Adobe Commerce(Magento) Vs Shopify: Which to Choose?

Was it about how many dollars you are going to make? Or, were you dreaming about becoming the next Amazon? Well, all of these things are crucial to keeping your zeal up to start a business, in the first place. But, the first and foremost question that you should actually answer is:

How are you going to develop an online store that helps you accomplish all these dreams?

More precisely, which eCommerce development platform are you going to use? Selecting the right digital commerce platform can greatly influence the way you do business, online as well as offline. It will define the customer experience you deliver, sales you generate, and the amount of money you spend in operating your business.

Adobe commerce is a robust, scalable, and highly flexible digital commerce development platform for B2B as well as B2C businesses. It lets you build multi-channel commerce experiences on a single platform.

Shopify is also a complete eCommerce platform that helps retailers develop, grow, and manage an online business flawlessly. With Shopify, you can develop and customize an eCommerce store, sell on multiple channels, and manage almost everything from products, payments, inventory, and shipping.

The platform perfectly caters to the needs of many B2C small and mid-sized businesses and a number of large retailers also consider it a good choice for certain features like social selling scenarios and faster time-to-market.

Now that we have an idea about the specialization of Adobe Commerce and Shopify, let’s compare both these platforms against several attributes to find which one is the best for up-and-coming retailers.

1. The Need for Personalization

Today’s digital commerce market is highly competitive and to attract and retain consumers your brand needs to provide an experience that is engaging, personalized, and consistent. Now, Adobe Commerce comes with features like a drag-and-drop page builder that let you develop and deploy unique experiences as per your consumers’ demands.

On the other hand, Shopify provides retailers with rigid and standard templates that you can not customize after an extent, resulting in your store looking like other Shopify stores. It limits your capability to provide unique and personalized experiences that are crucial to stand out in the experience-driven commerce world. Hence, in terms of personalization and flexibility, Adobe Commerce is a win-win for retailers.

2. Business Analytics and Reporting

Proper business analysis is crucial for a growth-oriented eCommerce business. And, thankfully, Adobe Commerce as well as Shopify Plus, both provide amazing features to generate business performance reports using which retailers can make informed decisions.

In Shopify Plus, you get reports with the overview of taxes, payments, finances, sales, profits, customer behavior, live data view, and product analytics. On the other hand, with Adobe Commerce, you also get to use Magento Business Intelligence tools that help you monitor your business health precisely.

3. B2B eCommerce Capabilities

As mentioned above, even the premium version of Shopify called Shopify Plus does not provide many B2B capabilities for retailers. It is designed for B2C sales and its B2B features are limited, including:

• Flexible payment options
• Order management and re-ordering
• Custom pricing for customers
• Tiered pricing and catalogs for groups and individuals
• Integration with ERP, OMS, and CRM

While Adobe Commerce has all the above-mentioned features, it provides some additional and advanced capabilities for B2B retailers that help them stand out in the market. These include order by SKU, one-click reordering, support for all payment methods, the ability to manage multiple fulfillment centers, and much more. Thus, for complex B2B operations, Adobe Commerce is an ideal choice.

4. Performance

When looking for an eCommerce platform, you should without a doubt look for reliability at local as well as global levels. Moreover, if you have international expansion plans in the near future, you must build your online store accordingly.

Adobe Commerce powers 315000 online stores from various industries including healthcare, retail, fashion, and more. Moreover, it runs on AWS and its global cloud infrastructure ensures 99.99% uptime to allow retailers to deploy websites regardless of where their business operates. However, Shopify has a multi-tenant architecture which means traffic surge on one online store can harm the performance of all other stores.

5. Advanced Search Feature

For eCommerce stores, search is a very essential feature because it impacts the user experience of the platform. Generally, eCommerce websites have thousands of products and it is crucial for retailers to ensure that consumers don’t get lost in the pool of products and find what they are looking for easily and immediately. That’s where a smart search can help them.

But, in Shopify Plus, search is considered to be quite weak. While it can search items for exact names or descriptions, the search engine in Shopify doesn’t support synonyms and visuals. As a result, retailers often use third-party integration to improve search.

• If your business is likely to handle complex B2B transactions
• If you want to provide unique and personalized experiences
• If you plan for international expansion in the future
• If you want to provide a continually evolving brand experience

• If you need a simple user interface
• If you are just starting a B2C eCommerce store
• If you don’t want to hire developers to manage your eCommerce store

Adobe Commerce and Shopify are both amazing platforms but their use cases differ entirely.

While Shopify is a good option for small-scale businesses with no plans of scaling and international expansion, Adobe Commerce or Magento caters to businesses having complex B2B and B2C needs. Like there is no one size that fits all, there is no one-liner answer to which platform will suit your business needs the most. All you have to do is, find out your business needs and choose the one that suits you the best.

If you want our expert opinion, our favorite is Adobe Commerce since it is highly flexible and customizable and lets us develop experiences that cater to the modern needs of the consumers. If you want more information on which platform is suitable for your business-specific needs, contact our eCommerce experts and we would be more than happy to help you.