Choosing the right eCommerce platform for your business can be a daunting task. There are many factors to consider, such as your budget, technical skills, and specific needs.
In this article, we explore why more and more merchants are migrating their Magento eCommerce stores to Shopify. We examine the pain points commonly experienced by merchants and how Shopify addresses these concerns, providing a comprehensive and user-friendly solution.
Let’s dive in!
- Why do users migrate from Magento?
- Why merchants prefer Shopify over Magento
- What to keep in mind when migrating from Magento to Shopify
- Don’t know which commerce platform is right for you?
Why do users migrate from Magento?
Over the years, we have observed that many Magento brands are switching to Shopify Plus for many reasons, all of which may differ depending on the brand. However, here we will discuss some of the most common reasons why our customers like Madam Glam, Irresistible Me and Teddy Blake have decided to stop using Magento.
Magento 1 end-of-life
Magento 1 was a popular eCommerce platform for many years, but it reached its end-of-life in June 2020. This means that this platform no longer receives security patches or updates, leaving businesses that are still using it vulnerable to security breaches.
For this reason, brands using Magento 1 were faced with a choice:
- Upgrade to Magento 2, but this can be a complex and expensive process.
- Switch to a different eCommerce platform, such as Shopify Plus which is a more modern, secure, and easier-to-use and maintain platform.
Why did businesses choose another eCommerce platform over Magento 2?
Magento 2 is a powerful and versatile eCommerce platform, but it is not the right fit for every business. Many merchants prefer other eCommerce platforms over it, citing its high cost, difficulty in upgrading, and lack of flexibility. If you are considering Magento 2, carefully weigh the pros and cons before making a decision.
Why merchants prefer Shopify over Magento
Shopify Plus is a leading eCommerce platform that is designed to withstand the traffic, volume, and velocity of the world’s largest brands. This has made it particularly popular among fast-growing merchants, many of whom are abandoning Magento in favor of this platform.
Below, we provide the reasons why Shopify Plus is the most preferred option for them, according to our observations and feedback from former Magento users.
Ease of use and setup
Shopify’s intuitive interface and drag-and-drop tools make it simple to create and manage an online store, even if you don’t have any technical experience. Magento, on the other hand, is a more complex platform that requires more technical knowledge to set up and maintain.
“A satisfied merchant attests, “It’s 100% better in every way. After a decade of managing Magento stores, I certainly don’t miss it one bit!!! There’s just so much upside to Shopify services. I feel Shopify works best for small and growing businesses who can work the way Shopify works.”
Reasonable price
At $2,000 per month, Shopify Plus is over 10x less expensive than Magento 2 Enterprise, which starts at $22,000 per year. This makes Shopify Plus a more cost-effective solution for small businesses that are just starting out or that have limited budgets.
Better performance
Compared to Magento stores, Shopify Plus stores load much faster, resulting in higher conversion rates and sales. For example, a one-second delay in page load time has been shown to cause a 7% loss in conversion and 11% fewer page views. For an online store earning $50,000 a day, that one-second delay could add up to more than $1 million in lost sales each year.
Shopify Plus’s high performance is due to a number of factors, including its use of a global content delivery network (CDN), its optimized codebase, and its scalable infrastructure. Shopify Plus also offers a number of features that can help merchants improve the performance of their stores, such as image optimization and lazy loading.
Traffic and conversion
Shopify has the internet’s highest converting checkout, surpassing competitors by up to 36% and averaging 15%. This impressive performance is attributed to Shopify’s extensive identity network, unparalleled scale, consumer trust, and continuous innovation.
Such significant boosts in conversion rates can greatly impact your company’s annual revenue. For instance, with 125,000 monthly visitors, an average order value of $100, and a conversion rate of 0.92%, a mere 0.5% increase in conversion rate would add $62,500 to your monthly revenue, totaling $690,000 per year. Scaling up revenue and conversion rates can have a substantial positive impact on your Gross Merchandise Value (GMV).
