WooCommerce vs Magento

Anand Agarwal October 11, 2020 0 Comments

As a beginner, finding an ecommerce platform that is low cost and reliable is difficult, especially when you are being bombarded with deceptive advertising all the time. Many aspirational tycoons are eager to realize their dreams, but fail to comprehend which e-commerce platform will work best for them. We have many e-commerce platforms like Shopify, PrestaShop, etc, and the number is growing rapidly.

So how to choose which platform to use? The query relies on many factors such as niche of your business, resources you have and the technical leverage you can offer into your venture. And today we’re here to give you a clearer perspective of the two e-commerce giants; Magento, the Adobe Venture and WordPress’s e-commerce extension WooCommerce, which will help you in making an informed decision between the two behemoths.

When comparing with each other, many questions will strike your mind. In this blog we’ll cover:

  1. Which platform is easy to use?
  2. How much these platforms provide you with technical, automated support from backend?
  3. Which platform can aid in the maintenance of product category you want to build?
  4. Which one the options will help more in marketing your brand online?
  5. Which one has better Analytics tool for measuring performance metrics?
  6. Last but not least, which platform will open more opportunities to connect with relevant experts and efficient customer support?

By the end of this article, you’ll have all the answers at your threshold facilitating you in making an ever-right choice for your new online enterprise. And a much more information coherently provided, will work for your greater knowledge and confidence on the platform you choose.

WooCommerce vs Magento: The Comparison

  1. Brand Building Made Easy
  2. Effortless Web Management
  3. Website Integrations
  4. Optimized Online Sales Process
  5. Secured Payment Gateways
  6. Data Analysis
  7. Optimization for Online Searches
  8. Support and Communities

1. Brand Building Made Easy

Magento and WooCommerce provide the users alike with unlimited convenience in customization and management of the website. This helps to draw your potential audience to make a purchase by giving them a seamless and attractive on-store experience on multiple devices.

  • Magento being a PHP based Open-source Platform, allows complete freedom for web developers to customize web pages through the source code.
  • To add various features and responsiveness, the user can browse from 1000’s of plugin options from Magento Marketplace and integrate into the website.
  • It provides user to choose the hosting solution out of the best and secure options. Meanwhile a current user can opt for cloud hosting in collaboration with AWS for scalability and simultaneously decreasing the page load time.
  • Magento is focused primarily for those users who have the resources or skills of web development and are willing to take complete control of their website.
  • It supports multi business models from a single on-site point of contact.
  • WooCommerce is an Open-source Platform where the access to web source code is given, imparting partial control of the user on the website while customizations can be done from the backend.
  • Since it’s an Open SaaS solution it depends heavily on plugins to provide features on the WooCommerce website.
  • This platform is created considering the niche which want fast and easy creation of website as well as a partial control on the backend.
  • It has 54,000 plugins on WordPress to integrate your website for various dynamic features.
  • The WooCommerce hosting provides you with free SSL certificate and is fully PCI Compliant.
  • The platform in conjugation with a multi-vendor plugin can offer user the leverage of multi-vendor business model
  • Page load time is faster when the website contains more content rather than products for sale, like an e-commerce website.

2. Effortless Web Management

WooCommerce and Magento offers a wide area of online store management and since both the platforms are an open SaaS solutions, a user can access the backend to give unique customization features on your website besides utilizing the preset thematic versions. But which will be worth the money?

  • WooCommerce allows the user to access the source code, to give unique customization features on your website.Carousels, CTA’s and Pop Ups can be added with the help of Plugins from WordPress.
  • This Open-source platform carries the prestige of providing the best CMS backend to the user, highly suitable for website which have more diverse and proportion content.
  • WooCommerce seldom witness any cross browser issue until the website is not updated.
  • Yes, generally speaking both WordPress and WooCommerce have responsive websites on different devices.
  • Magento through backend control and compatibility with AWS Cloud Hosting, gives unlimited scalability to businesses.
  • Online store management can be accessed through mobile with ease.
  • Magento has strong CMS feature and various content formats can be optimized on the website.
  • The websites do not witness any cross-browser issues as they can be optimized from their source.

3. Website Integrations for Effective Marketing

Marketing comes indispensable for companies if they desire to grow among the saturated market of e-commerce. Almost every company now indulges in online marketing these days as it is effective in reaching a wider audience and getting returns.

  • Magento it involves the usage of APIs for integration other platforms and plugins.
  • A developer is required to deploy a Simple Object Access Protocol in the web service during Magento installation for integration to a third party website.
  • Social media portals can be integrated through plugins which will give user the chance to leverage his Magento account dashboard to automate social media posts through it.
  • WooCommerce provides the opportunity of multi-channel marketing and even automate the daily recurring activities in backend.
  • The e-commerce solution has numerous plugins in the market which act as a mediator between two apps for integrating features into your WooCommerce account server.
  • These add-ons, extensions and even plugins can be derived from WordPress’s affiliate marketplace, known as WooMultistore.

4. Optimized Online Sales Process

Both WooCommerce and Magento provide exceptionally friendly web experience for inventory management and handle complex back orders. While both platforms are at par when it comes to bringing efficiency into play, each platform brings a new innovation in the field of inventory management.

