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Magento and Shopify are two of the biggest names in eCommerce website hosting. However, despite this, it’s tough to compare the two platforms. Shopify is a hands-off “service” that handles all of the coding and nitty-gritty for you, while Magento is full of developers’ tools and other expert-level features.

However, this just scratches the surface of a Magento vs Shopify eCommerce website builder comparison. We’ll walk you through a thorough evaluation of the two web builders below. 

What Is Magento?

Magento is an eCommerce suite that Adobe maintains and offers to the public. As with many of Adobe’s products, Magento is full of features. As long as you know how to code or implement it with the Magento software, you can do just about anything you can think of.

However, Magento’s fatal flaw is that it can be difficult for newbies or inexperienced website builders to use. Magento comes in two varieties: the paid version and the open-source version. If you’d rather not pay for your website builder, you can download and implement yours from Magento’s open-source code library, but this is for very advanced users only. 

Magento is available for any business size you can imagine. In fact, Magento breaks down their services by size and variety on its Solutions page. Magento breaks down its business solutions into the following categories:

• Small Business
• Mid-Market and Enterprise
• B2B eCommerce
• Global Expansion
• Omnichannel
• Mobile eCommerce
• Digital Transformation

Magento has been used across virtually all industries; if you can sell it online, the chances are that Magento has been used to build a virtual storefront for that product. However, remember that Magento isn’t just a storefront, either; Magento is a full suite of business tools providing other services such as B2B marketing.

Furthermore, keep in mind that as a highly-expandable business solution, Magento’s fees and costs can be very high. Instead of charging you a subscription fee as Shopify does, Magento will charge you a hefty upfront fee. There are, however, many add-ons in their Marketplace that can invoke subscription costs and higher prices. 

Using this vast library of extensions, you can build your Magento website to the exact standards you want (and need). 

Pros of Magento

Magento’s most significant advantage lies in its flexibility. Because it’s a “modular” website builder that you customize according to precisely what you need, you could go as far as creating a brand-new type of website that has never been seen before. If Magento doesn’t have the kinds of extensions you need in their Marketplace, it’s as simple as creating one (or hiring Magento or an independent web builder to create a custom solution for you). 

Because Magento is also one of the biggest web store building platforms on the web, it offers incredible support. Not only will Magento help build you whatever you need as part of its web building process, but they also have tutorials, a 24/7 help center, forums, documentation, partner solutions, case studies, and many more resources. 

If Magento itself doesn’t have the tools you need to get the job done, they have a network of specialized partners that they can refer you to to get the job done instead. By integrating their most successful business solutions into the full Magento package, Adobe can offer vertical scaling that very few other website builders can match. 

Lastly, remember that Magento offers its basic package as open-source software, too. The reason why Magento’s paid packages are so expensive is that Adobe is essentially creating your website for you from the ground up; this is no different than any other website builder, in theory. However, if you’re an experienced web builder, you may save a pretty penny by doing it yourself.

In the end, the biggest pros of using Magento are:

• Robust, 24/7 support
• Massive library of extensions and add-ons
• Open source availability
• A long list of partner solutions
• Unparalleled scaling

Cons of Magento

A full-featured service like Magento has a long list of pros associated with it, of course, but there have to be some downsides to the service. The first and main one, of course, is the price. Magento is a premium website building service, and unlike Shopify, it has more of an “upfront cost” model. 

As you might expect, when Magento is done building your website for you, you’re supposed to pay for services rendered. Expect to spend at least five figures for a basic Magento website built custom for you. The most extensive solutions for enterprise-level businesses can go for more than six figures.

Unfortunately, Magento doesn’t give definitive price-lists for the services they render. Since every website is unique, the final amount due will always be different. However, you can get a decent idea of what individual extensions will cost by looking at their Marketplace, as this will give you the starting prices of these integrations. 

Another drawback to web building with Magento is time. While Shopify allows you to build your web store on your schedule, Magento depends on developers to build a custom solution for your business. Sometimes, they must create an entirely new, unique solution for your business alone. 

This can take many months’ worth of working hours to accomplish. For example, Magento’s Small Business “Rapid Deployment” packages can take as long as twelve weeks! Keep in mind that any custom package will take longer to produce, and the faster you want a custom website solution created for you, the higher your final cost will be. 

