $ 16,000,000 per year onwards: you will pay $ 40,000 per month at most.

On the other hand, we have the transaction fees. Since we are talking about big deals, the commissions are lower than in their conventional plans. You can expect to pay perfectly 2.15% + $ 0.30 per sale (these are US prices). If you use an external payment gateway, such as PayPal or Skrill, you will be charged an additional commission of 0.15%.

And finally there are those costs that we cannot specify so much, and it is not that it is a secret, but it depends a lot on your preferences. We talk about the costs of buying themes, buying apps and hiring experts. Some themes in the store are free, but others are $ 180. The same thing happens with apps, since there is a fairly wide range of prices. But where the money can go the most may be in hiring experts in web design or programming depending on the agency you choose.

The Magento Commerce license also operates in a similar way, as it depends on your company's billing.

Here you also have to take into account the cost of hosting, which with Magento 2 Commerce Cloud Hosting can be around $ 3,333 with the license fees included. On third party hosting , you can expect to pay $ 1,000 and up. We are going to put a similar list of examples for the prices of Magento Commerce (hosting included).

Annual turnover of less than $ 1,000,000: you will pay $ 3,333 per month
From $ 1 to $ 5,000,000 per year: you will pay $ 4,583.33 per month
From $ 5,000,000 to $ 10,000,000 annually: you will pay $ 6666.66 per month
From $ 10,000,000 to $ 25,000,000 annually: you will pay $ 10,000 per month
From $ 25,000,000 to $ 50,000,000 annually: you will pay $ 15,833.33 per month

We also have to take into account the costs of development and hiring experts in web programming. The open source nature of Magento usually needs a lot of support when editing the source code.

The costs in the lower tranches from around 1 million dollars of billing are higher in Magento Commerce, so you will suffer more in economic terms as soon as you start on this platform, especially if you take into account the price for have a code developed by professionals. Why is Magento more expensive? Precisely for this very reason. Shopify Plus allows you a much more advanced customization than in its standard plans, but Magento gives you the option to access the complete source code, with its respective advantages.

Remember that if you do not want to hire the hosting that Magento Commerce Cloud provides, it is recommended to pay $ 1,000 per month in a third-party hosting to ensure the good performance of your traffic. This will go up as your store visits increase and you will have to make sure you are prepared for the spikes that can occur at times like Christmas or Black Friday. With Shopify Plus, scalability is guaranteed at all times and you won't have to worry about it.

Multi-store capacity and management

In this section, we'll start looking at the more robust features that the enterprise versions of both e-commerce platforms specialize in. From the outset, both Shopify Plus and Magento Commerce allow multi-store management.

Shopify Plus allows you to add 9 more storefronts for your business and control everything from a single location: the control panel. All the information you are looking for, analytics for each store, users, permissions, automation controls, number of sales, comparison list, etc., can be found here.

Perhaps the disadvantage of having different windows or additional stores is that you cannot set different prices for products that are sold in different countries. The good part is that if you use Shopify Payment, the default payment gateway in Shopify, the currency conversion rate will be automatically calculated and added to the final price. The customer will know what he is paying at all times.

Of course, you can configure different warehouses in multiple locations to control your inventory and be aware that your orders are the order of the day. On the basic Shopify plans, you could have up to 4 warehouse locations. With Shopify Plus, this number increases to 20.

Magento Commerce also has a control panel that integrates all aspects of multi-store management, similar to what happens in Shopify Plus, adding both B2C stores and B2B stores. At a single glance, all your business data will be visible on the screen.

What are the differences with Shopify Plus? First of all, Magento does not have a maximum number of additional stores that you can create and it allows you to synchronize product catalogs between different web pages or stores, something that in Shopify Plus is not yet available. This helps to create different web pages or storefronts for one brand or for multiple brands.

Another difference is that you can specify a local price for a product, thus differentiating its cost between different countries. In Shopify Plus the currency is automatically converted, but Magento allows you to change the cost directly in the destination country. And we cannot forget about your inventory, since Magento has its own algorithm to optimize its operations.

B2B functionality

Selling business to business ( business-to-business or B2B for its acronym in English) is a supported option for both e - commerce platforms and is an important activity in the daily life of large companies.

Shopify Plus has an express functionality for B2B selling, which allows you to establish a separate store, based on the main store catalog. In reference to the data of your buying and selling activity, you can set different prices for specific customers, as well as discount rules, or discounts based on the order volume. A strong point of B2B in Shopify Plus is automation when it comes to checking orders and managing your customers. You will save time and money by not always having to be on top of every sale (but don't forget to take care of your customers!).

The Magento Commerce functions for B2B are divided into the creation of custom catalogs for specific clients, such as in this case, budget management, role configuration and rules for client groups, among others. If you want to add multichannel sales to B2B commerce on platforms such as Amazon or eBay, you can also do so by installing an extension.

Apps and extensions

If you need to expand specific functions of your online store or install third-party payment gateways that are not included in the platforms, you can use their add-on store to find everything you need. Both Shopify Plus and Magento have a large number of add-ons to install.

Shopify and Shopify Plus are characterized by offering the seller a large number of apps to install in the store. Compared to the costs of the Shopify Plus license, the functionalities of these apps can be cheap and they offer a multitude of add-ons that will undoubtedly help you and your customers on a day-to-day basis.

When you enter the Shopify App Store you can browse the different categories depending on the function of each app, check the apps developed by the Shopify team itself and even those that work ideally in the Spanish market. Several examples that are only available for Shopify Plus are:

Shopify Flow

It is an app that is used to import or migrate data from other media to Shopify Plus. Information on products, invoices, orders, customers... You won't have to do it manually.

Bold

It allows the creation of paid subscriptions within the online store. In this way, it will be easy for you to manage member clubs and memberships of different characteristics.

Magento has its own marketplace for acquiring extensions and services. The store is also divided into categories, with the most popular being the first to appear. Some of the functions that you can perform with its extensions are the following:

Turn your website into a store with multiple sellers who can upload and manage orders from their own site.
Specific customer support functionalities and integration with third party software for this purpose.
Set up more personalized shipments with different rules.
Integrate your Magento store with a Facebook store.

Both platforms provide the option of adding more payment gateways than those that bring natively and a multitude of apps or extensions to deepen the management of almost all aspects of your store: product, customer, shipping, taxes, SEO, marketing, customer service, and so on.

Presentation of the catalog or merchandising

There is no question that good marketing and product presentation can make the difference between a customer who stays and a customer who leaves. How do both platforms respond to the presentation of your catalog?

As for Shopify Plus , customers can select different products when browsing the catalog and order them in the way they prefer.

You can also set a default order and allow customers to order them at will if they need to. Catalogs can be ordered as follows:

Bestsellers
Newer and older
More expensive and cheaper
By name (ascending or descending)

If these are not enough, you can also add additional options so that customers are able to order the products with specific rules.

Magento Commerce has great flexibility when it comes to displaying the products of a store in a personalized way.

Natively, 7 different product types can be configured:

Standard products
Customizable products
Products in pack
Downloadable Products
Digital products
Grouped products
Gift cards

An interesting option in Magento is the possibility of creating rules so that the related products you want appear while the client is consulting the catalog. In this way, you can attract them to those products or services that you consider of most interest.

Professional reports

If we have an online store billing tens of thousands of dollars a year, we will need to have all the appropriate information and professionally viewed.

Shopify Plus reports appear elegant and clean, and cover all the data that is of most interest to the naked eye. It also allows integration with third parties to expand its potential or import / export the data.

Magento acquired RJMetric a few years ago (now called Magento BI) and provided merchants with a robust solution for professional reporting, this section being one of the weakest on the e-commerce platform.

Magento BI is free for Commerce users and costs $ 100 per month for those with standard plants. This software extracts the information directly from your Magento store and offers data that were previously more difficult to access, such as the _customer lifetime value (_the profit that a customer represents in a given time), or specific product reports.

Customer Support

Shopify Plus would be the winner in this section. You have an expert dedicated to your service 24 hours a day, not only to help you with questions and suggestions, but also to help you grow your business and manage all the problems that may arise. You can contract specific marketing services to receive unique recommendations on how to increase your store sales. You can contact the official support via live chat, email or by phone.

Magento has a large online database that will help you find the answers you need, including best practices and guides on how to build your business, but it doesn't have as dedicated customer support as is the case with Shopify Plus. In these cases, you may need to hire Magento developers to move forward.

Yes, it is possible to hire the services of professional developers focused on Magento Commerce, but this is not included in the license and will cost you an additional amount. If you don't want to take out your wallet, you can always check out the community forums and help center. The Magento community is very active.

Last conclusions

Our final conclusions are as follows: the winner is Shopify Plus. It results from a less complex e-commerce platform to use for those large businesses that are growing rapidly. It does not require so much technical knowledge, and at the same time it has experts in marketing and web development in case we need them at certain times.

Magento Commerce is a very robust and very powerful solution, but its complexity and higher cost in the first tranches of our annual billing can be a major drawback. It has very interesting functionalities incorporated into its software that Shopify Plus does not have, but at the same time it also takes more time to learn how to use them.

At Elitech Systems, We stick with Shopify. As experts in e-commerce, we help our clients create their first online store and also increase their sales, whatever plan they choose. Sign up for Shopify and we will be happy to talk to you.

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