A great shopping cart software is more than the clean, crisp look of its storefront interface. It packs in flexible, scalable, and powerful backend features that let you perform critical e-commerce tasks from promotion to payment. Some shopping cart solutions are strong at certain features, while others are better at other sets of tools. With dozens of shopping cart solutions in the market–each one claiming to be the best–it’s easy to get lost in your product research.
To help you decide which shopping cart software to use, our B2B software experts analyzed a wide range of cloud shopping cart solutions for aspects that are important to running an e-commerce site: ease-of-use, functionality, shipping, mobile, payment, integration, pricing, and product attribute.
After reviewing all major online shopping cart builders, we came up with our list of top 3 shopping cart products that provide the best level of quality.
Shopify – Score: 9.7 User Satisfaction: 98%
Wix – Score: 9.5 User Satisfaction: 100%
Magento – Score: 9.4 User Satisfaction: 99%
From the top 3 shopping cart solutions our experts found Shopify to offer the ultimate level of quality and decided to award Shopify with the Best Shopping Cart Software for 2015 award for meriting the top score in the shopping cart sofware category (9.7) as well as for its functionality, intuitiveness, and pricing, and for enjoying a very high user satisfaction rating of 98%. You can also easily test the solution for yourself by getting Shopify free trial.
Our comparison review will help you focus on the best-in-class shopping cart solutions to ensure that your e-commerce site is backed by powerful and, more importantly, useful features. In this article, we’ll give you an overview of each of our top three solutions and compare their main strengths and weaknesses, to illustrate why Shopify won our overall nod for best shopping cart solution in the market today.
1. Overview of Shopify, Wix and Magento
Shopify – Best Shopping Cart Software for 2015
Score: 9.7
User Satisfaction Rating: 98%
Price: $14 per month, free trial version is also available
With a score of 9.7 Shopify is currently the best shopping cart software listed in our base. Used by over 150,000 stores worldwide, Ottawa-based (Canada) it is one of the most popular shopping cart solutions for its simple but practical features. It targets small businesses and professional users; however, large enterprises are known to use it, too, mainly for its extensible options and flexible settings. Shopify has also one of the most affordable entry subscriptions at $14 per month and a great free trial offer. Shopify is a great way to launch your online business because it’s easy to set up, use, and maintain at an affordable price. In fact, it may be the only complete shopping cart solution you’ll ever need if you’re not expecting to become a billion-dollar multinational with physical retail stores around the world. Feel free to read our detailed review of Shopify for more information about the software.
Sample Shopify storefront
Wix
Score: 9.5
User Satisfaction Rating: 100%
Price: $16 per month
Tel-Aviv (Israel)-based Wix offers an e-commerce component on top of its web development platform. The software is notable for its HTML5 editor with drag-and-drop web builder and mobile responsiveness. It’s targeted at small businesses with subscription of $16+ per month, sold separately from its web builder that features a freemium. If you’re focusing on content with an online store incidental, Wix is a good option. Alternatively, you can use Wix to build the content site and integrate Shopify to sell online. You can read our detailed review of Wix to learn more about this software.
Sample Wix storefront
Magento
Score: 9.4
User Satisfaction Rating: 99%
Owned by eBay, Magento forays into the shopping cart industry as an enterprise-class solution for big retailers with online and offline storefronts. It has a Community Edition, but it’s positioned as incidental to the enterprise platform. Features-wise Magento is more complex than Shopify and Wix, with hundreds of extensions, tailored backend workflows, and network of partners and developers to help you maximize Magento. It’s also an ideal component to the vendor’s other suite of omnichannel commerce solutions for retail order management, store fulfillment, and retail associate platforms. We included Magento in our review because if your business is directed to be a large enterprise one day with several offline retail branches in and out of the country backed by an in-house IT team, Magento is a good choice. In fact, the company boasts to have several clients in the 2015 Internet Retailer Top 1000. In our detailed review of Magento you can find more information about this service.
Sample Magento storefront
2. Ease of use
Shopify and Wix are far more user-friendly than Magento. Both applications feature an intuitive admin panel with drag-and-drop, menu, personalization, and WYSIWYG features. You also have hundreds of professionally designed themes to select from in both solutions and you’re ready to go live.
If you have standard shopping cart needs, such as, design and layout, product additions and details, checkout and payment processes, and sales analytics, both Shopify and Wix will help you immediately start your online store.
In ease of use, we give Shopify a slight edge over Wix because of the latter’s wider range of functionalities and integration options that we’ll explain below. Both aspects extend Shopify’s intuitiveness.
Meanwhile, Magento requires more steps to set up and customize settings. For instance, even its basic version, Community Edition for small businesses, requires you to choose an e-commerce platform on top of picking a design template and the whole process can take a week. Magento also requires a technical team to scale its high-performance architecture, which can handle tens of thousands of transactions per hour and the largest set of product catalogs. The software may be more difficult to use than Shopify and Wix, but that’s because it’s designed for more difficult and complex order volumes, possibly, in the magnitude of an eBay, its mother company.
3. Design
Both Shopify and Wix have hundreds of storefront themes to choose from.
Wix has artistic and even edgy themes. However, Wix leans towards creative and fancy themes, while Shopify gives you clean, crisp, predictable themes that are more practical to help shoppers focus on the buying process.
Shopify’s Theme Settings editor also lets you preview display changes as you make them, while in Wix, you need to save the changes first and refresh the browser to view the latest changes. This difference can be stark especially during the early stages when you’re pesonalizing the store’s look.