In the end, the only real cons to Magento’s business model are time and cost. However, you might also consider the following to be cons, too:

• Open-source software is for experts only
• Not really a “build it yourself” website solution – design and implementation is handled mostly by Magento
• Not for small businesses who are just starting out (and unable to handle paying five figures for a basic custom website)

What Is Shopify?

Shopify is an easy-access platform that’s designed to bring eCommerce to small business individuals. Instead of an upfront price model like Magento, Shopify operates under a subscription-based model, which can make it easier for small and just-starting-out businesses to afford. 

Where Magento builds a custom shopping experience from the ground up, Shopify uses preconfigured codes and templates to create a website based on tried and tested formulas. As such, many of the web stores made with Shopify will function similarly to each other. However, you can make these web stores look unique with your own themes and extensions. 

While Shopify’s extension store isn’t as robust as Magento’s, it’s enough to add an impressive amount of function to your Shopify website. Different Shopify add-ons exist for simple tasks like:

• Terms and conditions checkboxes
• SEO optimization
• Product videos
• Food order dashboards
• Announcement bars
• Social media feeds
• Order printers

Keep in mind that Shopify has a full App Store, too. Many apps have free tiers available that won’t add-on to your monthly subscription price, or they have free trial modes that let you test them before you commit. If you’re looking to build your shop on a budget, you can with Shopify, whereas that’s not possible with Magento.

It’s hard to compare Spotify with Magento because they’re marketed toward very different people. Magento is capable of building you a completely custom eCommerce store from the ground up (or you can create your own with their open-source software if you know how to code). Shopify’s goal is to bring eCommerce to sellers who want to start with small, inexpensive, and self-managed stores.

Pros of Shopify

If you’re a small business owner (or even a large business owner who doesn’t want or need a completely custom eCommerce site), Shopify has a lot to offer you. You can create your website exactly according to your vision (within the limits of Shopify’s capabilities, of course), and you manage every aspect of its operation.

For those who prefer to micromanage or tweak many small things about their store’s operation, this is extremely useful. With Magento, on the other hand, you might have to wait for a technician or web expert to edit your site for you if something isn’t exactly the way you want it. You’ll likely have to pay for their time spent, too. 

Additionally, Shopify is incredibly flexible in terms of cost. If you’re looking to keep costs low, you can do that with Shopify by choosing free tiers of apps and add-ons. However, if you’re willing to pay a bit more, you can customize that experience much more, too.

Shopify also has incredibly helpful 24/7 support available to help you out. While they don’t have the same forum presence as Magento, their support team and small, helpful community can still help you find an acceptable solution for whatever problems you run into.

Keep in mind that over one million businesses around the globe use Shopify for their eCommerce websites, too. With that many active users, you can have confidence that their service is respectable and productive. 

In the end, the biggest pros of Shopify are: 

• Accessible for small and large businesses alike
• Allows you to sell on multiple platforms in addition to your own (such as Amazon, Facebook, etc.)
• Free and premium options abound

Cons of Shopify

While you can’t argue that Shopify is an incredibly useful platform, it has its own set of cons. For example, while Shopify has plenty of free options, it can never truly be “free.” This is because Shopify, as a subscription service, will always require you to pay a monthly fee. On the other hand, even Magento is not truly “free,” as even with its open-source software, you’ll have to pay to host your new website somewhere.

However, that brings us to another con: as lovely as Shopify is, you’re corralled into using the same apps, extensions, and themes as every other Shopify user. As such, another user could, in theory, build an identical website to yours, though the chance is low.

While Shopify is still a highly flexible platform, it will never come close to the innate flexibility that a custom website can provide to larger businesses. However, you can manage Shopify from an extremely user-friendly interface on Shopify’s website because of this. With Magento, depending on your site’s complexity, you might have to have an expert take care of any website edits for you.

This is both a pro and a con for both Magento and Shopify. Smaller business owners might specifically want to be in control of more minor tweaks and changes to their websites, but it’s likely not worth a large business owner’s time to bother with small website changes. Most likely, their time would be better spent on managing other aspects of the business. 

Unfortunately, one of Shopify’s main cons is how the costs add up as you select additional apps and extensions. While this isn’t much of a consideration compared to the cost of Magento, too many premium apps, themes, and functions can drive up the price of your eCommerce site and make it too expensive for a small business owner. 