Ease of updates and maintenance
Magento 2 has a frequent development cycle, with new releases that can impact existing code and customizations. Merchants must upgrade manually, which can take days or weeks and require rewriting code. This can be a time-consuming and complex task, especially for merchants who don’t have a lot of technical experience.
Shopify takes care of all the updates and maintenance for its merchants. This means that merchants don’t have to worry about keeping their software up to date or fixing security vulnerabilities. It allows merchants to launch new features as they become available, without the need for upgrades. This saves time and money and removes the risk of downtime and errors.
Security
Shopify is a certified Level 1 PCI DSS-compliant platform, while Magento 2 merchants are responsible for ensuring their own PCI compliance. Shopify Plus also covers the entire online experience with SSL encryption, while most eCommerce websites only use SSL encryption for checkout.
Additionally, Magento 2 is an open-source platform, which makes it more prone to malware attacks. Shopify Plus, on the other hand, is a hosted platform with a team of security experts dedicated to protecting your store.
Support
Shopify offers excellent support for its merchants. There is a 24/7 helpdesk available, and merchants can also get help through live chat, email, and phone support. Magento also offers support, but it is not as extensive as Shopify’s.
First-party POS system
Shopify offers a first-party POS system that allows merchants to manage their in-store and online sales from a single platform. This can be a great advantage for merchants who want to have a seamless shopping experience for their customers. Magento does not offer a first-party POS system, so merchants need to use a third-party solution.
Easy integration setup
Shopify integrates with a wide range of third-party apps, making it easy for merchants to add new features and functionality to their stores. Magento also integrates with third-party apps, but the process can be more complex. For example, you can integrate your store with social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest to sell products directly from posts. Shopify’s ecosystem of pre-built integrations means you can quickly plug it into your existing tech stack. Powerful APIs let you integrate the business system and tools you rely on, with ease. Your ERP, PIM, or CRM integrations would be much more simple.
Quicker to launch
Shopify is a more agile platform than Magento, which means it can be launched more quickly. This is important for merchants who want to get their online store up and running as soon as possible.
Magento 2 deployments typically take 4 – 8 months, while Shopify Plus deployments typically take 2–4 months. This is because Shopify Plus takes care of eCommerce architecture, hosting, and security, while Magento 2 requires merchants to manage these themselves.
Global and omnichannel selling
Shopify enables eCommerce on any social network, blog, app, or marketplace, while Magento lacks integration with common channels and marketplaces. It also has a native multi-currency solution, while Magento requires multiple store views and apps to sell in multiple currencies.
This makes Shopify Plus a better choice for businesses that need to reach customers on multiple channels and sell in multiple currencies.
Lower cost of ownership
Shopify Plus has a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) than Magento. Shopify Plus is a more scalable and efficient platform, which results in lower hosting costs, decreased IT resources, and reduced maintenance overhead. Shopify Plus brands have a likely TCO of 25-75% lower than Magento Commerce brands.
Scalability
Shopify Plus is a fully hosted SaaS solution, which means that Shopify manages all of the infrastructure and hosting for you. This makes it easy to scale your business up or down as needed, without having to worry about the technical challenges of scaling your infrastructure. Simply put, whether it be handling huge traffic or accommodating complex operations, Shopify Plus scales with you — and with ease.
Magento is an open-source platform, which means that you are responsible for hosting and managing your own infrastructure. This gives you more flexibility and control but also requires a significant investment in time, money, and technical expertise to scale your business.
A merchant attests, “I’ve done Magento in a previous life at a successful DTC startup. Shopify scales have better development hooks for 3rd party apps and come with a full-fledged CDN that does image resizing and other fancy things. It’s also fault tolerant out of the box so you have multiple CDNs and multiple data centers running your store. I run one of the largest stores on Shopify and haven’t had issues with Shopify. When I ran Magento, I had lots of issues scaling and we had to do an unplanned migration to deal with scale. You can’t scale Magento to do 750k orders per day. It isn’t possible.”
