Magento Vs. Shopify
After a year on Magento we decided to move the Holstee Shop to Shopify to makes our lives easier with a: reliable + fast server, easy-to-use backend, fair pricing, and friendly personal support – cant really ask for much more than that!
We looked at Shopify before we decided to develop a custom solution on Magento but were worried about the monthly fee, and the idea of being tied into a SaaS – we were wrong. The time, energy, buildout expenses and headaches were more than the highest plan on Shopify.
Magento could do anything, but never simply. In fact the simplest tasks (like adding products) that we needed to do on a daily basis were the biggest challenges. In Shopify, without much technical knowledge, I have been able to create a theme within a dozen files, in Magento there is close to a hundred files buried within multiple folder levels. Due to the clunkiness of Magento it came to the point where we needed to get our own dedicated or split shared hosting (running about $25-50) for something decent – and at $60 for the Shopify Professional plan it just made economical sense.
The icing on the cake is support. As the default tech guy within our small start-up, I am looking forward the dedicated support team, active community, and platform updates that Shopify offers. I am actually looking forward to finishing up the design and adding products to the shop – could never say that about Magento.
So while I can not yet endorse Shopify as the go to E-commerce solution as I am still new to it, I can confidently say that if you are considering Magento think again – there is a very very small portion of companies who this tool would be useful for, and I would even urge them to think twice.
I’ll do another post to recap the experience I have in launching the Holstee Shop on Shopify – stay tuned.