In the end, the main cons of Shopify include:

• Many free options, but not truly “free” 
• Limited design and function options
• Website management is your responsibility
• Costs of apps and extensions can add up quickly

Magento vs Shopify : Head-to-Head Comparison

Features and Tools

Magento and Shopify have plentiful tools and features that make their respective services more natural and satisfying. Both services also have access to an impressive app store that allows access to extra functions (for a fee). 

However, as we ascend through various price tiers, Magento comes out as the clear winner. This is because, if you want to accomplish a function that there’s no app available for, you can either code it yourself or have one of the professionals at Magento or a partner company code it for you. 

While you can create your own apps with Shopify, too, the process is more restrictive. Unless you intend to create an app that anyone on the app store can use, it won’t be possible. 

Essentially, Magento is a platform created to be whatever you (and your business) need it to be. It will create the solution to whatever problem you might have, all with a focus on eCommerce. Shopify, on the other hand, is designed to bring the ability to do eCommerce to any size business, regardless of the uniqueness or ingenuity of the website itself.

Marketing and Sales Tools

Marketing and sales tools are a particular subsection of the features available to both Shopify and Magento. Unsurprisingly, both Shopify and Magento excel in this category, as marketing and sales are the two cornerstones of a good eCommerce website. 

However, the way that Magento and Shopify handle their marketing and sales tools is very different. While Shopify comes with lots of these tools built-in to the platform, Magento depends on the Marketplace for anything beyond essential sales tools. Note that Magento has an additional suite of marketing tools exclusive to the Magento Commerce (paid) package that is lacking from the open-source version of their service.

Some of the sales and marketing tools that come integrated with your Shopify website include:

• Multi-channel sales
• Social media integration
• Email campaigns (through apps like Constant Contact and others)
• SEO and content marketing
• Ads through Facebook and other sites
• Ad campaigns and auto-pilot marketing
• Campaign reports and insights right on your dashboard
• Built-in blogs

Conversely, some of the tools that Magento offers with or in addition to your Magento eCommerce website (not the Magento open-source option) are:

• B2B Marketing
• Multi-channel sales
• Custom checkout experience
• Customer loyalty tools
• Optimized cloud computing
• Global availability

Keep in mind that, while Shopify comes with many more features included in the basic package, Magento has a much bigger app store. As such, many of Magento’s integrations depend on apps from this Marketplace. This will drive up the price of your Magento website, of course, but if you’re willing to purchase a Magento website in the first place, you’re probably aware of (and okay with) this already.

Accessibility and Support

Both Shopify and Magento offer 24/7 help and support to their eCommerce site users. However, Magento edges Shopify out a bit here because of their more extensive range of helpful resources. Both websites have help guides, forums, developer tools, expert advice, and more. However, like before, Magento is geared more towards experienced web developers here, too.

For example, Magento goes a step further and offers eCommerce training courses on its website for those looking to really get involved. Additionally, Magento offers their own 24/7 support for customers, and they have hundreds of affiliate partners with useful Magento expertise. 

Custom Designs 

For both Shopify and Magento, you can submit custom apps, programs, and themes to the parent company. If they decide that your submission passes their quality check, you may be able to sell your app or theme on their website or feature it yourself. This provides opportunities to web developers, and it lets individuals with web hosting experience design a unique eCommerce website for themselves. 

Add-Ons and Extras

As you know, both Shopify and Magento have app stores that you can use to download extensions and themes. However, while both platforms offer you the opportunity to design and build your own apps and themes, Magento edges out Shopify just slightly. This is because, while Shopify has a comprehensive app store with more than 100 apps, Magento has over 5,000.

Additionally, because developers are always creating new, bespoke programs for their Magento websites, new extensions are being created all the time. If you’re savvy about your app store use, you may not even need Magento to create a completely custom website, simply because of the sheer number of solutions available on the app store.

The apps from both Shopify and Magento’s app stores are small and functional, but they don’t change how the website works. For example, on the Magento store, you can download apps for things like web address minimization, Follow-up emails, and pop-up banners. 

Similarly, on Shopify’s web store, you can download add-ons for things like mass photo imports, geolocations, and product reviews. The main differences between the two stores are scope and audience; while Shopify’s apps are designed to be accessible to anyone, even small business owners, Magento’s apps are more complicated, and many are closer to “developers’ tools” than standalone apps.

