Shopify vs. Magento?

Full disclosure: We've developed 80+ BigCommerce websites. And to answer your question, it just depends on what you're trying to do, eCommerce wise. No one here can honestly answer you with wisdom unless they know what you're trying to accomplish.

We've been looking and watching Shopify since it came out, but there are a handful of gotchas last I looked on Shopify that wouldn't work for us/clients:

- For example, you can't get a dedicated SSL certificate until you are on Shopify Plus paying $1000 a month. This means you can't use critical ecommerce tracking tools in Google Analytics, and it impacts shopper confidence and cart conversions because it routes to ".myshopify.com" at checkout.

- Additionally, Shopify's pricing structure forces merchants to pay up to 2% transaction fees for using popular, non-Shopify payment gateways, such as Paypal and Authorize.net.

- By way of example, Shopify themes don't contain microdata (a feature that optimally structures data for search engines), whereas new Bigcommerce themes have it baked in. SEO company Moz found microdata can increase search rank up to 4 positions, and Search Engine Land studies report microdata can increase search engine click through rates up to 30%.

- Another feature Shopify doesn't offer is sitewide HTTPS. This advanced feature provides an SEO lift and was singled out by Google as a future ranking signal.

- From payments, to POS, to analytics, Shopify pushes their own homegrown solutions and makes it difficult or costly for you to integrate with third-party solutions. For example, if you are doing decent volume offline, you will need a midmarket POS that supports more sophisticated capabilities such as sales commissions and multi-store locations, but Shopify doesn't offer these integrations.

- Shopify themes are developed in "Liquid", their proprietary coding language, so the pool of developer talent is smaller to draw from. In contrast, Bigcommerce themes are coded in standard languages - HTML, CSS, Javascript - which makes it much easier to find quality developers that you can quickly hire to execute improvements to your site as you grow.

- A true mid market client increases their revenue through marketing optimization and merchandising, and only on Bigcommerce will you get that depth of reporting and insights. Shopify's reporting isn't very high level, and doesn't offer any merchandising capabilities at all.

- Shopify also doesn't support dimensional shipping, which is how all major shipping carriers calculate shipping costs as of February 2015. Shopify encourages merchants to just guestimate by calculating dimensional weight instead, which is inexact and will make shipping costs balloon at volume and hurt margins.

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So again, without more knowledge of what you're doing online, no one here can give you the most valuable advice you need. And even though most here know 10X more than me, we're all shooting in the dark.

Both Shopify and Magento have its own pros and cons. If you stick to the budget, you can go for Shopify. You should choose Magento if you're planning for a long term goal.

First time posting here, and frankly I don't have time to write a more elaborate answer. Why? Because I'm busy fixing Magento.

We run a LARGE ecommerce site (20k SKU's, 8 figures revenue). Magento was the worst mistake we ever made and we pay for it on a daily basis.

EVERY DAY I sit with development and literally the first thing IT says is "you have to understand first that what you want and what should happen won't happen because we're on Magento"... then we spend 2 hours dreaming up some hack and cron job to make Magento do very basic things.

I have no experience with Shopify, but I do know that we've been doing this for 14 years. We're pro's in eCommerce and stand shoulder to shoulder with any big box store you'll come across. Magento haunts us every day....

My $0.02... cheers!

PS. Depending on your number of SKU's, an ERP will also be a big decision for you. Don't go cheap and pick one you'll outgrow too quickly.