Overview

Shopify

Stacks12.5K

Followers6.7K

Votes76

commercetools

Stacks38

Followers68

Votes0

Shopify vs commercetools: What are the differences?

Introduction

Shopify and commercetools are two popular e-commerce platforms that provide various features and functionalities for businesses to create, manage, and grow their online stores. While both platforms offer similar core functionalities, there are some key differences between them that can influence a business's choice of platform.

Customization and flexibility: Shopify provides a highly customizable and user-friendly platform that allows businesses to easily design and customize their online stores. It offers a wide range of pre-designed themes and templates, with the ability to customize layouts, fonts, and colors. On the other hand, commercetools offers a more flexible and headless e-commerce solution that allows businesses to have complete control over the front-end design and build a unique shopping experience. It enables businesses to create customized front-end applications using their preferred programming languages and frameworks.
Scalability and Performance: Shopify is a fully-hosted platform, which means it takes care of hosting, security, and performance optimizations. It allows businesses to scale their online stores without worrying about the technical aspects. commercetools, on the other hand, offers a more scalable and high-performance solution. It provides a microservices architecture that allows businesses to decouple different parts of their e-commerce application, enabling them to scale individual components as needed and achieve higher performance for complex and high-traffic scenarios.
API-first and Headless Commerce: commercetools follows an API-first approach, which means it provides a complete set of RESTful APIs that businesses can use to build customized e-commerce experiences across multiple channels and touchpoints. It allows businesses to decouple their front-end presentation layer from the back-end e-commerce logic, enabling them to deliver consistent experiences across various devices and platforms. Shopify, on the other hand, offers a more traditional monolithic architecture where the front-end and back-end are tightly coupled, limiting flexibility in terms of building custom front-end experiences.
Pricing and Cost: Shopify offers a range of pricing plans to suit businesses of different sizes and needs. It provides a straightforward pricing structure with monthly subscription fees, transaction fees for third-party payment gateways, and additional charges for add-ons and advanced features. On the other hand, commercetools offers a more flexible pricing model based on the specific requirements of businesses. It provides custom pricing plans based on factors such as the number of products, API usage, and specific features required.
Built-in Features and Extensions: Shopify comes with a wide range of built-in features and extensions that allow businesses to quickly set up and run their online stores. It offers features like inventory management, order management, marketing tools, and integrations with popular payment gateways and shipping providers. commercetools, being a more flexible and headless solution, does not come with as many built-in features. However, it allows businesses to integrate with third-party services and add-ons to enhance their e-commerce capabilities.
Community and Support: Shopify has a large and active community of users, developers, and experts that provide support, resources, and guidance to businesses using the platform. It offers a knowledge base, forums, and a dedicated support team to assist users with their queries and issues. commercetools also provides support to its customers through various channels, including documentation, API reference guides, and a support team. However, its community and ecosystem might not be as extensive as Shopify's, which could limit the availability of resources and expertise.

In summary, Shopify provides a user-friendly, fully-hosted, and customizable e-commerce platform, while commercetools offers a more flexible, scalable, and API-driven solution, enabling businesses to build unique shopping experiences. The choice between the two platforms depends on specific requirements, technical expertise, and desired level of customization and scalability.

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Advice on Shopify, commercetools

David

CEO at SwiftERM

Jun 18, 2020

Review

We devised SwiftERM to generate additional income from existing consumers on ecommerce websites. Available for those using Shopify, Magento, Woocommerce or Opencart, it runs in alongside (not instead of) existing email marketing software like Mailchimp, Drupal or Emarsys. It is 100% automatic so needs zero additional staff. It uses predictive analytics to identify imminent consumer purchases. The average additional turnover achieved is 10.5%. It is the only software in the world authorised to send Trustpilot to send product ratings in outbound emails. Developers and ecommerce retailers are invited to try to it for free, to establish viability this predictive analytics system is. SwiftERM is a certified Microsoft Partner MPN ID 6197468.

128k views128k

Comments

BrandLume

President at BrandLume

Jun 8, 2020

Decided

we've had alot of shopify clients and do alot of those website builds, but we decided a little while back to transfer any client possible to woocommerce, for our e-com web development, as there is alot more functionality available with zoo-commerce. you can have a look at our examples and even our own website in the link provided.