Note that Shopify’s apps are usually significantly less expensive than Magento’s.

Fees and Pricing

As you’ve probably gathered throughout this article so far, many of Magento’s features are premium-level features designed for large, wealthy enterprises. On the other hand, Shopify is designed to be accessible to any size business. The prices of these features follow accordingly. 

A Magento website is nearly always a significant investment. If you choose to build your own eCommerce site using Magento’s open-source software, you can save quite a bit over hiring a web developer. However, even with that, Magento is far from free; if you want to purchase one of their extensions or themes to use, for example, these can be hundreds of dollars.

Similarly, once you’ve designed your Magento website with its open-source software, you must figure out how (and where) to deploy your site. While Magento Commerce, their paid tier, provides cloud hosting, Magento’s free open source software does not. As such, even if you designed the website for free, you need to pay to host it somewhere (and that doesn’t count Marketplace fees for extensions, either).

All in all, Magento isn’t an option for anyone but well-established businesses with the budget to afford the whole Magento package. Companies that are just starting out have the option of using open-source Magento, but you’re better off using Shopify because of its more affordable add-ons and plans.

Style

It’s hard to compare Magento and Shopify from a style perspective. Because you can build virtually anything with Magento, the sky really is the limit in terms of design. However, Magento also has a wealth of templates and designs that are pre-prepared for you to use if you’d rather go that route.

As you know, Shopify operates exclusively using themes. Because their storefront model is, underneath all the bells and whistles, virtually the same for every customer, your only choice in changing the style of the site is to change the theme. 

Shopify also has a theme store for you to browse through, but keep in mind that choosing a theme from the store and failing to customize it at all generally isn’t a good idea, both with Magento and Shopify. Someone else is most likely using the same basic theme somewhere out on the web, and this could turn customers away from your store or make it seem less unique.

If you’d really like to make sure your eCommerce site is unique, you can always create a custom theme. In this Magento vs Shopify eCommerce website builder comparison, these home-made themes are about equal in terms of uniqueness and difficulty. 

We don’t recommend creating your own themes unless you have some programming experience. For both Magento and Shopify, you need coding expertise to create your own theme. Shopify uses its own open-source coding language called Liquid, while Magento uses PHP. 

This is one more point for Magento, as you already have an advantage if you have experience using PHP. On the other hand, if you have no coding experience whatsoever, it may be easier to learn Liquid, since it is open-source and was created specifically to support Shopify themes.

Final Thoughts

All in all, it’s easy to compare the individual talking points of Magento and Shopify, but it’s hard to look at them side-by-side and say which is the better option overall. Both platforms have advantages and disadvantages, but in the end, the biggest divider between the two will always be price. 

Because Shopify is designed under a subscription-based model, it’s friendlier for those who can’t afford an all-in-one upfront cost like Magento demands. However, this isn’t to say that Shopify will be less expensive in the long run. There are many related variables to consider, like whether a Magento website will help you recoup that initial cost better, how much you’ll end up paying Shopify over time, and more.

The size of the business in question is your best starting point to determine whether Magento or Shopify is right for you. The fact of the matter is that most small businesses will not be able to afford Magento’s services, but intermediate and enterprise-level firms will. 

On the other hand, Shopify may not be custom enough for large businesses, even though it’s still a viable and inexpensive option. A small business with fewer products that’s more concerned with building an online presence than creating a truly bespoke storefront will benefit more from the features that Shopify has to offer, especially at such an affordable price.

Either way, the best thing to do is weigh the pros and cons of each platform and determine which one is best for you, just like we’ve done in this Magento vs Shopify eCommerce website builder comparison. 

The post Magento vs Shopify Ecommerce Website Builder Comparison [2020] appeared first on WebMonkey.

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Big Cartel and Shopify help you sell things online. They provide comparable services — helping you set up and keep an online store — but they go about it in different ways.

Big Cartel is best suited for artists or those who sell creative products. Shopify better suits those who plan to sell a diverse array of products. Big Cartel merchants tend to be small independent stores, while Shopify better serves larger businesses.

Overall, Shopify is the better ecommerce website builder. It accommodates bigger brands, offers 24/7 help, and lets you list an unlimited amount of products — as well as run multiple staff accounts to keep your business running smoothly.

