Pros and cons comparison for e-commerce

Webflow CMS + Shopify

  • Features - When combined together everything you need for your e-commerce store, blog and website.

  • Flexibility. The power and options of Shopify, combined with the ease of visually building custom stores in Webflow CMS.

    Themes.

    Plugins in Shopify. Custom code in Webflow.

    Widely used. 228,000 stores worldwide (as of Feb 2017) according to trends.builtwith.com/shop, 10% of the e-commerce store market.

    Straight-forward. Shopify is easy to use up to the point where you need a custom store, which is where Webflow excels.

    Integration - easy to integrate Shopify product data with a Webflow CMS site and integrate with Ebay and other services you may need.

    Much easier learning curve. Products built by each company for a specific purpose, to make it easy to build/maintain web sites and e-commerce sites.

  • Security - Webflow built with Amazon AWS and follow best practices. Shopify focus on security, spending over £300K in security exploit bounties.

    Performance - Running store, store apps and front-end website on separate infrastructure usually helps improve performance and reliability. Use API's wherever possible to reduce chances of crashing store when individual components fail.

    Fast. Webflow's design is pure HTML, CSS and Javascript backed by an AWS hosted NO-SQL database for CMS, so content served fast with no extra overhead.

    Low maintenance. Everything just works.

    Reliability - status monitoring provided out of the box.
    http://status.webflow.com/
    https://status.shopify.com/

    Hosting - fully managed by Webflow and Shopify. Webflow does not have releases, or patches to install, only new features to use.

    Costs known up-front. You pay to ensure that problems are solved up-front and continue to be solved for you.

    Customer support - Direct responsive help from both Webflow and Shopify. Also extensive FAQ's, blogs and training videos provideed by both Webflow and Shopify.

    Lock-in. Hard to export your product data if you want to move to a different CMS platform, but both Webflow and Shopify provide developer API's for getting your product data in-out.

    Developer API's - both Webflow and Shopify provide developer API's for getting your product data in-out.

    PCI DSS compliance is easier when every component is fully managed, secure and infrastructure is not shared between stores or other websites.

Magento Community Edition

  • Features - Everything you can think of for an E-Commerce store.

  • Flexibility.

    Themes.

    Plugins and custom code.

    Widely used. 226,000 stores worldwide (as of Feb 2017) according to trends.builtwith.com/shop, 8% of the e-commerce store market, excluding Enterprise Edition which is a different version.

    Complex - Suitable for Developers or Advanced computer users with extensive knowledge of how to run servers with SQL databases. Fully managed server options get over some of this hurdle, but additional tech knowledge will likely be required at some point.

    Steep learning curve, even for a developer. Lots of Open Source technologies combined together.

    Security - Large number of stores hacked. MAJOR security vulnerabilies (exploits) each year. New releases don't contain security fixes, so leaves your store open to attack during the weeks it takes for security patches to be released. Plugin vulnerabilities hard for average users to assess risk even if they have good reviews. Not the same product as the Enterprise edition.

    Performance - requires heavy duty hardware to run well.

    Slow - serving new web pages can take up to several seconds. Overly relies on caching of pages as a band-aid.

  • High maintenance. Requires you update to the latest releases, install every patch and configure complex options to avoid leaving your store open to attack. BUT updating can break your store, as new versions may not be compatible with old software components. Catch 22.

    Reliability - status monitoring options from many companies. Too much choice. May be provided by hosting provider.

    Hosting - choice of where to host left to the user, adds to risks.

    Costs - Low initial cost with Community Edition, but lots of hidden costs you won't come across until later, like scaling your store, plugins, optimising it, keeping it secure. Likely to require a developer or Magento expert at some point, which are VERY expensive.

    Customer support - depends on hosting solution but usually only technical support or community support aimed at developers or technical users. Basically help yourself and learn tech or pay a high $$$ or £££ to a developer.

    Lock-in. Hard to export your data if you want to move to a different CMS platform. Magento formatted CSV files for import/export, as well as Developer API's. May generate errors when importing your own data via CSV from Magento.

    Developer API's.

    PCI DSS compliance harder to maintain when another store or wordpress website could be run on the same infrastructure as your store, when not using dedicated servers. Individual plugins or components being PCI level 1 compliant does not absolve the merchant of responsibility.