To help in this, here we are presenting some of the comparisons between ecommerce giants and top 3 platforms so far. 1) Shopify shopify Shopify is a hosted ecommerce portal. All files, styles and data are hosted on shopify servers. As of today Shopify serves over 325,000 of businesses worldwide. You can say it’s a kind of shopping site builder and easy to use platform to get your store online within few hours. 2) Magento Magento Magento is a sophisticated ecommerce and open source platform written in PHP. One cant deny that magento has most strong ecommerce features as its core features and there are unlimited possibilities to extend this features. Magento supports multiple modules in product management, user management, customer management, order management, cache management etc. Biggest strength of Magento is its open source, hence the code is versatile and ready to get extended. 3) Woocommerce woocommerce Woocommerce started to establish as a plugin (Kind of library) and originated to be a popular platform for creating ecommerce module with wordpress platform. Most appreciating thing about WooCommerce is that it comes as a free plugin to industry’s most dominating content management system, WORDPRESS. Its ideal option for business who wants to extend their CMS portal to have ecommerce features. As on today WooCommerce is setup and configured on around 766 000 unique domains. Its also possible to extend WooCommerce since its also open source platform. Lets compare this ecommerce platforms based on following parameters. User-friendliness In terms of user friendliness, we can say shopify is super user-friendly. Just drag-and-drop interface, can operate without technical knowledge, Providing best and easy user experience even for eCommerce newbie. Simple checkout process gets more customer to purchase through checkout process as compared to complex checkout process involved in other platforms. Magento, unlike Shopify, is not so user-friendly. With the release of Magento 2.0 the platform and dashboard doesn’t look that simple as it sounds by certified professionals. So honestly speaking, Magento is not a 100% good option for those who have only basic or limited technical knowledge, but in case you choose it, be prepared to provide some time to learn its basics as well as ways to operate its features. WooCommerce can be a balanced solution between Shopify and Magento, since it provides you independence about hosting environment and keeping simplicity in its dashboard while setting up a store and its options.Hence, WooCommerce is less complicated and easier in use as compared to Magento. One of the best feature of WooCommerce is the intuitive and powerful onboarding wizard which guides a customer step and step with questions and configuring itself without any technical knowledge required. SEO Shopify has got inbuilt SEO-optimized. It includes all aspects of SEO features in all its plans. According to research performed by analysts, SEO score of Shopify is 98 out of 100. In case of Magento, there is a separate section wherein you can enter SEO related parameters like title, description and keywords. There is nothing preconfigured as compared to Shopify. Lots of options for setting SEO parameters are available in Magento. Examples are meta tags for products,home pages, images, Product Categories, Product Tags etc. According to research performed by analysts, SEO score of Magento is 100 out of 100. Amazing. Isn’t it? Since woocommerce is built meant to integrate with wordpress CMS, it has lots of benefits of SEO and it has complete versatile and custom module for SEO and customer can change according to convenience and requirements. According to research performed by analysts, SEO score of Woocommerce is 98 out of 100. ECommerce Templates and Design In case of Shopify, to select of finalize layout, once has to browse collection of template available in its store, but since it’s a hosted environment one has limitation of number of templates that can be used. At Present, Shopify offers 9 Free Website templates and the paid layout start from $140. Magento has wide options of templates and designs which can still be customized as per the choice of customer. At Present, there are total of 121 theme available as free theme on Magento Connect. And pricing for paid theme ranges from approx 45 USD to 90 USD. Allthough customer has option to get its own layout designed and create a theme out of it as per taste and choice. To be honest, WooCommerce has a serious advantage over Shopify and Magento when it comes to layouts and designs. One can either select a ready made template or a layout of their choice and get integrated with template and activate and configure woocommerce in it. Therefore, For a website, you can select any layout as per client’s choice and still get woocommerce work with that layout. Customer Support This is the area so far where Shopify win its bets. Shopify offers 24/7 responsive customer support to its customers. Customers are rest assured if any issues happens, there is someone going to fix it. When it comes to magento, there are 2 categories of support. One is wherein for community edition users, there is no support, you might need to find the right person to fix an issue, Magento CE users do not have access to official support services of platform. Customers of Magento Enterprise Edition which is paid, might expert for the technical support. Hence to summarize this point, if customer chooses Magento, he needs to deal with support issues. However in case of woocommerce, you have both options open. Either you can write in support ticket to woocommerce team as well as code is open to extend and fixed by developers as well, which gets it advantage as well. Prices and extra costs However in case of woocommerce, you have both options open. Either you can write in support ticket to woocommerce team as well as code is open to extend and fixed by developers as well, which gets it advantage as well. Although shopify provides free trial of 14-days, one might need to buy a monthly subscription, with prices starting from $29 for basic plan. Disadvantage is that it’s going to be a bit expensive to maintain a store, since monthly fees will rise and scale up with the revenue growing proportionally. When it comes to pricing, Magento can offer two options. There is Magento CE (Community Edition), which is free for download and use, furthermore, you don’t need any monthly subscription. It is the perfect choice for small or medium sized businesses. Another option is Magento EE or the Enterprise Edition. It is ideal for large businesses and the price depends on the size of your business. Even magento community edition is free, but when it comes to extra features there is overhead cost for it. Similarly every year magento releases security patches with new version which costs client extra costing since they need to pay more to developers nowadays. Woocommerce again provides you more advantage in pricing since you can find more woocommerce developers compared to shopify or magento developers and they do not demand anything too higher. Customization is also easier and less costlier.