No more server worries
Forget scaling up your infrastructure ahead of Black Friday. Shopify handles whatever you throw at it, automatically. Shopify has a 99.99% uptime rate, meaning that your store is virtually guaranteed to be up and running when customers want to shop.
Ecosystem
Shopify Plus has a community of thousands of Shopify Experts, as well as a certified Shopify Plus Partner program. Magento 2 has a smaller community, and changes to its architecture have impacted its ecosystem.
Shopify also has a larger app library than Magento 2. The Shopify App Store offers over 8,000 apps that specialize in marketing, sales, social media, shipping, inventory, and supply-chain management. Magento 2 extensions require more coding and testing, and they can conflict with individual customizations.
Flexible design
With Shopify, merchants have complete control over the look and feel of their storefront, from the overall layout and branding to the individual product pages and checkout experience. This flexibility allows merchants to create a unique and engaging shopping experience that is tailored to their target audience.
Customization
Magento customization is powerful but complex and expensive. Shopify Plus customization is flexible and easy to use, with less risk and cost.
Magento offers a high degree of customization and flexibility. However, this also means that Magento can be complex and expensive to customize, requiring in-depth technical expertise and resources.
On the other hand, Shopify offers many built-in features and a large library of themes. This makes it easy to customize your store without the need for extensive technical expertise. Also, this platform offers custom app development and Embedded App SDK, which gives developers even more flexibility.
Mobile optimization
Shopify themes are responsive on any device, and Shopify provides a Mobile App SDK for custom commerce apps and checkout integration. Magento 2 includes a responsive theme, but responsive or mobile deployments require heavy page development and QA testing.
This makes Shopify a better choice for businesses that need a mobile-friendly eCommerce platform without the complexity and cost of Magento 2 development.
Powerful automation
Shopify Plus offers a variety of automation tools, including Flow, Scripts, and Launchpad, that can save your team time and money.
For example, Flow can be used to automate abandoned cart emails, create new orders when customers receive a specific coupon code, and update inventory levels when a product is sold. Scripts can be used to automate more complex tasks, such as integrating Shopify Plus with other systems, developing custom checkout experiences, and creating custom reports. Launchpad is a tool that helps merchants launch new products and features quickly and easily, by automating tasks such as creating product pages, setting up promotions, and sending launch announcements.
What to keep in mind when migrating from Magento to Shopify
Moving to Shopify from Magento can be a great way to improve your eCommerce store. However, it’s important to carefully plan the migration process to ensure that it goes smoothly. Here are a few things to keep in mind:
- International setup. Shopify Plus requires multiple store instances for international stores, while Magento allows for a single store with multiple store views.
- SEO. Carefully map out and redirect all pages from your current international setup to your new Shopify URL architecture.
- Data migration and structure. Shopify has a core data structure that can be extended via tags or metafields. Use tags to store data that someone will need to access and edit within Shopify, and use metafields to manage data that will be synced and edited within external systems.
- Customer data. Shopify captures the following core fields for customers: first name, surname, email address, phone number, tax setting, email marketing status, tags, and addresses. If you hold additional attributes in Magento, these will need to be mapped and stored against the customer using additional tags or metafields.
- Product data. Shopify offers a single product for items with multiple variations. This works by the one ‘product’ then having the ability to behave differently depending on its configuration. Shopify does not have grouped or bundle product types.
- Native features. Shopify leverages an ecosystem of third-party apps to replace functionality that is native to Magento. You may need additional apps from the App Store to replace functionality that you use on your Magento store.
- Find the right agency partner. Migrating to Shopify Plus can be a complex process, and choosing an experienced agency partner is important to help you navigate the journey. At SpurIT, we have a proven track record of success in helping businesses migrate to Shopify Plus. Our team of experts will work closely with you to develop a customized migration plan, transfer your data seamlessly, and provide ongoing support after the launch.
Don’t know which commerce platform is right for you?
If you’re considering switching to Shopify Plus, contact our experts. We understand that choosing the right eCommerce platform is a big decision, and we want to make sure you have all the information you need to make the best choice for your business.
