DEV Community: perezhenya

Magento or BigCommerce

perezhenya — Fri, 11 Sep 2020 08:11:34 +0000

According to SimilarTech, BigCommerce powers 37,278 online stores including Toyota, Tyler’s, and Clarks. Magento has a much bigger market share with 133,425 websites and big brands such as Bauhaus and Burger King on their client list. In 2018, the total value of merchandise sold on websites handled by Magento amounted to $155 billion. This doesn’t mean you need to choose Magento and call it done.

Ease of use

Setting up a BigCommerce website is much easier than Magento. The BigCommerce dashboard demands only minimal coding knowledge and has an intuitive dashboard that makes it simple for store owners to get their site up and running.

With Bigcommerce, you get access to step-by-step instructions, useful tutorials, and tooltips that simplify the website development process. In the paid plan, BigCommerce provides excellent customer service. Additionally, the ecommerce solution comes with a website builder that enables merchants to build and operate the website without web technical knowledge.

How easy is Magento to use? Building an ecommerce store on Magento requires the technical expertise of the platform, thus you’ll need to hire a certified Magento development company that has an experienced team of developers with profound knowledge in HTML, CSS, PHP, Java, and JavaScript programming languages.

Magento is written on PHP, so you can customize the store the way you need and has access to unlimited selling capacity. On the other hand, BigCommerce also allows you to customize your ecommerce website store but with many restrictions and this customization can cost a pretty penny.

SEO

Search engine optimization is vital for any ecommerce store. Recent research claims that 75% of users only check the first page of Google results. If your company doesn’t show up on the first page on the search engine, there is a high probability that your potential customers won’t find your brand.

To develop your online business, you need to optimize your store for search engines. Fortunately, both BigCommerce and Magento come with powerful SEO tools. Both platforms give you an opportunity to perform significant tasks such as optimizing your pictures, customizing page meta tags, altering search links.

BigCommerce has many SEO features such as robots.txt file and Google sitemap to perform professional SEO configurations for your pages and headlines. With BigCommerce, store owners also get access to a program called SocialShop that enables you to post promotions on Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter.

Magento is known for its SEO friendly options. Being a self-hosted platform, Magento Open Source offers a lot more flexibility and control regarding SEO for maximum output. Magento 2 has introduced many improvements to SEO such as Auto-Generation and Schema.org features. Auto-Generation is aimed to set templates for product metadata and Schema.org could help to boost the search engine rankings of your ecommerce store.
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Magento VS WooCommerce

perezhenya — Tue, 08 Sep 2020 14:20:15 +0000

If you are planning to launch your own online business and can’t make your mind on the ecommerce solution to get started with: Magento vs WooCommerce, you have come to the right place. Making the right decision on which platform to opt for is crucial when building an online presence.

Magento and WooCommerce are top platforms with regard to self-hosted ecommerce solutions. Magento is known as one of the most popular solutions for enterprise-level companies, whereas WooCommerce is a perfect option for WordPress-powered stores.

Magento Woocommerce comparison

Let’s compare Magento and WooCommerce in more detail to see their strengths and weaknesses.

Ease of use

A great number of merchants do not have technical and coding knowledge, so they are looking for ecommerce solutions that are easy to deploy and run.

Magento is a robust platform with a great variety of useful features and functions. However, it could be a little bit challenging for beginners to get started with Magento. The platform comes with an advanced setup process and requires technical expertise to make any store configurations.

Nevertheless, Magento provides detailed documentation and video tutorials. To make the most use of the platform’s potential, it’s better to task the deployment process to a certified Magento development company with the expertise and resources to deliver top-quality online sites.

WooCommerce is not a standalone platform, it is a plugin that you can integrate into your WordPress website to transform it into an ecommerce store. WooCommerce has an intuitive interface, thus you can set up an ecommerce store on your own. Anyone familiar with WordPress coding even without deep technical knowledge can easily learn how to deploy and run the WooCommerce website without too much effort.

