There’s no doubt that people’s interest towards online shopping is increasing day by day. According to a report by Fortune, 51% of shoppers purchase products online compared to 48% and 47% in 2015 and 2014 respectively. Therefore, it’s very natural for businesses to join online selling to maximise their profits. But before you jump into this massive online world, you have to ensure that you’ve covered all your steps on your way to success. Otherwise, you may face some major issues.
The prosperity of an online store depends greatly on its overall appearance, user-friendliness and several other functionalities that are determined by the platform used to create the store. The names that are placed at the top of eCommerce platforms are Magento and WooCommerce. Let’s have a quick look at both of them and learn how they can help different businesses.
What Is Magento?
Magento is a complete content management system, designed for eCommerce sites. There are two versions of the platform. One is Community that can be downloaded without any cost. And the other one is Enterprise that’s a premium paid version.
What is WooCommerce?
Unlike Magento, WooComerce is not a content management system itself. It’s actually a plugin, developed by WooThemes. Once installed, it can turn a WordPress site into a fully functional eCommerce site. WooCommerce, when installed in a WordPress site, is called an eCommerce platform.
Let’s have a quick look at how these two platforms can help you.
Use and Design
If you already have a WordPress site and want to transform it into an eCommerce site, then WooCommerce is best for you. By simply installing the plugin to your existing site, you can have your online store. It also comes with the framework that allows you to have some basic pages. In fact, it’s easy for a new user who hasn’t worked with WordPress to use. It is popular because of it’s clear designs and it’s wide range of customization options. It also comes with an easy interface to manage your shop and run reports.
Magento is known for being a one-stop eCommerce solution. What’s beneficial about the platform is that it can manage unlimited products and allows you to work with different currencies, languages and payment gateways. It can even run various storefronts with a single dashboard. This is really helpful if you have a number of stores.
It’s also very easy to install. One can do it just by seeking the help of online videos and tutorials. What’s difficult with Magento is the installation of additional plugins and the customization of the store that requires some coding experience.
Cost
It costs nothing to install WooCommerce. There are limited primary options and therefore you have to use the extensions to take full advantage of the platform. For instance, the basic version of WooCommerce only allows you to have payment options like PayPal and bank transfer. To have other options, you need to purchase extensions.
Magento also comes with a free community version and paid version. The extensions are also required to customise your store. What’s different here is that it’s more difficult to install the extensions as it requires the knowledge of coding.
Hosting
WooCommerce requires little disk space and therefore, it’s very light on your server. No matter which server you are using, it can run perfectly on it. Comparatively, Magento is a complicated platform that takes up several GBs of disk space for a decent sized store. Therefore, you really need a dedicated server to run a Magento site.
Blogging
It’s really necessary to have a blog section in an eCommerce store. It influences users as well as improves your SEO rankings. When it comes to the implementation of a blog section, there’s nothing more useful than WooCommerce. You can easily set it up and manage various pages using various plugins. As discussed earlier, Magento is a more complex platform and requires a plugin even to add a blog section.
Features
No matter which eCommerce platform you choose, it should give you shopping cart functionality and unlimited product uploads. Both WooCommerce and Magento come with these basic features but you have to pay extra for further customization and payment options.
The easy to manage WooCommerce platform allows you to rate products and show best sellers or products that get sold more often just by using the widgets. But for these extra features, add-ons need to be installed.
Apart from cross selling and up selling products, with Magento you can compare them, add discount codes and filter to navigate products. In fact, if you have more than a single product, you can view all of them on a single account.
In spite of the above-mentioned differences, there are a good number of similarities between these platforms. The most notable one among them is that both of them are open source products. It means that you can get the original code without paying anything. So if you have coding experience, you can modify the code if required. Both of the platforms have their own dedicated support communities that repeatedly check, develop code and help with new solutions. It is more efficient to get assistance from people who have faced several issues and found way outs instead of you having to figure it out.
WooCommerce is more popular within small businesses and is great for products while larger businesses prefer Magento for its wide range of options. But this doesn’t mean that you can’t use Magento for small businesses and WooCommerce for big businesses. What’s important is to factor in the points mentioned above before making your choice.
