E-commerce has been around since the dawn on of the internet, and now there are many tools that allow you to do this without any web design experience. Magento and Woo Commerce are the industry leaders in e-commerce web design and development. It used to be OScommerce, but not anymore. How does Magento and WooCommerce stack up against each other?
Magento Vs. WooCommerce: What is Magento, and When Do I Use It?
Magento is an open source e-commerce platform. The term “open-source” is significant because it indicates that developers are free to manipulate and improve upon certain aspects of Magento at will. The original software was developed by Varien Inc, a company based in Culver, California, now owned by eBay. The main advantage of having Magento over Woo Commerce or many other platforms is because it comes packed with power and features right out of the box. One of its most impressive features is its ability to run multiple stores at once. Magento is for companies who plan on bringing in profit from day one – usually for brick and mortar retail stores who are looking to expand online or for online e-commerce sites looking to increase the power and productivity of their website. If a business owner believes that their business will have more complex needs in the future – then they should try Magento right off the bat.
What makes Magento so complex? There are many integrated reports that are more in-depth for business analysis. Some examples of these are reporting for abandoned shopping carts, summaries of most loyal customers, RSS feeds for new orders, low stock reports, and customer finance promotion tools. Other features include one-page checkout, and customer experience customization tools as well – this makes Magento one of the best tools on the market.
Magento Vs. WooCommerce: What Good is WooCommerce For?
A person may wonder why they would need to use WooCommerce if they plan on using Magento. The truth is, the learning curve with Magento is extremely steep because of all of its features and complexities. WooCommerce is focused on the business person who simply wants to get their feet wet – yet can still appear to be a large professional company. Furthermore, WooCommerce is great for the small business who aren’t looking to incur a great deal of costs in the online department. Magento requires a powerful web hosting server while WooCommerce does not. WooCommerce is extremely easy to learn, however, if one wants to advance their company or their online business, they will have to install more plugins and even higher custom developers to create new plugins for their business. Some plugins such as running coupon offers may cost extra money, which can be rather frustrating in the end.
Last but not least, if you are looking to market your website through inbound efforts, you may hear the term “content is king”. WooCommerce helps those looking to blog because it’s made for WordPress – a natural blogging companion. Magento would require some additional steps before blogging was made possible! (although there is a wordpress plugin for it, but we don’t trust it)
In the end, both are great e-commerce platforms, however, if you are a small business, you may want to stick with WooCommerce. Businesses seeking a great deal of sales immediately may want to try Magento.
Alternative
Use Magneto as your front end store and use WordPress as the blog. Just match the design of WordPress to Magento. You’ll need a web developer to do that. If you can’t afford American developers, read our blog post about “Outsourcing Your Work“.
