As a newbie in the eCommerce space, you must have established your direct-to-consumer (D2C) digital storefront on free or open-source eCommerce platforms. But that’s then.
With growth, your need for scale, improving customer convenience, adding do-it-yourself (DIY) services, expanding, and personalizing across channels grows along.
Even if you have started just now, this could be the case in just a year or two. So, it is better to start considering eCommerce platforms that you can migrate to gear up for the foreseeable future.
For many, Magento Commerce and Shopify Plus could be in the contenders’ list. If you need a clear idea of which one to choose among these, you’ve landed in the right spot.
The goal of this eBook is to help you evaluate both platforms. Begin your journey of upgrading to a more robust platform that enables continuous growth.
Compare Magento Commerce and Shopify Plus based on:
- Cost
- Transaction Fees
- Time to Market
- Scalability
- Global Expansion
- Security
- Hosting
- Marketing
Preview the first 3 chapters of the book
DTC 1.0: A Cautionary Tale
Over the past 10 years, DTC brands such as Everlane, Allbirds, Casper, Dollar Share Club, Parker Warby and Away, were bright spots in the retail apocalypse. While major retail chains floundered, these brands dazzled consumers, investors, and industry pundits alike with their radical approach to storytelling, customer centricity, and bespoke products.
The IAB opined that these young entrepreneurs are changing the retail landscape.
And the IAB is not wrong. To say these brands broke the retail mold is an understatement. Long-established brands like Unilever and P&G never even conceived offering subscriptions to purchase premium shaving products or toilet paper. Yet, that was just par for the course for many of these brands.
They leveraged their one-to-one relationship with their customers to get product feedback, develop their product roadmap, and optimize the customer journey. Their growing pools of first-party data meant they could market to their customers as they went about their digital lives without running afoul of GDPR or CCPA.
The DTC 2.0 Playbook: Positioned for Growth
What does the next evolution of DTC brands look like? They’re focused on growth, and they see growth as a multi-faceted endeavor: more customers, more products, more channels, more markets to sell in and even introducing more brands. If you’re a DTC brand and have every intention of thriving in the coming years, you will need to:
#1: Plan Multiple Customer Journeys Upfront
Modern DTC brands will need to sell to multiple consumer personas in multiple arenas. To succeed, you’ll need to plan and execute a number of end-to-end customer journeys, from awareness and consideration, to purchase and post-purchase experiences.
This journey will encompass your customer and employee experiences, internal business processes, and technologies.
#2: Think B2B
The most successful DTC brands expanded beyond the initial model of selling directly to consumers and have formed relationships with wholesalers, distributors, and other retailers. Brands like Allbirds still sell directly to consumers, but they also sell via Amazon and Nordstrom’s. B2B relationships offer significant growth potential, allowing you to benefit from the sales and marketing initiatives of your partners.
Magento Commerce vs. Shopify Plus
Both Magento and Shopify offer fully-featured eCommerce platforms and have substantial footprints in the marketplace. Shopify has traditionally focused on the lower end of the market, with prebuilt functionality and templates that allow retailers to get up and running quickly. Its code is proprietary, meaning you can’t easily customize it.
The company launched Shopify Plus in 2014 to attract higher-end retailers. There are about 427,000 sites that use Shopify, including 5,000 that run on Shopify Plus.
Magento Commerce, on the other hand, was always designed for the mid to large scale retailers (Gartner has named it a ‘Leader’ in its category). Magento is an open-source platform, which means any developer can download its code and create extensions and add-ons. More than 250,000 eCommerce sites use Magento, and it adds new businesses to its rolls every quarter.
Check out our eBook
If you are a manufacturing brand looking to build your eCommerce presence Magento Commerce and Shopify must be in the list of platforms you are looking to evaluate. If you want to go for a head to head comparison, our eBook is the right resource to check out.
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