84.3k views84.3k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Shopify	commercetools
Shopify powers tens of thousands of online retailers including General Electric, Amnesty International, CrossFit, Tesla Motors, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Foo Fighters, GitHub, and more. Our platform allows users to easily and quickly create their own online store without all the technical work involved in developing their own website, or the huge expense of having someone else build it. Shopify lets merchants manage all aspects of their shops: uploading products, changing the design, accepting credit card orders, and viewing their incoming orders and completed transactions.	Our headless commerce platform separates frontend and backend functionality. So commercetools enables businesses to create seamless shopping experiences across all digital touchpoints. Our flexible API lets you engage with your customers via webshops, mobile apps, voice assistants, AR/VR applications, social networks, and others.
Choose from 100+ professional themes;Customize the look of your online store;Start accepting orders in minutes;A fully-featured website CMS;Detailed customer profiles;A complete blogging platform;Extend the functionality of your storefront;Customer accounts;Create customer groups;Over 70 payment gateways;Painless customer checkout;Free SSL certificate;Multiple languages, taxes and currencies;Automatic carrier shipping rates;Certified PCI compliant;Fixed-price or weight-based shipping rates;Unlimited bandwidth;Blazing fast servers;99.94% uptime;Hassle-free set up;Level 1 PCI compliant;Your own domain name;Search engine optimization;Discount code & coupon engine;Social network integration;Targeted email marketing;Free advertising credits;Advanced store statistics;Beautiful, responsive mobile themes;Manage your store on-the-go	Manage all your retail channels using a fast and intuitive business user interface; Highly scalable cloud platform with a flexible commerce API at its core; Supports a modern microservice-based architecture and offers a wide range of integrations
Statistics
Stacks 12.5K	Stacks 38
Followers 6.7K	Followers 68
Votes 76	Votes 0
Pros & Cons
Pros 23 Affordable yet comprehensive 14 Great API & integration options 11 Business-friendly 10 Intuitive interface 9 Quick Cons 1 User is stuck with building a site from a template	No community feedback yet
Integrations
Zendesk Campaign Monitor PayPal Mouseflow GoSquared Mailchimp Chargify Hipmob Squarespace Mad Mimi	QuickBooks Google Analytics Drupal Twilio SendGrid Stripe Symfony HubSpot

What are some alternatives to Shopify, commercetools?

PrestaShop

PrestaShop is written in PHP, is highly customizable, supports all the major payment services, is translated in many languages and localized for many countries, and is fully responsive (both front- and back-office).

Magento

Magento Community Edition is perfect if you’re a developer who wants to build your own solution with flexible eCommerce technology. You can modify the core code and add a wide variety of features and functionality.

Spree

The Spree storefront offers a full feature set and is built on common standards, so you don't have to compromise speed to market, efficiency or innovation. The modular platform allows you to easily configure, supplement or replace any functionality you need, so that you can build the exact storefront that you want.

Saleor

Saleor is a rapidly-growing open source e-commerce platform that has served high-volume companies from branches like publishing and apparel since 2012. Based on Python and Django, the latest major update introduces a modular front end powered by a GraphQL API and written with React and TypeScript.

nopCommerce

It is the open-source eCommerce solution. It has everything you need to get started in selling physical and digital goods over the internet.

Shopware

Shopware 6 is an open headless commerce platform powered by Symfony 5.4 and Vue.js 2.6. Check out our GitHub Repository https://github.com/shopware/platform

WooCommerce

WooCommerce is the most popular WordPress eCommerce plugin. And it's available for free. Packed full of features, perfectly integrated into your self-hosted WordPress website.

Wombat

Automate your store in no time: Wombat is an ecommerce integration platform that quickly connects your storefront with all your favorite 3rd party services. Comprehensive enough for large ecommerce stores and easy enough for small merchants

Pimcore

It is a software vendor for free and open-source customer experience management, digital asset management, product information management, multi-channel publishing and e-commerce software.

Reaction Commerce

It is an API-first, modular commerce stack made for ambitious brands and retailers. It’s service-based architecture is built to deliver flexibility and freedom at scale.