Magento vs Shopify: Should You Make A Switch From Magento To Shopify?

Magento has been one of the eCommerce giants on the market since forever. However, there has been a significant rise in the number of merchants moving away from Magento. Here are the statistics of Magento market share retrieved from Builtwith, the first one is from a report in April 2019 and the latter is up-to-date data at the time of the same report (December 2022). Let’s see how the Magento market shares have changed!

Outlines

• Why Shopify Outperforms Magento 2?
• + Ease of use
• + Support
• + Expense
• + Analytics
• + Integration Tools
• What does Shopify customers say?
• How to migrate from Magento to Shopify error-free?
• Conclusion

Source: aitoc.com (April 2019)

Source: Builtwith (December 2022)

As shown, Magento market shares have declined by 5%, which equals approximately almost 20.000 stores lost. This huge number of lost stores can be anticipated since the Magento 1 end of life (EOL) has approached since June 2020. Moving between Magento 1 and Magento 2 is a re-build rather than an upgrade. As a result, many retailers on Magento 1 are evaluating whether Magento 2 is actually the most sensible next step for them.

Some have come to a decision which is moving away from Magento to a totally new platform. Among different alternative solutions for Magento out there, Shopify seems to be gaining a lot of attention.

Here’s how we know about it, a quick check with the Google Trends. Since the Magento 1 EOL announcement in September 2018, “Magento 1 to Magento 2” keyword had seen a rise in volume as more Magento 1 merchants consider the upgrade. However, “Magento to Shopify” keyword seems to getting more and more popular especially in Canada and the United States.

Certainly, Shopify is a slick platform that can support online stores on any aspects. But is Shopify the better fit for Magento 1.x merchants who are trying to make a long term commitment to a new eCommerce platform? 

In this article, we would be explaining why Shopify could be a perfect fit for many Magento merchants, and later guide you through the easiest Magento to Shopify migration process. So, stay tuned!

You might like this: Shopify vs Etsy: Everything you need to know

Why Shopify Outperforms Magento 2?

Below we would be discussing the key outstanding Shopify features that are worth mentioning when considering moving from Magento to Shopify.

User’s Experience

Ease of use

First off, Shopify is a one-stop solution, which ensures the easiest way for store owners to customise their stores at their will! It facilitates you with all the necessary tools to build your online store so that you’ll be selling online in no time at all!

With Shopify, you can do all this without knowing the first thing about coding:

• Easily customise themes (color, size or font) to personalize your store.
• Add products, categories easily to start selling online quickly.
• Simple payments setup so you can start making money.
• Set up dropshipping
• Customize the look and feel of your store to reflect your business and catch the eye of online shoppers.

On the contrary, Magento, as an open-source platform, requires human hands on every custom endeavour. Although one can freely scale their business and make any changes they want, if they don’t have any technical experience, they may find Magento hard to figure and use. For example, creating a custom theme on Magento requires not only a great deal of time and effort to be put forward, but also a huge budget hiring a developer. 

Support

What’s more? Magento support relies solely on its online community, which may take days or weeks to thoroughly solve. Not to mention store owners still have to make substantial effort to learn around the ropes. As a result, the setup and problem-solving process may take forever. 

In this regard, Shopify definitely has the edge thanks to its 24/7 support selections including:

• 24/7 phone support
• Social media support
• 24/7 live chat support
• Email support
• Advanced specialist support 

And support is included specifically in the pricing plans. Shopify also packs a powerful community forum and a help center that one can refer to at any time.

For these above reasons, moving to Shopify could effectively enhance your experience in navigating your online store and handling technical issues. Starting a new business, or taking your physical store online is already a stressful task. So why make it even more stressful by using an eCommerce platform that you find difficult to use? 

Expense

Magento, as an open-source platform, came with a ton of things to take care of from hosting servers to domain names. Especially, when you want to scale your business, Magento can cause you a huge sum of money on development.

Of course, you can considerably save up on the Magento development costs if you’re tech-savvy. However, Magento is quite a complex platform that demands proper programming skills and deep comprehension about its peculiarities. Not to mention that customization and its integration with third-party apps or services might become a challenging task for an inexperienced Magento developer. Therefore, it may require you a huge extra cost to be able to fully optimize your store with Magento.

Unlike Magento, the costs associated with Shopify are mostly monthly, which includes the basics you need to get your store online; for example, CDN bandwidth cost and SSL secure certificate. Shopify also ensures 99.99% server uptime for you. Plus, you don't need to worry about cyber attacks.

And it’s worth mentioning that Shopify offers a 14-day free trial for merchants to experience online selling with Shopify before committing to a long term plan. No credit card is required to sign up. Voila!

Side note: Shopify extended the free trial time to 90 days due to the Covid-19 pandemic. 

Like I have mentioned, Shopify is much easier to navigate and customize, even for beginners. However, what's it like when the time of scaling up comes? No worries, with over 3,500+ apps including in-house and third-party apps, Shopify users can easily scale their business without concerning the cost of hiring a developer or agency.

Read more: Shopify Cost and Pricing Explained - What's Your Investment

Analytics

To build successful commerce brands, modern online merchants need more than just transaction records and website traffic data. They need tools to keep track of their eCommerce inventory data.

Magento has Magento Analytics or Magento Business Intelligent (MBI) which is a cloud-based visual data management and analytics system. You can trust it to manage your data sources, model your data, create charts and reports, all in one place. However, MBI package is not cheap. MBI kit starts at a flat $100/month fee but grows quickly according to your monthly Gross Merchandise Volume (GMV).