  • Magento provides a new strategy of automated intelligent sourcing which can drive 35% increase in company’s revenue. It extends the functionality through additional API’s which can re-module the supply chain model through amendments in the API directory, making out-of-the-box business logics easy to implement on web plethora.
  • This facilitates the management of multi-location inventory as well as enhancing stock visibility through barcodes. You can also turn your store into a mini distribution centre for other Magento based e-commerce portals.
  • It supports multi business models from a single on-site point of contact.
  • It’s order management system dashboard will provide you with metrics as Order ID, Store, Items, Language, Date, Customer, Status, Status reason and Pick list
  • Sales management allows the webstore owner to assess and refine the on-store assistance on every level of the purchase funnel, from shopping cart to printing invoices and sales collection.
  • WooCommerce’s Step-by-Step Ordering System allows the sellers to diversify their product categories through layers and add-ons. This comes out really beneficial in promoting cross-selling, pushing grouped and segregated products through enhancing the end user’s in-store shopping experience.
  • The user can view orders and sales status for a given time period.
  • Also he can change the order status, manage prices and inventories as well as product meta descriptions on the website.
  • The order, sales and store management analysis facility can be derived from plugins in the marketplace.

5. Secured Payment Gateways

Both WooCommerce and Magento have partnered with some of the most popular and secure payment gateways, giving their clients the satisfaction to grow on secured sales and revenue.

  • WooCommerce Payments and Magento Payments do not support 3D Payment Gateway but have numerous options in the marketplace to integrate the plugins and add 3D functionality to your checkout page.
  • WooCommerce, just like Magento offers a massive list of options from third party companies like PayPal, Stripe, Square, etc. to protect your online stores from cyber attacks.
  • They not only provide online stores with the securest of the payments processes, but also furbish their clients with SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificates of reputed organisations, for defenses against cyber attacks.

6. Data Analysis

Data is the oxygen for any company to grow its business on. Both WooCommerce as well as Magento, provide an uninterrupted match for all their clients’ data needs. Subscribers can track from where the customers’ have landed on their page, which product is selling the most.

  • The basic metrics of sales, marketing, products and customers are provided by Magento as well.
  • It offers advance version of Magento reporting, free of cost known as business intelligence.
  • The basic requirements for running the business intelligence reports are; the website should run on a public server, the domain must have valid SSL certificate, while configuring Magento, the Base URL must point to secured URL and last but not least, make sure Magento crontab is created and running successfully.
  • The platform can merge Google Analytics into your Magento hosted website.
  • The basic WooCommerce plan will provide you statistics and data on orders, sales by date, by month, product and category along with the graphical representation of the information given through a user legible dashboard.
  • You can now find the brand performance aggregate metrics like stock, customer downloads, potential customers vs acquired leads as well as total sales and taxes.
  • WooCommerce besides the basic plan, offers users the choice of Advanced reporting plugin which provides a highly detailed metric analysis of various brand performance domains.

7. Optimization of Online Search

Both ecommerce platforms provide a safe and reputed domain for their clients’ to build their website upon. This helps in increasing the visibility of the website on Google, whenever a searcher inputs their query regarding a particular segment in which the subscriber deals in.

  • Both sources provide convenience to end user as well as to its main user in segregating the products into sub categories and catalogs.
  • Magento and WooCommerce alike, provide their subscribers the feature to utilize product cataloging and allowing users to search on the website through catalog search.
  • WooCommerce is the extended arm of WordPress, where 30% of 10 million websites are present on the Internet, it’s domain usability and popularity adds to an advantageous factor when it comes to SEO.

8. Support and communities

Shopify as well as Magento both boast of their uninterrupted helpdesks to their clients. Not only there are virtual help desks to solve your issue in a minute but also you can contact experts for their help when in need.

  • Magento and WooCommecre for general queries about products and services, has curated massive collection of documents online.
  • They’ve also established the online support system with many trustworthy third-party companies.
  • Alike WooCommerce, the user can approach the MagentoExperts and partners who can guarantee satisfaction for the solution of your problem.
  • This feature is unique to Magento and unlike any other platform available today, it promotes computer enthusiasts to contribute to Magento’s interface by innovative solutions, and solve website bugs for better user experience.
  • Magento simultaneously incurs interactive practices like forums and stack exchange besides the usual collection of authentic data, case studies and information on Magento and it’s product.
  • It welcomes the community of web developers in contributing to the user experience for Magento store subscribers, through Core Codes and Developer Portals.

Platforms such as these permit innumerable advantages to the user in maintaining and balancing the goals of the company. Not only companies aim to increase their sales but havoc in the inventory administration could otherwise prove disastrous. Hence these are some insights which might help you in coordinating a smooth process of your e-commerce company. And this starts with what e-commerce platform you’re selecting for the growth and scale of your business.

As for Magento against WooCommerce, it’s the most desirable Open SaaS (Software as a Service) platform when a user:

  • Has a substantial budget in the start of the business and wants to focus on e-commerce establishment more than the content-focused websites.
  • Offers advanced security features, as well as dedicated patches to close any vulnerabilities that arise.
  • The core WooCommerce plugin is extremely limited, hence it depends on a lot of additional plugins to scale the development of your website.
  • Wants an advanced and innovative level of inventory management systems to save time and revenue of the company
  • Wants the reputation of the top billion turnover companies’ platform in it’s ordeal.
  • WooCommerce has weak database architecture for high order volume and scalability

Usually, such platforms are frequently updated with features for an invariably smooth user experience curated for their subscribers, but picking the right option in the lot is necessary which will depend significantly on the niche you’re willing to create in the industry. Many mid-sized companies have moved onto Open SaaS platforms such as Magento which indicates they are ready to afford the technical complacencies, which will grant them full control of their website. So before making a purchase through any of the platforms make sure you have the right resources, the right budget and the right niche.

This post first appeared on our E-Commerce Services Business site at https://commercecodes.com/magento-vs-woocommerce

AboutAnand Agarwal
Helping Startups and Fortune 500 companies in shaping their next big IT idea. Working in Web Technologies, E-Commerce, Mobility, Digital Transformation and Product Engineering areas. Help startups and SME make more sense, more beauty, more love and more money.
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