Meanwhile, Magento uses third-party providers for design and development (Shopify and Wix also have this setup but it’s an option). You’re either forwarded to a Magento-powered e-commerce platform (ex., Pixafy, Blugento) if you’re doing the design yourself or to a web design and digital marketing agency if you’re outsourcing the task. The third option is to use the Enterprise edition and build the store from ground up with your development team. The software presents a more complicated development approach because it’s true power lies in its backend infrastructure.
4. Customization
If you want to customize the look in Shopify and Wix, you have two options: shallow customization using drag-and-drop and click tools to change colors, layout, fonts, background; or deep customization by embedding your own HTML and CSS code.
On this note, Shopify’s Ruby-based Liquid open source gives you a more seamless integration, where the custom changes are built within the Shopify code, while Wix simply creates an iframe to embed the code. Customization is one of Shopify’s main strengths; it can be as simple as a templated Wix, yet can match the extensibility of a Magento at an intermediate level.
4. Functionalities
Because it’s a developer’s playground, Magento has more complex functions than Shopify and Wix. Plus, Magento has a lot of category options and more detailed content–e.g. multiple wish lists, private sales restrictions, and unlimited product attributes. Furthermore, you can add and manage new modules, create backup systems and databases, use comprehensive technology documentation, and roll back changes. In fact, you can massively scale all these functions as you add more production servers.
If all these sound like an overkill for your online business, you could be right. Magento has too much functions for a standard online store. In terms of functionality (the software features’ practical use), Shopify and Wix are more cost-effective.
5. Mobile
Both Shopify and Wix offer mobile optimization without the need to learn mobile coding.
Wix automatically optimizes your storefront for any mobile device. It’s a great time-saver and ensures that web and mobile stores are using the same data. The catch is, the site is mobile optimized only at the front-end.
On the other hand, Shopify offers a separate mobile app (iOS). You need to import it from your Shopify store to sync data. It sounds like an extra step compared to Wix, however, the native app gives you backend capabilities. For example, Shopify Mobile lets you look up products by scanning barcodes using a phone camera. It also lets you remotely access your admin dashboard and check daily revenue, track trends, or monitor inventory. You can also look up customer data or search for specific orders.
As for Magento, you can use its Mobile SDKs for iOS and Android to manage a complete resource library, an API to connect the app to Magento, and customizable features. The software has a deeper mobile integration structure, but, again, you need a developer to fully utilize the feature.
6. Payment
All three solutions accept payments from major credit cards via third-party payment gateways. Note that Magento and PayPal are both owned by eBay, so integration between the two are expected to be seamless. However, Magento also relies on other third-party payment processing.
Shopify also lets you accept payment from nearly 100 third-party payment processors around the world including PayPal, SagePay, and Stripe. It also charges a low fixed transaction fee for all major credit cards, which helps protect your margins. On the contrary, Wix only connects you to either Authorize.net or PayPal to accept all credit card payments.
Note that you can always accept payments manually by creating instructions on how to accept cheques, mailed orders, or bank transfers.
7. Shipping
All three shopping cart solutions allow for manually setting shipping and tax rules for each product based on locations, so rates are automatically calculated wherever the order is placed.
For automatic tax calculations, you can install tax calculator plugins for Magento, one each for different countries or regions. Note that some of these plugins are priced separately. On the other hand, if you’re selling only in the US, you’ll like Shopify’s automatic tax calculator for US-based zipcodes. There are no automatic tax calculators for Wix.
Shopify also allows you to outsource fulfillment. It integrates with three main shipping fulfillment services, Fulfillment by Amazon, Shipwire, and Rakuten Super Logistics. Since fulfillment outsourcing isn’t yet covered by Wix, here’s an option if you’re already running a Wix site: integrate it with a Shopify store, then hook it to a fulfillment service.
8. Product attributes
You can create an unlimited number of product attributes in Magento since you can tinker with the open source code. But without a technical background, you’re better off with the other two applications.
Shopify allows three product attributes, color, size, and material, while Wix only lets you display two attributes, size and color. You can, however, create a drop-down menu for more attributes in Wix–you need to delete either size or color because only two attributes are allowed for display–but they’re hidden until a customer clicks on the menu.
9. Integration
Magento is technically a strong player here because of its SDK and open source platform, which you can tinker to integrate almost any business solution. With plugins and extensions, however, Shopify can challenge Magento’s claim to have the largest e-commerce application marketplace. From inventory, accounting, shipping, payment processors, subscriptions, email marketing apps, social media plugins, help desk, product feeds, reporting, and analytics, both Magento and Shopify offer a wide array of third-party plugins. On the other hand, Wix extensions are mainly for its web building platform.
There’s one thing that you should also consider when it comes to integration–owing to its dominance of the shopping cart market, Shopify is often integrated to by other apps, from accounting to CRM and sales automation to web builders. A case in point: Wix allows Shopify integration, not the other way around. This benefit alone is critical to ensure that your future business solution purchases will work with your shopping cart.
Our Final Verdict
Shopify emerges as a clear choice for small and medium businesses and even large enterprises with standard shopping cart needs. Wix, on the other hand, is a great web builder first before being a top shopping cart solution. It’s ok if your website is more focused on content and brand building with an e-commerce incidental (ex., a portfolio site with a merchandise section). On the other hand, Magento is powerful and robust but requires a technical background to maximize its potential. All in all, most companies will benefit most from choosing Shopify as their shopping cart solution. If you’re not convinced yet, you can always try the service out and get Shopify free trial.
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