Moreover, WooCommerce provides a setup wizard that takes you through all the essential steps to set up your store like creating pages, choosing the language, configuring payments, and shipping methods. You only need to follow the guide and configure everything correctly.

Theme Selection

Both WooCommerce and Magento give you the possibility to design a unique storefront and provide beautiful themes selection. There are dozens of free and paid mobile-friendly templates to select from. With a little customization, your ecommerce store should look exactly as you wish.

You can look for Magento templates on the Magento marketplace or opt for themes from third-party providers such as ThemeForest or TemplateMonster. When it comes to the store design, we encourage you to create a custom-made theme from scratch if you want to have a unique look.

WooCommerce has a little advantage over Magento in terms of the number of themes available on the market. The platform provides a large variety of themes. Apart from native WooCommerce themes, there is a possibility to apply any of the WordPress themes. There are thousands of WordPress themes on the World Wide Web.

Which one will work for you?

Which is better Magento or WordPress plugin WooCommerce? At the end of the day, it is up to you to decide whether WooCommerce or Magento is the best option for your ecommerce business. There are different disadvantages and advantages of using Magento and WooCommerce in terms of usability, scalability, SEO, performance, security, hosting, and customization

WooCommerce is a perfect fit for small businesses that are looking for a flexible, cost-effective, and user-friendly solution. Its smooth integration with WordPress allows ecommerce businesses that are already using WordPress to start selling right away.

Magento is a perfect fit for medium and large businesses that are looking for a strong order management framework, great customization, high scalability, advanced security, and a full range of built-in features. If you expect a high volume of traffic, Magento will be the most beneficial platform

Magento store audit

perezhenya — Wed, 19 Aug 2020 11:51:12 +0000

Here are the steps need to be done to audit your website

Magento performance audit Make sure your website is speedy both on desktop and mobile. If you don’t focus on delivering the fastest user experience, Google may rank your competitors’ websites above your own. To accurately troubleshoot the issue of slow loading time,look at frontend performance, backend environment, and server-side elements. The most common factors that slow down ecommerce websites are fonts, images, JavaScript files, or poor custom code. Sometimes you might also need a better server to increase your website performance.
Magento code review Decrease the cost of software maintenance. Poor code quality makes websites expensive to maintain. When you need to add new features or integrate a third-party system, with poor code quality, you will face technical problems. The goal of the code review is to find mistakes overlooked in the previous development phase and improve the overall quality of the custom code. After you find the defects in code, fix them and test the functionality to make sure modifications in the code didn’t cause any new issues.
Magento security audit Prevent the risk of cyber-attacks and manage vulnerabilities. Check if your web servers got the latest patches and security software installed and if not, install it. Also control and limit the IP addresses that are allowed in your area, review all usernames and passwords on your site, and remove trading and customer data from a publically accessible web server. Read more https://elogic.co/services/magento-store-audit/

Pros and Cons of Magento Ecommerce Platforms

perezhenya — Mon, 10 Aug 2020 14:22:26 +0000

Ecommerce platforms have made it cost-efficient and easier than ever to set up your own online store. The Magento ecommerce platform has been the leading choice of retailers all over the world.

In recent years, Magento went through a lot of changes to become one of the most commonly used platforms on the market. Other platforms that follow close behind are BigCommerce, Shopify, Salesforce, and Woocomerce.

The Pros of a Magento ecommerce platform

Magento came out as one of the most robust, flexible, user-friendly, and scalable platforms in the ecommerce market. It offers an extensive range of powerful tools for developing and running your online store. Let’s talk about the advantages of Magento ecommerce platform in detail.

Feature-rich

Magento offers an abundance of out-of-the-box features to operate your business, such as multiple stores, numerous locations, different languages, product types (simple, configurable, virtual, grouped, bundle, downloadable), color swatches. Since Magento 2.3’s release, it also supports multiple warehouses, various price tags, and a wide range of currencies.