Which is Better, Shopify or Big Cartel?

Shopify

• User Friendliness: 4.5
• Value For Money: 4.5
• Design Flexibility: 4
• Features: 4
• Support Help: 5
• Customer Rating: 4.5

Big Cartel

• User Friendliness: 5
• Value For Money: 4
• Design Flexibility: 4.5
• Features: 3
• Support Help: 4
• Customer Rating: 4

How Ecommerce Works Between Big Cartel and Shopify

No two ecommerce website builders look the same, and that’s especially true between Big Cartel and Shopify. Mainly, Big Cartel has more payment options, but Shopify has more features. Here’s how they compare.

Big Cartel Ecommerce Structure

Big Cartel has five payment structures. They’re each color-coded and differentiated by the price and the number of products you can sell.

• The Gold plan is free and allows you to sell up to 5 products.
• The Platinum plan lets you sell up to 50 products for $9.99 per month.
• The Diamond plan gives you up to 250 products to sell for $19.99 per month.
• The Titanium plan affords you 500 products to sell for $29.99 per month.

The different features you get between the products don’t change much. From the Platinum plan up, you get all the same features as Gold except you can edit theme codes and get Google Analytics. Beyond that, you’re just paying for the number of products you can sell on Big Cartel.

Shopify Ecommerce Structure

Shopify only has three payment plans:

• Basic Shopify, costing $29 per month
• Shopify, costing $79 per month
• Advanced Shopify, costing $299 per month

Unlike Big Cartel, the number of features you get between pricing plans varies greatly.

The additional fees incurred when you use a provider other than Shopify Payments differ between plans. On Basic Shopify, that fee is 2.0%. It’s 1% on Shopify, and 0.5% on Advanced Shopify.

We could go in more detail, but it would probably take too long. See for yourself here how the features differ among pricing plans.

User Friendliness — Which Has the Lowest Learning Curve?

We describe user-friendliness as how easily your grandma can use these services. We don’t like website builders that require you to know a lot of code to understand. The simpler the features, the faster you can build your website.

Big Cartel User Friendliness

Big Cartel beats Shopify in terms of design. The site touts itself as being built by artists, for artists, so the site is certainly pretty to look at. But does aesthetic beauty translate to beautiful design?

We think so. Setting up your website is very simple. Once you purchase a membership with Big Cartel and create an account, you’re taken to a page containing 3×3 boxes, sort of in a cube shape.

They walk you through adding products for your site, choosing a template, adding payment options, and tweaking the design. It’s very straightforward and, yes, so simple your grandma can do it.

Shopify User Friendliness

Shopify doesn’t have a major learning curve, but setting up a website isn’t as straightforward as it is with Big Cartel.

Shopify appears to have more features on each page, so your eye has to wander around each section before finding what you’re looking for.

One example is the home page. It shows your earnings, top products, top pages people visit, and the money you made that day. It’s not a bad looking page — it’s still sleek and easy to read.

The amount of stuff could make you feel a bit lost or overwhelmed when you first use it, which can lessen over time.

Big Cartel vs Shopify User Friendliness — Verdict

The winner: Big Cartel

Big Cartel beats Shopify in terms of user-friendliness. You can tell Big Cartel put a lot of effort into its graphic and user design. Setting up a website doesn’t feel overwhelming, and each page looks clutterless and elegant.

Creative Control — Which Offers the Most Design Flexibility?

This section is for the perfectionists. Do you spend forever trying to find the right shade of blue behind your product page? Do you want to have full control over the font you use when describing yourself on the “About” page?

That’s what design flexibility is all about. Full creative control means website builder lets you tweak whatever you want without diving into the page’s code.

Big Cartel Creative Control

While Big Cartel says it was built “by artists, for artists,” it offers a disappointing amount of design flexibility.

You’re essentially stuck with Big Cartel’s out-of-box templates for your store’s design. This doesn’t mean your store will look ugly — quite the contrary. But there aren’t many features allowing you to tweak the template’s colors, fonts, font size, typeface, and more.

To tweak Big Cartel’s design, you’ll have to tweak the CSS, HTML, and JavaScript directly. That’s great for developers and graphic designers, but it’s unlikely that everyone using the platform will have that background.

