E-commerce is a booming field as more and more businesses are going digital to reach a wider audience and strengthen their ability to make a profit.
However, with so many eCommerce platforms available, which should be used by businesses during the design of their website ?
Currently, there are a lot of e-commerce platforms out there that all offer similar features and options. Some solutions consist in opting for a hosted version, such as Shopify, one of the best options hosted on the cloud. With this solution you can control every aspect of your store, and your hosting, security, and SSL certificates will be taken care of for you. However, the customization options are limited because you don't have access to the backend code.
If you really want to unleash the potential of your online store and have total control over how it looks and functions, you should consider a self-hosted solution. At this level, the two main competitors in the industry are WooCommerce and Magento. They both offer plenty of features to make online stores effective. However, while they are similar in many ways, each has specific advantages that make them the perfect choice for some businesses.
In this article, we will explain the differences between these two solutions to allow you to make a more informed decision, and to decide which solution to choose during your Design.
Discover Magento and Woocommerce
Woocommerce
WooCommerce is a newcomer to the world of e-commerce, which appeared in 2011. It is one of the most popular WordPress plugins, which adds e-commerce features to your site. It is recognized for its flexibility and customization options, its tailor-made functionalities, its intuitive interface and its almost non-existent transaction fees.
Woocommerce remains very popular with WordPress users and also supported by this community.
Magento
Like WordPress, Magento is an open source project, but it is a comprehensive content management system designed specifically for e-commerce, rather than an e-Commerce Framework that adapts to a WordPress site. There are two versions: Community, which can be downloaded for free, and Enterprise, a paid version. Since it was acquired by eBay, a huge community has grown around it, and Magento Connect functions as a hub for extensions and themes.
According to a study conducted by Datanyze, the two solutions represent almost a third of the e-commerce platforms included in the universe of the study.
In other figures published by BuiltWith, we note that the geographical distribution of the two platforms varies according to the regions.
Design and usability
Woocommerce
WooCommerce is a well-developed and popular plugin that is excellent for small and medium businesses. It is intuitive and easy to use and set up. If you are already a WordPress user, adding e-commerce features to your site would be as easy as launching the plugin, and the Framework will create the basic pages you need. Even if you're not currently working with WordPress, learning to use WooCommerce is still fairly easy.
The default design is clean and stylish, and there are a range of customization options, with several free themes, plus a number of paid premium themes. It can also be integrated into virtually any WordPress theme.
While WordPress is renowned for the number and variety of plugins and extensions that improve the appearance and functionality of its sites, this is also true for WooCommerce. The basic WooCommerce plugin comes with limited functionality, so you'll need additional plugins and possibly custom development to exploit its full potential. The major advantage is the number of WordPress developers who have the skills and knowledge to work with you to achieve your goals.
But, once set up, using the Woocommerce interface to manage your store and run your reports becomes a breeze, and even if you don't have any basic WordPress knowledge, you can easily run your own store in a few hours.
Magento
Magento is a more comprehensive solution for online stores that is aimed at the largest e-commerce retailers and requires a lot of customization and features. It is easily the most in-depth E-Commerce solution option available on the market. It has the power to manage an unlimited number of products, and can work with various currencies, payment options, and in multiple languages. You can also run multiple storefronts through a dashboard, which is very effective if you manage multiple websites or you have local variants of your stores.
As with WordPress, the initial installation is fairly easy, thanks to videos and tutorials available online. The initial product is very powerful, with many features, but which require additional plugins, included as standard on WooCommerce.
The difficulty with Magento is that adding these extensions and customizing the store is much more difficult, and it's a steep learning curve for those new to e-commerce or with no programming experience. If you're not familiar with code, you should hire a Magento developer to help you set up your store, and due to the complexity of the platform, that could drive up the bill. So even though it's feature-rich, flexible, powerful, and highly scalable, it comes at a cost. Which brings us to another equally important element: cost.
Cost
Woocommerce
WooCommerce is a free plugin, although its basic options are quite limited, so you should use the plugins and extensions available to take full advantage of it. While many options are free, others are chargeable. For example, the basic version of WooCommerce only allows PayPal payments and bank transfers, and you need to buy extensions if you want a more comprehensive range of payment solutions.
Magento
The cost of the Magento platform varies depending on the edition you use and the hosting option you choose. Magento 2 Community Edition (CE) continues to be open-source and free. However, you'll need to add extensions to customize and manage your store as your business grows, and that's when your costs start to climb.
For very large e-commerce businesses, there is an Enterprise option that offers improved content management, a higher level of support, and improved search capabilities. Magento 2 Enterprise Edition (EE) licenses range from $22,000 to $125,000 per year based on expected annual gross revenue. Magento 2 now offers a cloud hosting option called Enterprise Cloud Edition (ECE) that combines AWS licenses and managed hosting and varies between $40,000 and $190,000 per year based on expected gross annual revenue.
Note here that licenses for new installations of Magento Version 1 are no longer available since Magento 2 was launched in November 2015. Existing websites using version 1.x EE will be able to renew their license for 3 years from the launch date of version 2. Then, they need to upgrade their stores to M2.
Lodging
Woocommerce
In terms of hosting, WooCommerce is a small and efficient plugin that uses little disk space and is light on your server space. It can run quickly and smoothly on virtually any server, unless your products reach thousands when your site functionality may start to feel the need for a more powerful solution.
Magento
Magento is a more complex platform, and its complexity means that even modest-sized stores consume several GB of disk space, while more complex operations put a strain on your server loads. So you really need dedicated servers or a cloud plan, otherwise your site will run slowly and you may lose customers. All of this adds to your secondary expenses, but it pays to be ready to spend a bit more on a successful web host with large amounts of storage.
Blogging capabilities
Woocommerce
For your e-commerce store to be really successful, you need to have a blog to help you sell your products and maintain better SEO. Indeed, many sites may have only one e-commerce component, the rest of the site being dedicated to advertising and selling this product. When it comes to true integration, there's only one winner: WooCommerce. It integrates perfectly with WordPress so that you can easily configure and manage other pages and run a blog, taking advantage of the many plugins to get your website exactly the way you want it.
Magento
While Magento has significant e-commerce capabilities, its CMS is much more difficult to set up and use, and you'll need an extension to be able to publish a blog.
Examples of sites using Woocommerce or Magento
Woocommerce
Magento
So Woocommerce or Magento?
In reality, there is no answer to this question. The choice between the two depends largely on the needs of your business, the time, money, and skills you want to devote to it.
WooCommerce tends to be a better option for small and medium businesses and those with little programming experience. This is a great solution if you already have a WordPress site and are familiar with its interface. With the plugins and extensions available to you can provide a better experience for your customers.
Magento tends to be more popular with larger e-commerce retailers, or those who use agencies to set up and manage their stores. It has a greater range of core features, and while it has fewer extensions, it's generally more powerful than WooCommerce. It's very scalable, so if you're a small business with big projects and have a decent budget to set things up, it's a good option. It also gives you the ability to manage multiple stores through a single dashboard, which is ideal for those with more complex needs.
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