In the last few weeks, I have been asked this question numerous times, “Which is better, Magento 2 Vs Magento 1 Vs Woo Commerce”, so I thought of sharing my thoughts with you all. As a marketer who has worked on different platforms and conducted extensive research on various shopping cart solutions for e-commerce businesses all over the world, I would like to throw some light as an entrepreneur and software designer.
I am involved in building only one type of website – business or corporate websites which can be scaled across multi locations. Here are a few pointers on why Magento 1 or Magento 2 will never become a true ‘e-commerce platform’. They may work out when built from scratch but not if we need to integrate with everything out there in the world.
Magento 2 Vs Magento 1 Vs Woo Commerce Scenario:-
Now, we are all aware of what happened earlier this year when eBay and Magento 2 parted ways. While it’s not entirely clear as to what happened behind the scene, however, it has been speculated that eBay was unhappy about the fact that they were moving away from traditional e-commerce platform towards this ‘do everything’ platform. They wanted a classic business/e-commerce website which could do marketing, product data management and other things and work perfectly fine under existing merchant interface without any customization changes required for each individual client order or template change. Many merchants use certain characteristics of their products (image hover effects) as a marketing tool on their website. It is crucial that the product data be SEO friendly and accurate so that customers can make informed decisions while purchasing products online. While Magento 2 may sound like an excellent e-commerce platform, it has some serious flaws in terms of functionality which I will explain gradually but before that let me look at the other two solutions – Woo Commerce Vs Magento 1.
As per official stats, Woo Commerce powers over 24% of all e-commerce websites (more than all of Magento & Shopify combined) with WordPress powering more than 20% websites worldwide. Before you say that these are small marketplaces and hence not relevant to us, let me tell you one thing – as businesses grow they start depending on a website to do most of the marketing and many more things. Remember these stats are for all e-commerce websites, some companies will have both Woo Commerce powered websites as well as Magento 1, Magento 2 or Shopify websites powering their online shopping.
Woo Commerce is free to download and you can try before you buy, exclusive extensions are available which can be added at any time. It supports popular payment gateways including PayPal and PayU money along with easy installation and customizations via WordPress dashboard without touching a single line of code. Speed has never been an issue while I was researching on this platform. You get one product page template and if required it can be customized via back end but nothing fancy here (this may not make a difference for a new business but if it’s a corporate website then you may need something much different).