Shopify Creative Control

Shopify also comes with some breathtaking templates, but you can customize them with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. You can also alter products, discounts, checkouts, and payments with a range of coding experience, or none at all.

Not only does Shopify give you the options to customize everything, but it also gives you the best news and information to give you the tips on how to customize your site.

For example, Shopify links to a blog post describing that familiar website designs actually increase the likelihood of getting conversions.

Therefore, Shopify doesn’t just provide the necessary tools to alter your website but the best information on how you should design it.

Big Cartel vs Shopify Creative Control — Verdict

The winner: Shopify

Shopify offers surprisingly more design flexibility than the ecommerce website builder built by artists.

You can control different aspects of your website from the product to checkout, whereas Big Cartel mostly leaves you with templates and rigid structures. And Shopify beats Big Cartel on giving users the best information on how they should design their website.

Features — Which Gives You the Best Tools?

Your site can’t just look pretty. Websites need tools to market their products, create promotions and discounts, send out alerts for said promotions and discounts, and a host of other features.

The more features web builders have to choose from, the better they can optimize their website and find paying customers.

Big Cartel Features

For a cheaper service than Shopify, Big Cartel still offers a sizable number of site features. They include:

• 13 clean themes
• Up to 300 products
• Unlimited bandwidth
• Full HTML and CSS customization, regardless of price plan level
• Integrated Google Analytics
• Coupon code generation
• List “sold out” or “coming soon” on a product
• Integrate into Facebook to add to an existing Business’ Facebook page
• Create a mobile admin app for iOS

Features also differ based on the pricing plan.

There’s a free Gold option up to the highest-paid $30/month Titanium option. Gold lets you sell five products with one picture each, run discounts and promos, and get real-time stats, among other things.

The titanium option lets you get all Gold plan features plus the ability to sell 500 products. And you get theme code editing and Google Analytics support with Titanium.

Shopify Features

Shopify offers:

• 60 professional, elegant themes
• Unlimited products
• Up to 15 staff accounts
• Unlimited bandwidth
• Gift cards
• Mobile POS, or allowing physical stores to sell from mobile devices
• SEO marketing features
• Built-in analytics
• Assign inventory in up to 8 locations
• Easy Google Analytics integration
• Coupon code generation
• Inventory management
• Full HTML and CSS access
• Integration with popular shipping carriers
• Customer profiles to allow users to log-in to your store

There are more features to list, of course, but these are the top ones.

Accessing these features depends on the pricing plan you choose. For example, the Basic Shopify plan only lets you create two staff profiles and set up inventory in only four locations. The Advanced plan gives you the full 15 staff profiles and eight separate locations.

The feature of online credit card rates lowers between pricing plans as well — a notable difference. The rate for the basic plan is 2.9% of the sale plus 30¢, but it’s 2.4% plus 30¢ for the Advanced.

Therefore, Shopify has more features in general, and these features expand as you go up the pricing plans.

BigCartel vs Shopify Features — Verdict

The winner: Shopify

Shopify has 4x the amount of features Big Cartel has. These robust features better suit larger merchants who plan on expanding their business to different locations. If you’re serious about growing a company, Shopify’s features would be for you.

Can BigCartel or Shopify Post Blogs?

Highly ranking blog posts on search engines allow customers to come to your ecommerce store organically. They also allow you to give customers helpful tips, tell them any internal news or press events, and otherwise engage with your audience.

Ecommerce website builders that offer blogging platforms forgo the need to set up a different website for your blog, which could get especially tedious if multiple staff members help run your website.

For simplicity and cohesion, it’s best to keep your blog attached to your ecommerce store.

Big Cartel Blog Posting

It doesn’t look like Big Cartel lets you add a blog as we think of it. When we say “blog,” we mean a tab on the website in which you can add different posts. The blog is thus embedded in the site and doesn’t redirect readers elsewhere.

Big Cartel tells you ways that blogs are useful to adding traffic to your website, but we found that you can only add custom pages like an “About” or “Bio.” You can’t have multiple posts on one page.

Therefore, you cannot use Big Cartel to also build blogs for your ecommerce store. But adding a custom page is simple.

