Themes and Mods

Magento vs WooCommerce: What to choose for your online store?

The field of eCommerce is increasing rapidly. A large number of business owners are moving online to reach out a wider audience and increase their ROI. For this, they need to choose the right eCommerce platform, tools to set up and run an online store. But, most of the store owners often find it difficult to choose the most appropriate eCommerce platform to commence their E-business.

WooCommerce and Magento are two most popular eCommerce platforms preferred by E-merchants all over the world and both have their individual strengths and weaknesses. Then, how an online merchant can choose the best one amongst the two? Well, this comprehensive guide will help you to evaluate these two E-commerce platforms on different parameters and make a wise decision easily:-

Before choosing an eCommerce platform, you need to analyze a few things:

• Your targeted audience
• The number of products and services you are going to offer (to your potential customers)
• Type of store
• Are you capable of supporting your E-store with additional infrastructure like an ERP system
• Do you have sufficient budget to get a totally customized online store both in terms of design and functionality

You need to answer several other such questions before choosing your preferred platform. Using any of these two systems will consume your valuable time and money. Switching from one platform to another is not an ideal option when you have already invested a large sum to develop your E-store.

Let’s evaluate these two platforms from different angles:

1. Cost

Magento
The Community version of Magento is free in the beginning. But when your business grows and, you feel it necessary to expand your business, you need to add some extensions to customize and run your store successfully. At this junction, your costs start to mount up as some essential Magento extensions are quite expensive. Additionally, you may also need a specialist Magento developer to take care of your E-store and keep it in running mode. You will need to spend a considerable amount of money for enhanced content management, a higher level of support and on other things.

WooCommerce
The basic version of this plugin has the ability to accept payments from your customers via PayPal and a few other payment options. Nevertheless, you need to have diversity when it comes to sending or accepting payments online. You need to buy premium extensions to add a full range of payment options to your store, which enables you to take payments from your customers easily.

2. Hosting

Magento
Magento is a complicated platform, which means even a small or medium sized store can consume several GBs of disc space and complex operations put additional pressure on your servers. That is why; you need to have dedicated hosting or a cloud plan to run your site smoothly. If you host your site on shared servers, it will run slowly. You may lose your customers due to slow website and suffer a great loss in business as well. Hence you need to do thorough research and read genuine web hosting reviews before finalizing your web host.

WooCommerce
If you talk in terms of hosting requirement for WooCommerce, this small and efficient plugin eats up a little disk space and is light on your server space. It can run smoothly on any server. But, when you increase the functionality of your site (following a sharp boom in your E-business), it will start to feel sluggish and clunky.

3. Design & Features

Magento
Magento is a complete online shopping solution and is preferred by larger E-retailers who need plenty of customization and functionality. This platform has the power to handle numerous products and it supports multiple languages, payment options, and different currencies. Apart from this, you can easily run multiple storefronts via one dashboard, which is a fantastic facility if you have the local versions of your website or you manage numerous sites.

The initial installation process is simple with the availability of numerous videos and tutorials. Adding extensions to Magento and customizing the store is much more difficult for you if you don’t have coding experience. Herein, you need to seek the help of Magento developers, which come at a considerable price on account of the complexities of the platform.

WooCommerce
WooCommerce is a popular plugin for WordPress and is ideal for small and medium-sized eCommerce companies. You can easily set it up and use it even if you don’t have deep coding knowledge. If you have been using WordPress already, you can easily add eCommerce functionality to your site.

Its default design is clean and numerous customization options are available, with a number of free and premium themes. Even if you don’t have in-depth knowledge of coding, you can still run your E-store easily.

4. Search Engine Friendly

Magento
Due to the availability of too many features, the Magento-based websites often face problems while loading in browsers. If customers are accessing your site with slow speed Internet connections, it takes more time to display the pages fully. Such a condition make customers unhappy and they abandon visiting your site sooner or later. Even search engines give them less importance, which might affect your ranking on SERPs.

WooCommerce
WooCommerce is comparatively lightweight and it loads faster on all browsers. Due to quick loading, the WooCommerce-powered websites are likely to secure higher ranking on different search engines, which means you get more visitors and more income too.

Final analysis

WooCommerce stores are ideal for small to medium sized stores. You can start and handle a WooCommerce store easily if you are familiar with WordPress.

Magento is a right solution for large scale business entities, who have lots of products and service to offer to their prospective customers and buyers. Magento is ideal for you if you have long term plans for the expansion of your business. For this, you will require a team of Magento developers to assist you while dealing with the technical aspects and customization of your E-store.

So, the choice depends upon your budget, business scale and goals. Analyze all these with a cool mind and take decision accordingly.

Author Bio
Emily Benson is an creative writer and an experienced CMS developer. She currently, employed at HireMagentoGeeks and managing Magento web development projects. You can follow her on Twitter.