WooCommerce or Magento, whichever shall it be? In this article, we look into whether WooCommerce is better than Magento for your online store.
Product Management
The first thing to consider is how easy it is to manage products on each platform. WooCommerce products work similarly to blog posts in the WordPress blog, which makes them relatively easy to update for a somewhat WordPress savvy user. However, it does feel a little bit hacked together when editing products.
Magento on the other hand definitely has the look and feel of a professional e-commerce platform. After an initial learning curve, Magento is relatively easy to manage products in.
Neither Magento nor WooCommerce leaves much to desire when it comes to product management.
The Customer’s Shopping Experience
The experience your customers have when visiting your website is one of the most important factors to consider when choosing between the two e-commerce platforms.
Although much of this is down to the marketing and web development team assigned to your website build, we do commonly see Magento websites outperforming WooCommerce sites in this area.
Plug-ins can be installed on both platforms that can enhance the user’s experience, such as one page checkouts and cart abandonment emails, making both platforms great depending on the team working to build the site.
Search Engine Optimisation
When it comes to SEO, there is a clear winner for performance. WooCommerce has almost everything perfectly set up for you out of the box. And what it doesn’t do on its own, Yoast SEO will take care of for you.
Following Magento’s best SEO practices will improve your website’s search engine performance, but it is a fair amount of work.
If SEO is important to your website, both platforms can do great. WooCommerce will just require slightly less work initially.
Software Cost
WooCommerce is a free e-commerce platform, with no ongoing fees. Because of this, there are thousands of experienced developers on the platform who can help you with your website if anything was to go wrong.
Magento on the other hand is not a free e-commerce platform, and there are far fewer developers who are experienced enough to work on your website. This often means paying more to get the development done as you will need to find an expert.
Advanced Features
As previously stated, WooCommerce feels like a blog that’s been hacked together to sell products through, whereas Magento feels like an e-commerce platform that has been built to sell products.
One of the best examples of this is whenever advanced features are required on an e-commerce project. It’s often far easier to develop more complicated features in Magento than it is WooCommerce. And so it’s worth considering using Magento if your project is a little bit more complicated.
The Winner? You Decide
As you now know, there is no real winner between the two – just personal preference that should be used as the determining factor. Both Magento and WooCommerce are great for selling products online and should be a great solution for your business.
