Magento
DemandWare
osCommerce
Shopify
Magento offers flexible, scalable eCommerce solutions designed to help you grow and succeed online. Cost-effective technology platform makes it possible for you to control the content, functionality, look and feel of your online store.
Pros
- Feature-rich – the Community (free) version boasts features not commonly available in other solutions such as ability to manage multiple store fronts, multi-language and multi-currency support and is mobile and search engine friendly.
- User-friendly – the administration area is one of the more user-friendly ones we’ve come across. A simple back-end with intuitive navigation and well organized store management features.
- Cost – community version is free.
- Community – wide community of users who have developed many extensions and plugins and can help with support.
- Flexibility – Magento’s templating architecture allows you to pretty customize everything so you can create your site exactly how you want The software is open source so you have full control over the code so you can develop the functionality you need.
- Scalable – as previously mentioned, Magento is built to scale so whether you’re selling 10 products or 10,000, Magento can handle it.
Cons
- Developers – good Magento developers are hard to find. Magento is an extremely large system (over 20,000 files and 200 database tables) so it takes a fairly clever developer with good understanding of object oriented development and experience with the core software to really know what they’re doing.
- Hosting – due to its largesse, Magento should only be hosted on dedicated servers that you can configure or providers who specialize in Magento hosting. Running Magento on normal shared hosting will create a slow and frustrating user experience for visitors.
- Time – Magento’s flexible architecture also makes it complex. It usually requires more time to make the same customizations as in other solutions. It usually takes developers more time to get up the learning curve than other solutions.
| | | | |
| SaaS or Deployed | Deployed | SaaS | Deployed | SaaS |
| Hosting Costs | $100-$500 | % OF SALES | $20-$50 | None |
| Monthly Fee | Free (community version) | Individualy | Free | from $14/month |
| # of Free Website Templates | 500+ | None | 20+ | 20+ |
| # of Free Extentions | 5000+ | Unknown (available only in Demandware xChange) | 7000+ | 500+ |
| Cost for Paid Templates | $10-$300 | None | None (only free) | $80-$100 |
| Cost for Paid Extension | $10-$5000 | All extensions are include in monthly fee | None (only free) | $10-$150 |
| Open Source | Yes | No | Yes | No |
| Edit Products | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Edit Customers | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Product Attributes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Multiple Product Images | Yes | Yes | No | Yes |
| Coupons | Yes | Yes | No | Yes |
| Persistent Shopping Cart | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes (additional application) |
| Product Import/Export | Yes | Yes | No | Yes |
| Payment Gateways Support | Yes (PayPal, Authorize.net as default) | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Mobile | Yes | Yes | No | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes | No | Yes |
| Tax calculation | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |