Magento and Shopify, what's to discuss?

This question seems to be thrown around a lot, and I wanted to weigh in with BigHat's view on this. Although, before getting into this, while I'm trying to make it as unbiased as possible, I'm trying to show why Magento holds the crown for many businesses, so apologies if it construes otherwise.

There's no denying it, both platforms have immense benefits to their users. They both have their pros and cons, which I'm not going to get into... Google is your friend, there's about 100 of them! :) I'm going to lay bare, the fundamental difference between the two, there's only one.

*Drum roll* - Being able to customise the backend architecture, pure and simple, in all its glory.

Shopify is a proprietary platform, just like Windows, Mac and that copy of Photoshop, you can't get into the underlying running architecture, the thing that makes all the magic happen. Magento noticed a gap in the market back in the mid-2000s, in particular, the open source (think Linux and the like!) side of it, and this is where has sat Magento and comfortably filled over the last decade or so.

So why Magento?

Let's weigh an example in, one of our clients Shuttershack, had an extremely bespoke requirement. They wanted to be able to sell exterior shutters, where customers enter the measurements of the required sized shutters and would subsequently be fed to the backend order system. The frontend also needed to create the Shutters, and display in real-time to the customer, what they would receive.

I thought this was a great example to use, in that, if under any circumstance in your businesses lifetime, where you think you might need something where you have a highly personalised product, and the customer needs to add a lot of information. And importantly, pass this user entered data along to your warehousing system, production system to (oomph) a SOAP API, and unfortunately, many, many SOAP API's exist, typically attached to production systems. Magento is the way to go, this is a part of Shopify that you won't have access to, 'under the hood' so to speak.

Here's another example, our client ArtRepublic, were spending 1 to 2 weeks a month, inserting products into Magento manually. This was being duplicated from their warehouse management system. All taking up a lot of time and resources, needlessly. BigHat developed a new feature, which made use of their WMS API, and instead of them duplicating it and entering by hand we simply accessed the data via Magento, and then automatically created the products in Magento. Totally eliminating this 1 to 2 weeks which was being spent. Again, this is another example of something that couldn't be achieved with Shopify, as artrepublic's current WMS system is new to the market. If they were with Shopify, they would have had to move their WMS too, skyrocketing the associated costs.

Why can't Shopify help me?

The problem is, many merchants will move to Shopify, continue growing over the years, and then hit a plateau because they need to pivot with their industry. This pivot requires a custom feature on your website.

They've got this awesome new supplier in, but specific custom order data can't be sent to their WMS system. It's using some archaic 1990esqe spreadsheet, that needs specific character returns (Yep still in 2019!).

Again, not in Shopify.

And I think fundamentally this is where the great bonuses of Magento lie, it allows you do anything, if it can't do something out of the box, that's where we can come in as Magento Agency with all the benefits that entails, you could get a freelancer or even hire someone.

All those things that gobble up your staffs time, filling in a spreadsheet from an export, all can be automated by Magento and if you hire the right person, someone who can get that done for you in as little time as possible so you can see a return on investment within months.