If you’re starting an eCommerce business and are deciding on your platform, you might be torn between Magento and WooCommerce. For the uninitiated, these two platforms both power thousands of stores worldwide and have a lot of similarities. But there are some differences too! In this post we will explore Magento vs WooCommerce to help you make your decision!
We’ll start with some history – Magento is an open source platform that’s been around since 2008 and its free backend allows for unlimited products, price variations, taxes, customers, etc. It also has a ton of add-ons for themes (UI) or extensions (functionality) which can be bought from third party companies.
WooCommerce is also an open source platform with a backend of its own but unlike Magento it arguably doesn’t allow for unlimited products, prices, or tax types and has a built in extension system. This post will help you decide which is the better platform for your eCommerce business.
The Magento vs WooCommerce comparison below shows some of the functionality you may be missing out on with Magento and some that are coming to WooCommerce as well! Up first is the search functionality – you’ll notice Magento didn’t have this for a long time (why use a search box if all products are on your homepage anyway?) but now the functionality is available and it works. It doesn’t mean that search functionality in Magento is bad, it is just not robust enough unless you do some customization.
WooCommerce however has had search since its inception and it rocks! It is also incredibly powerful – a string of characters can be entered on the search bar and it will auto suggest products based on that partial string! On top of this, you can also filter for sale products, add terms to exclude (say you’re looking for a product with the word ‘necklace’ but not ‘earrings’) or sort by price to help you further narrow down your results. Very useful indeed.
Admittedly WooCommerce search isn’t perfect – if your store is very large, you might want to employ clever indexing and caching strategies to prevent your site from slowing down. But for most small to medium size stores it should be good enough. Magento on the other hand handles this aspect very well with little customization.
Next up is the navigation – Magento has a tabbed navigation which might work well on some stores but it’s not as intuitive as WooCommerce’s sidebar navigation. In addition, WooCommerce lets you add multiple storefronts and each store can have its own theme! Magento only allows one storefront with the same theme. However, this is changing and Magento is turning out to be better than WooCommerce on this front if you work with a professional Magento developer.
Moving on to user experience – Magento has a download manager which helps you view the details of the files being downloaded (size, when it was downloaded etc.) and it also has a login manager to handle customer logins. WooCommerce does not have this functionality out of the box although extensions can be used from third parties for this.
Now for some payment methods – in Magento when you place an order and are redirected to PayPal, Google Wallet or any of the payment gateways you choose, there is no way to return back or cancel your transaction without using a third party extension. In WooCommerce, you can easily cancel your order from the order page itself. With customization, Magento developers can achieve a lot better functionality on the checkout page
Lastly (this time with WooCommerce) is dealing with customer support. Magento has a developer team who often update the platform – meaning customizations, updates and bug fixes can come out very quickly (especially compared to WooCommerce which is dependent on 3rd party extensions). In addition, it is much easier to contact support for queries since they are the ones answering all of your tickets rather than having some random individual from an extension vendor.
We hope you found this Magento vs WooCommerce comparison helpful! If you’re still unsure about which one to go with, you can contact Webiators to clear your doubts and get answers.
For more information, visit https://webiators.com/