Compare Magento with Shopify, Woocommerce, or any other ecommerce platform. Magento stands out with its variety of features. Magento Commerce offers powerful options when it comes to marketing, user loyalty, user experience, and business efficiency.

Optimal scalability

Magento is fully scalable, so whether you’re selling 100 items or 1,000,000, Magento can deal with it effortlessly.

In fact, Magento can support up to approximately 500,000 products and thousands of transactions per hour. It’s a prominent benefit because you can scale smoothly in the background with no interference involved.

The Cons of a Magento ecommerce platform

Among its many advantages, we need to consider some weaknesses before using Magento as an ecommerce platform.

High cost

Magento is a very expensive solution (compared to Shopify, for instance). Magento license costs are usually based on a store’s revenue through the platform. Magento Commerce Cloud licensing begins at $2,000 per month or on-premise begins at $22,000 per year.

Even though Magento Open Source is free of charge, it requires support that includes updates, custom development, and integrations. You also need to pay for off-the-shelf extensions for developer’s work building those extensions. Magento developers usually charge more than regular PHP web developers.

Require excellent development skills

Magento is a complex platform, with over 20,000 files and 200 database tables that not all developers will know how to manage. It can be difficult for beginners with the lack of or no technical skills to build an ecommerce store on Magento.

Even skillful and qualified Magento developers who have experience with the core software need time to learn how to set up and run Magento at its full potential.
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Overview of Magento pricing

perezhenya — Wed, 01 Jul 2020 15:35:24 +0000

You’re in the market for a car and you have three options: 1) a free car 2) a new, luxury car, or 3) a new, luxury car with tons of horsepower with an extended warranty and the highest safety rating.

Which one do you go for?

Merchants looking at Magento as a potential platform to build their store have the same dilemma. In this article, we will cover Magento costs across the three different Magento versions: Open Source (the “free” car), Commerce (the luxury vehicle), and Commerce Cloud (the more powerful, stable, and secure luxury vehicle).
Magento Open Source Pricing
The Magento software cost for the Open Source version is $0. You can download it for free, modify it, edit any files, and code all you want, and host it absolutely anywhere.

Open Source has tons of features, some that aren’t included in more pricey competitor offerings. But as we will see later, the total cost of ownership may be higher compared to the premium Commerce and Commerce Cloud options.
Magento Enterprise Pricing
Magento Commerce, formerly known as Magento Enterprise Edition is one of the leading ecommerce enterprise platforms on the market. Most ecommerce agencies and sources state that Magento Commerce costs a minimum of $22,000 per year ($1,833 per month). This number is prone to increase depending on two factors: Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) and Average Order Value (AOV).
Hint: quotient means dividing (GMV divided by the number of transactions). The easiest way to think of this is the average amount of money a customer spends on your site.

As stated in the Magento Commerce Software License Agreement, the Magento license subscription fees are based on the GMV and AOV thresholds provided by the merchant. These fees are subject to change if the GMV for a given year is higher than the threshold.

So to get the exact cost for the platform, you’ll need to contact a Magento sales representative.

Magento Cloud Pricing
Magento Commerce Cloud is the ultimate Magento experience.

You get all the features that come with Magento Commerce: advanced content creation with Page Builder, Magento’s B2B and Business Intelligence tools, Progressive Web App Studio, and much more.

Plus, you get all the benefits of the cloud — lower maintenance and support costs, a fast and stable website, and shared security responsibilities between Magento, Amazon, and your team.

Many sources state that Commerce Cloud starts from $40,000 per year ($3,333 per month) and increases in price depending on the same factors (GMV and AOV).
To reiterate, if you want to know the exact price of Magento Commerce and Commerce Cloud, contact Magento development team or, hire magento developer

Magento VS Shopify: Which to choose

perezhenya — Thu, 18 Jun 2020 09:39:05 +0000

Setting up a retail business is a daunting task. One of the biggest challenges is to choose the right platform. This decision should be made wisely. That’s why researching your options is crucial.

