Shopify and Magento Community are fairly powerful ecommerce hosting platforms, Shopify provides greater ease of use since it is a hosted and fully managed service.
All mentioned solutions are great and used by merchants in different countries. Shopify seems to be one of the most widely used options. Also, i have heard about one new solution which is just emerging on the market and might be interesting to you, it is called Browuse. In order to find out more you can just google.
Yeah, Shopify's great -- especially if you're just starting out. They take care of all the backend server work for you, and they do a pretty good job with it. Meanwhile, you can add products and design your store. They also incorporate security measures during the checkout process, but I'd still recommend finding a separate merchant solution. Shopify Payments rates are pretty high -- you can find something much more competitive. Take a look at the merchant services/payment gateways Shopify can work with: https://www.shopify.com/payment-gateways
@Natasha_Williams Still a long way to go for Browuse as it can't compete yet to Shopify, BigCommerce etc.
Shopify is extremely easy to use. The backend is modeled after WordPress and so it has much the same look and feel. You can easily figure out how to add products, how to enable or disable features of your store, how to set up payment options and many other useful features. This is probably one of the main strengths of Shopify.
As compare to many other ecommerce solutions providers, it is much more better. There is one more name in market that is performing well, Magento. You must try this for better solutions.
I agree in 100% it is great tool on some stage of business development process. Easy to use, offers must have basic features- will work great for you till certain size of operations. When you want to cross 5000 parcels a month you might need either professional tool set on hand or hire more people to keep highest customer service level + additional modules to bypass technology gaps in a system. With additional modules it gives you good startup- but since there are are third parties modules there might be a bit gambling in reliability. This works for any backend system- when you have multi suppliers responsibility goes blur.
Magento is great if you can afford it and you require some specific functions not available in Saas model.
Well, Shopify is becoming more and more popular among e-commerce community. I tried Prestashop 5 months ago and have given up it. I have migrated Prestashop to Shopify. Now, I am really satisfied with my results. Hope you will make your decision soon!
Magento is better than Shopify because Magento is 100% SEO friendly. There are Marketing, Promotions and Conversion Tools in Magento. Magento's features: Customer Segmentation, Targeted Promotions & Merchandising Dynamic Rule Based Product Relations Persistent Shopping Automated Email Marketing Reminder There are lots of advantages of Magento in compare to Shopify.
Do you do anything else than Shopify? In case you are strong on front-end I can provide you says based enterprice pavia ck-end solution. You can build up front and connect SMARTY with back int- test us- to compare apple to apple- no one represents higher rate features vs. money on market.
Shopify is alright however I would rather have total control over everything. I use opencart and magento.
Shopify maybe a good choice with plentiful templates, flexibility and fast support. You can completely believe in Shopify for your e-commerce website. Btw, if you wanna transfer data from your current site to Shopify, you can find Shopify database migration tool by LitExtension.