1. Go to your Account area
2. Click “Customize design”
3. Click “Pages”
4. Click “+”
5. Name the page
6. Add your content. You can use the editor to insert links, images, or fancy editing.
7. Save once you’re done

You can still use these static pages to give readers information about your store or your policies, show off work through an embedded Instagram gallery, and increase user engagement with a way to sign up for a newsletter. It’s still not a blog, though.

Big Cartel Plugins allow you to create a blog, such as through Powr.io, but you can’t create a blog directly through Big Cartel’s layout.

Shopify Blog Posting

Yes, Shopify lets you start a blog. And doing so is simple from the admin portal.

Once you log in, click the “Online Store” tab to the left. You’ll be taken to a new set of menus, and “Blog post” will be the second one. Click on it.

There will be a large button that says “Create Blog Post.” Click on that, and you’ll be taken to a page where you can write your blog post, add a title, change who that author is, and even alter the SEO description (the little box of text that appears under a headline when you Google something.)

You can even add feature images, embed media into the blog post, and add tags so that you can better categorize the post. In all, the Shopify blog post content management system looks a lot like WordPress, so it shouldn’t be a huge learning curve if you’re already used to that.

Big Cartel vs Shopify Blog Posts — Verdict

The winner: Shopify

Shopify easily beats Big Cartel in the blog posting category because Big Cartel doesn’t even have that option. Shopify’s blog content management system has everything you need to make legible, attractive, and optimized blog posts for your ecommerce store.

Best Marketing Tools — Big Cartel and Shopify

Marketing tools grow your online business. You can create advertisements and target certain audiences, create a newsletter about upcoming items to create interest, and create promotions to draw audiences towards a sale.

Every good ecommerce website builder needs to have a robust set of marketing tools. Here’s how Big Cartel and Shopify compare.

Big Cartel Marketing Tools

Big Cartel lets you embed the following apps into your online store:

• POWr.io — Create a microblog, social feed, customer review, and other marketing materials
• Elfsight apps — Embed social media, customer testimonials, FAQs, Google Maps for physical locations, and more into your online store
• Instagram — For displaying pictures of products, people, locations, etc
• LiveChat — Facilitate customer support through instant messages
• Lucky Orange — Utilizes traffic data to help you understand why visitors don’t convert
• Mailchimp — Create targeted campaigns, automatically follow up with customers after they purchase a product, recommend products all through email
• Zapier — Automate tasks such as email marketing, customer management, social media promotion, accounting, and more

In all, these apps help small businesses grow their customer base. They’re all relatively simple to use too.

Shopify Marketing Tools

Shopify lets you:

• Start up a blog
• Access SEO tools
• Create marketing campaigns through Facebook ads, email marketing, and Google Smart Shopping
• Automate marketing through Kit — allowing you to boost awareness, drive sales, and email customers without labor
• See in-depth data behind your marketing efforts, taking the guesswork out of which campaigns are effective or not
• Access to the Shopify App Store with even more marketing tools
• Connect with Shopify Experts to help you better strategize marketing campaigns.
• Get high-quality 24/7 customer support should you experience issues with your marketing tools

It’s hard to quantify the number of items Shopify has, but it’s more than Big Cartel. On Shopify, you not only have access to top-tier marketing tools but the knowledge base, data, expert advice, and customer support to use it most efficiently.

Big Cartel vs Shopify Marketing Tools — Verdict

The winner: Shopify

Shopify offers more than Big Cartel. And Shopify not only offers tools but the information and access to marketing experts to let you market your site the best.

Big Cartel is good for independent artists hoping to grow their audience. Shopify better suits large businesses striving to reach millions of people.

Which Has Better SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimization. Good SEO allows products or blog posts to land among the first top five listings when searching for something on Google.

Readers aren’t likely to scroll onto the second or third page to find something they need, so good SEO is crucial for creating conversions and growing traffic organically.

Big Cartel SEO

Big Cartel takes care of SEO on the backend, so you don’t have to do much if you’re not well-versed in this sort of thing.

Big Cartel automatically generates unique meta descriptions using optimized keywords for your products. The company also does the meta keywords and sitemap, which are also important for ranking highly on search engines.

There are a few things you can do, though, as listed on the Big Cartel website. Users can create a custom domain that lets search engines see the URL clearly as a unique brand.

Merchants can also create a good description with ample keywords to rank highly. You should also write robust product descriptions for each product rather than leaving them blank. Ask friends or other business owners to link to your site — that’s another way to rank highly on search engines.