Nowadays there are many ecommerce solutions presented on the global stage and the two most popular platforms are Magento and Shopify. In recent years, Shopify and Magento underwent a lot of changes and presented some interesting innovations to become a leader on the market.

If you are on the fence, trying to choose between Magento vs Shopify — no worries! We will analyze the pros and cons of both Magento vs Shopify in order to choose the right technology for your business.

How to Choose an Ecommerce Platform

In order to help you to make a final decision, we’ve come up with a side-by-side comparison of Shopify vs Magento. Let’s find out what is the best ecommerce platform for your business requirements.
1.1 Ease of use
One of the most important aspects of a novice merchant is how easy it is to start selling and making money.
Shopify is the best choice for businesses that are new to website building, as it’s incredibly easy to get up and running. It only needs 10 minutes of browsing the Shopify dashboard to understand how it works. Also it has drag-and-drop tools, making it fairly easy to customize your website by moving elements around the page the way you like. For more advanced features, you’ll need to add apps or use custom coding.
Magento is relatively quick to deploy (in multiple languages, payment methods, etc), it will require technical knowledge and extended developer support. Magento isn’t the best choice for beginners, however, experienced ecommerce merchants will find every feature they need in a flexible, customizable interface.
1.2 Features
All retail companies have various needs and priorities when it comes to the features. Magento has a wide variety of features, including its support for big product catalogs with multiple modifications, native product bundles, cross-selling and upselling features.
General Magento feature list
Marketing, Promotions, and Conversion Tools
Site Management
Search Engine Optimization
Catalog Management
Product Browsing
Catalog Browsing
Checkout, Payment, and Shipping
Order Management
Customer Accounts
Customer Service
International Support
Analytics and Reporting
Mobile Commerce

Shopify has some native features as well, and other ones can be added through its app store.
General Shopify feature list
Unlimited products
Staff accounts
24/7 support
Sales channels
Manual order creation
Discount codes
Free SSL certificate
Abandoned cart recovery
Gift cards
Professional reports
Advanced report builder
Third-party calculated shipping rates

1.3 Hosting

Shopify is a cloud-based platform, meaning you won’t have to search for third-party hosting. Shopify takes care of operating your servers, optimizing it for performance and security patches. However, control over it is limited, because it’s run, maintained and monitored by Shopify.
Magento can be hosted on-site, in the cloud, or through a third-party. In cloud hosting, your ecommerce store is fully hosted and run by Magento, while in open source you need to purchase your domain and hosting.

1.4 Theme Selection

The theme of your ecommerce website creates the first impression. The platform you select should provide a wide variety of themes. Both Shopify and Magento offer a large selection of themes.
Shopify provides over 60 responsive themes. They also have a ‘product zoom’ function, allowing your customers to view each item in more detail. Some of them are free of charge but the majority are paid. Prices for themes range from $140 – 180.
Magento provides 12 free and paid themes, 10 of which are mobile-optimized. Themes are not expensive, but be ready to optimize it for mobile and other devices. Prices for themes range from $29 – 499.
1.5 Performance
When you’re running an ecommerce store, performance is essential to its success, since you might lose potential sales. None of the customers is willing to wait for store pages to load and is likely to look elsewhere to make their purchases.
As has been mentioned above, Shopify is a hosted solution, so it takes care of the loading time of your website. However, if you have any issues related to speed, all you need to do is to contact the Shopify support team.
Since Magento is a self-hosted platform, you can choose your own server and make all the necessary changes to speed up the store performance.
With the release of Magento 2, many new improvements were added to Magento 2 that allowed you to optimize pages for fast delivery, minimize the server response time for store activities, and make backend operations more efficient.

1.6 SEO
93% of online experiences start with an online search. Both Magento and Shopify ecommerce solutions provide different functionalities and extensions to guarantee higher SERP (search engine result pages) positions.
Magento offers a lot more flexibility from an SEO perspective and enables you to improve your strategy for maximum output. With Magento, you can make use of nofollow links, redirects, and canonical tags. You also can edit permalinks and meta tags and change URLs.

