Magento Enterprise vs Shopify Plus

For the past few years, OnlyGrowth has been helping high volume merchants make informed decisions about what road to take to grow their brand. For a limited time, Shopify Plus is offering free data migration and up to 6 months free hosting on a two year contract. Learn how simple it is to migrate to Shopify Plus now.

Security and Servers

If you didn't know, Magento merchants are responsible for their own security as Magento thinks being open source is their golden nugget. This hasn't exactly panned out as Magento has been hit by two big malware security breaches in the last 6 months including the recent self-healing malware and the infamous Visbot malware. With Shopify Plus, your hosting is taken care of and Shopify Plus has Level 1 PCI DSS compliancy, which means that your site will be as secure as your bank.

A recent series of a/b tests ran by Amazon found that a 500-millisecond delay in page load speeds caused a 5% drop in sales. If there's one thing that large businesses can't comprise on, it's page load speeds. Shopify Plus has proven to the world that it can handle the largest of traffic via Kylie Jenner and Kanye West's infamous flash sales without a crash in site. With Magento, you have the headache of always having to scale your server up and down which takes valuable time away from the real task – growing your business.

FACT: All support and security patches for Magento 1.X will end Nov 2018

Less Developers = More Money for Growth

Magento is infamous for being a developer-heavy platform. How can your ecommerce manager or content marketer grow the business when they must wait for hours (possibly days) for the developers to make changes? This is the most common complaint we hear from Magento merchants. On top of that, these developers can charge you an arm and a leg because Magento code is so complex and it needs highly specialized people to work with the platform. When you look at your end of the year financials and see that you spent more money maintaining the platform and less on marketing then there is clearly a problem.

Shopify is known to be the platform that your "80-year old grandmother" could use and this is also true for Shopify Plus. Shopify Plus uses the same easy-to-use admin as the regular Shopify. This allows non-technical team members to easily manoeuver the platform and make changes. No need for a ton of developers and if you know a little bit of HTML or Javascript then you are good to go!

App/Extension Ecosystem

Magento extensions/apps don't have any approval process or guidelines. Developers can build as many apps as they wish without anyone checking if the app works or not. Often extension quality is very low, extensions go unsupported and break constantly when upgrading between versions. In contrast, Shopify's app store is governed by Shopify and all app developers need to abide by their high standards. This provides increased security and assurance on the stability of the application you are using for the business.

Additionally, most Magento extensions are not straight out of the box and require heavy development. Shopify Plus apps are easier to set up and have to pass strict guidelines to provide the best in-class experience. This means your marketing or ecommerce manager can set up apps on their own.

"Our team is committed to only publishing apps that deliver high quality experiences for merchants." - Philip Kowalczyk, App Onboarding Specialist, Shopify Apps Team

Too Much Customization?

We'll give Magento some credit in that you can pretty much customize anything without much restriction. However, too much unnecessary customization can result in various bugs and broken code. If the initial developers who built your site randomly said goodbye, then the next wave of replacements will have a horrifying experience managing the site.

Shopify Plus' introduction of Shopify Scripts truly shut down any misconceptions of the platform's ability for customization. Shopify Scripts allows you to control the back-end logic of your business without the use of third-party applications. Automated discounts (no more discount codes!) and dynamic pricing are just a few game changing features that speed up the buying process for your customers. This game changing tool is getting better by day with much more functionality like shipping scripts.

Unlimited Product SKUs

People often think that Shopify is only meant for small and medium size businesses so they assume that it can't handle large SKU counts. Shopify Plus proved the haters wrong with notable clients like Deny Designs, Rage-On, MMA Warehouse, Chicago Music Exchange and Modern Automotive Performance all carrying over 1 million product SKUs.

Magento does win when it comes to publicly exposing an unlimited number of weaknesses on your ecommerce storefront to assist hackers. In fact, there are nearly 2,000 issues currently reported for Magento 2! It is incredible to think this ecommerce platform is production-ready. In our opinion, it is open for brands willing to work through the kinks of an unpolished product and help beta test a work in progress. Serious businesses doing serious volume should seriously consider Shopify Plus.

The Cloud Keeps You Updated 24/7

If you are one of the many Magento merchants who had to spend thousands of dollars to upgrade to 2.0 then we truly feel bad. For those not aware, Magento always has a newly updated version that is "almost" mandatory for previous-version merchants to move to. By almost we mean Magento would eventually shut down the support and patches for your existing version, thus leaving you deserted.

Moreover, a ton of different versions makes it harder for you to look at FAQs or support as the document you are reading might not be for your exact version of Magento. Shopify Plus is one platform that automatically updates itself without comprising your business and since it is one platform, Shopify has made it easy for merchants to access its support documentation and active communities. Try googling any question about Shopify's platform and Shopify would likely have the answer.

White Glove Support

We all know that moving from one platform to another is a big hassle. When you are migrating to Shopify Plus, you get a dedicated project manager to help you migrate and then a dedicated merchant success manager to assist with ongoing growth strategy. These two resources give you a smooth and non-stressful transition to the Shopify Plus platform.

... And Say Hello To 6 Months Free On Shopify Plus