Source: Magento

In this regard, Shopify certainly outperforms Magento because it has in-built analytics. It only takes 2 seconds to enable Enhanced eCommerce and if you’re crafty enough then you can leverage the rich Javascript data layer that Shopify offers for your other Google Tag Manager (GTM) conversion tags without having to build a full dataLayer from ground up. Shopify Analytics reports are really robust and accessible.

To reach the Shopify dashboard, navigate to Analytics > Dashboard in Shopify's left sidebar navigation. You can click the Today button in the top left to select your date range.

Source: Shopify

You’re probably thinking you have to be a data scientist to do all this, but SaaS platforms like Shopify require a short learning curve. It is easy to find out exactly how your website works, and how to optimize it.

Read More: How To Measure Your Shopify Store's Performance

Integration Tools

This is where the Shopify API can be really helpful. Creating an integration on Shopify is much less intensive compared to Magento. This could be due to the flat architecture and well documented APIs. 

Shopify packs with the integration features. This amazing function allows Shopify stores to sell on many social media platforms as well as marketplaces and allows superb inventory management for store owners. Users can buy on Amazon, Ebay, Instagram, Facebook or even Pinterest. 

On the contrary, Magento only allows integrations using third-party apps. Also, to implement a simple integration, you would need a considerable amount of knowledge about:

• Magento web APIs
• Web API authentication
• OAuth-based authentication

For a deeper comparison of Magento vs Shopify about other features, please visit this article: Magento Vs Shopify 2020 Comparison – Which One Is The Ultimate Choice?

What do Shopify customers say?

To really know if Shopify deserves your investment, there is no better way than looking for its reviews over the internet. Needless to say, with the excellent customer support they deliver, Shopify is well received by the majority of its users with 4.5 points out of 5 with over 3000 reviews.

Enough with the lengthy words, let’s hear some of the testimonials from Shopify customers.

Review source: capterra.com

Review source: capterra.com

What about reviews from ones that actually moved from Magento to Shopify? Adapting to a hosted solution may seem overwhelming at first, but it may not be a problem at all with Shopify. Read the following review to see for yourself.

Review source: capterra.com

How to migrate from Magento to Shopify error-free?

Currently, you can find migration services from Magento to Shopify anywhere from the internet. However, to choose the right company and ensure your migration journey would go as smoothly as possible, you need to really consider carefully. That’s why we recommend you have a look at LitExtension - The World's #1 Shopping Cart Migration Expert.

LitExtension is by far the best migration service for online merchants with the customer satisfaction of 98% on Trustpilot.

Review source: Trustpilot

In the next paragraphs, I would be guiding you through the data transfer process using LitExtension's automated service. 

Let’s start!

First, log in or sign in your Google account on LitExtension site. After the registration, you’ll see the main Dashboard with 4 stages of migration process including Setup, Demo Migration, Full Integration, and Completed. 

#1. Setup

First, insert your Magento URL and then download the “le_connector” to your computer. This “connector” has only one feature, which is creating a bridge between your Magento database with the LitExtension App. It is not a third-party app; therefore, your data is safe from being leaked out.

Repeat the same action with the Target Cart or Shopify store. Once you have finished, click Next.

#2. Tick the data you want to transfer

LitExtension supports almost all kinds of data you want, make sure to read and tick on the entities (products and product categories, customers, orders, etc.) you wish to migrate carefully.

Make sure not to forget about additional migration options that you can choose according to your exact business needs and requirements. Languages, Order Status and Customer Group will be matched together to be displayed correspondingly in the new store.

#3. Run Free Demo and Full Migration

It is advisable to run your demo migration first to actually visualise the result on your new Shopify store. Note that the free demo is unlimited but only with a limited number of entities. 

You can skip Free Demo and jump right into Full Migration, the dashboard should look like this:

When running full migration, you do not need to keep the browser or your laptop working, put it to sleep and wait for an email notification when the migration is complete.

Also, your current Magento store can still be up and running during the full migration. No loss in revenue! It is completely automatic! As you can see, the tool limits the least of human intervention so that users can save precious time.

Go-live checklist 

Now, having migrated to this powerful platform, you might want to go the extra miles to set up your store properly before going live. Make sure you take advantage of the Shopify outstanding features such as stunning landing pages, or dropshipping option, etc. 

Also, if you are aiming to scale your business, it is recommended that you avail of the +3500 apps store. You can find the best 20 Shopify apps to build and scale your online brand in this post. 

Finally, remember to take extensive tests so as to ensure a solid experience for online shoppers. 

Read More:  Top 15+ Shopify Affiliate Programs (Always-updated)

Conclusion

This article has walked you through key features that make Shopify a better deal than Magento. Shopify as a hosted solution is beneficial in so many ways and they are on increase even still. It’s no surprise that it has seen a growing re-platforming trend to Shopify lately. 

To compare Magento vs Shopify, Magento is like a big project that needs constant care and refinement so as to bring visions to life whereas Shopify can help you make money quickly and easily.

You should definitely switch from Magento to Shopify, if you are:

• Wanting to have your store up and running as soon as possible.
• Just starting out with eCommerce.
• Hoping to have a fully-fledged eCommerce business.
• Wanting to have an easy interface to work with and get your shop online faster. 

Lastly, after reading this article, if you are considering moving from Magento to Shopify, using an automated migration tool to securely transfer your data is never a bad idea.

Thank you for reading and see you next time!

This is the guest post contributed by Ashley Ta from Litextension Team.

Ashley is interested in digital content, constant learning, languages, and traveling. "Do your best, and be a little better than you were" is her favorite quote.