E-Commerce Platforms: Which to Choose?

Erin Lynch at Multichannel Merchant brought our attention to Brightpearl’s outstanding infographic, a useful tool for differentiating the strengths of three major e-commerce platform engines: Magento, Bigcommerce, and Shopify. We’re obviously biased towards Magento, but it can only help to clarify the often murky explanations of its benefits. This chart does just that, offering a step-by-step approach, with explicit yes/no paths, for determining the appropriate e-commerce platform from an entrepreneur’s perspective.

Here are some of the major points they raise. Want more? Take a look below!

• Like we always say, Magento is the most technical of the bunch. In addition to CSS and HTML tweaks, it grants you full feature control and the ability to go right into the platform code and edit away. The same can’t be said for the other two.

• The easiest out-of-the-box solution is Bigcommerce, followed by Shopify. While these may be better for the grab-and-go types, Magento stands head and shoulders above them in terms of performance scope—the only limit to modules and integrations is your budget and imagination.

• Open source can be a point of contention for some. With Magento, you can truly claim full ownership of your build, though the onus is on you to sweep out any bugs or misconfigurations. Luckily, a large and welcoming Magento community populates web forums, brimming with answers and workarounds. As SaaS solutions, Bigcommerce and Shopify do all the heavy lifting for you, with the provision that updates and tweaks are on their schedule, not yours.

• Many online retailers eventually want to expand to other channels—eBay, Amazon, brick and mortar, etc.—which require additional functionality. In these cases, no single e-commerce platform comes already equipped to handle everything. Magento’s advantage here, again, is its broad community dedicated to open-source modules, addressing needs as they arise in a well-supported ecosystem. It isn’t easy, but the answers can be found with diligence and flexibility.