Shopify also offers a basic set of SEO tools. With Shopify, you can edit meta tags, optimize product pages, edit the site structure, and benefit from a variety of SEO dedicated add-ons. All these features make it easier for search bots to crawl your website.

1.7 Payment Solutions

To provide its customers with secure payment - it’s what every ecommerce business obliged to do, to make transactions seamless for your customers.
Both Magento and Shopify offer access to a great diversity of payment gateways. Magento offers a far lower number of gateways, but it can be implemented through third-party apps. Among the most popular payment gateways supported by Magento are PayPal, Authorize.net, Amazon Payments, Stripe.
Shopify currently supports 70+ various payment gateways including PayPal, Amazon Payments. However, if you decide to integrate these third-party payment gateways with Shopify, be ready for additional processing fees (from 0.5%-2% on each sale).

1.8 Extensions and Integrations

Once you’ve set up your ecommerce store, you may find the lack of some features. Advanced navigation, elastic search, FAQ (frequently asked questions), one step checkout as a few examples. A set of functions that can be added to an ecommerce store are called extensions by Magento and Apps by Shopify.
On the Magento marketplace, you can find over 5,000 extensions that integrate smoothly with the Magento backend.
Shopify, on the other hand, offers much less – 3,000 Apps. At the same time, Shopify integration process is much easier.
1.9 Scalability

When you set up your ecommerce store you shouldn’t neglect scalability. If you’re considering expanding your business in the near future, your ecommerce solution choice also depends on the scale of that growth. Luckily, both Magento and Shopify provide the scope for scaling up or down.
With Shopify, to scale up or down is simple. There’s a clear plan for expanding your ecommerce business. You can easily scale up or down by choosing the lower or higher plans, which differ in price quite a lot from$29 – $200 per month.
Shopify Plus offers enterprise-grade solutions for scalability, providing a fully hosted solution designed to deal with any level of volume.
Due to its robust architecture, Magento can handle massive numbers of products. In fact, Magento 2 Commerce is designed with scalability in mind and can deal with up to 250,000 products. With Magento 2, if your sales increase by ten times from one day to the next, Magento will be able to manage it smoothly without causing any issues.
1.10 Costs

One more crucial aspect to consider when selecting an ecommerce platform is how much it’s going to cost.
The license cost of Magento depends on the edition you have. Magento Open Source Edition (Community) is free to download from Magento’s website, but you’ll have to cover all development, design, hosting, security, and maintenance fees.
Magento Commerce Edition (Enterprise) has a support package but is considerably more expensive. The license of Magento Commerce starts from $22,000 – $125,000 per year.
Magento also offers the cloud-hosted Magento Cloud Edition. The cost ranges from $40,000 – $150,000 per year.
Shopify has different pricing models depending on the business model. A Basic Shopify Plan starts at $29 and has basic features. The more advanced plan starts at $79 –$299 per month. Shopify Plus, designed for mid-to-large businesses, starts at $2,000 per month. Also Shopify provides a 14-day free trial so you can test it before choosing a suitable model.
Which Ecommerce Solution Will Not Work for You
Magento vs Shopify, which platform to prefer? After all, these leading players in the ecommerce market are best-suited for very different types of businesses. If you are looking for a scalable solution with unlimited features to handle your business growth, Shopify is not the best choice. It is the best solution for small retail to medium-sized businesses wanting to create an online presence. Shopify is known for its usability and provides great features for those who don’t have much experience building online stores and want to start selling ASAP.
If you’re lucky to own a large company and enterprise, which requires advanced functionality and a high level of customization - Magento is the best choice for you.
Bear in mind that there are not so many qualified Magento 2 developers out there, so make sure you hire a Magento developer, or development company such as Elogic Commerce,that has enough expertise to handle your project.