Shopify SEO

Shopify gives you an in-depth review of everything you need to know about SEO. It also lets you add keywords for SEO on your Shopify store, optimize site structure for search engines, among other useful things.

The Shopify App Store also lets you find other tools to boost your SEO, such as Smart SEO and TinyIMG SEO Image Optimizer.

Big Cartel vs Shopify SEO — Verdict

The winner: Shopify

Shopify has more tools, information, and app access than Big Cartel. Shopify even allows you to add SEO excerpts on each blog post to land higher on the page. In all, Shopify inserts SEO into everything it does, whereas it feels like SEO was tacked onto Big Cartel’s website structure.

Support Help — Which Has Better Customer Service?

We like it when a company offers 24/7 customer service so you’re never stuck waiting for someone to help you fix your problem. Quick, reliable support lets you get your site back on track and allows you to sell more products.

Big Cartel Support Help

Big Cartel states on their website that they have nine humans (not AI) working their customer help desk. They are available seven days a week from 8am to 6pm EST. Big Cartel’s customer service is also only available by email.

These are ample working hours, and it’s nice that customer service is available on the weekend. But these hours could be difficult to manage if you’re in a vastly different time zone or run your business after working hours.

Shopify Support Help

Shopify offers a 24/7 help center with people based in 21 locations around the world.

You also get access to a community forum, where you can quickly read solutions for problems people have had before you.

There’s also a help center filled with answers to common issues people on Shopify have, as well as ways you can grow your business.

Big Cartel vs Shopify Customer Service — Verdict

The winner: Shopify

Shopify has more customer support technicians working across the world to help users fix website issues.

Shopify also has more resources to help customers fix issues without contacting customer support, such as the help center and community forum. If you’re shy or just like solving issues on your own, that’s for you.

Big Cartel works on a much smaller scale than Shopify. This means you can’t always get access to one of Big Cartel’s nine customer support technicians, but you’ll probably get more care and attention when connecting with them.

Shopify, however, offers more support with more people in more locations. It’s simply a bigger company than Big Cartel, and it thus has more resources to help people.

Big Cartel vs Shopify — Our Winner

To review, here are the categories we had and the winner of each:

• User-friendliness — Big Cartel
• Design Flexibility — Shopify
• Creative Control — Shopify
• Features — Shopify
• Blog Posts — Shopify
• Marketing Tools — Shopify
• SEO — Shopify
• Customer Service — Shopify

Shopify is the clear winner in terms of categories won. It’s more expensive than Big Cartel, but the extra cost translates to more features and the ability to grow a large online business.

When to Use Big Cartel Over Shopify

Big Cartel works best for individual or small shop owners. These merchants can’t afford a huge staff to help run their company and are probably doing everything out of their bedroom.

Big Cartel also suits people who want to save money. You can have a free ecommerce store and just sell five products, which is perfect for people trying their hand at selling online but aren’t sure they want to commit to a costlier plan.

Big Cartel also works best with people who just want to set up their site and forget about it. They’ll revisit it from time to time, but they aren’t obsessed with metrics, growth, marketing, SEO, or the like. Big Cartel has these features for those who want them, but they aren’t the main point of who Big Cartel is for.

Big Cartel is for creative folks who want a simple, beautiful website and to connect with customers. Growth, marketing, SEO, and other tools help grow their audience, but they aren’t concerned with making millions of dollars. They sell for the sake of distributing good products.

When to Use Shopify over Big Cartel

Shopify is for entrepreneurial folks who want to grow their ecommerce store into a large business. Shopify gives you all the tools to grow big, complete with robust marketing tools, metrics, SEO, and hundreds of apps.

Shopify better suits online merchants with the capital to take on multiple staff members on board, growing the company’s team in addition to the business. Shopify isn’t cheap, either, so businesses must afford the higher price tag than Big Cartel.

Final Thoughts

Big Cartel and Shopify suit different niches. Big Cartel is for smaller, independent online stores, while Shopify works better for those who want to grow as big as possible.

Shopify offers more features for online merchants, but either ecommerce website builder will help you make stunning websites and sell products online.

The post Big Cartel vs Shopify Ecommerce Website Builder Comparison : Which is Better? appeared first on WebMonkey.

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