Should I use Magento or WooCommerce?

Magento 2
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Hi guys! Craig, I already asked you a bit on your video, I was called Rich Burmond. so here’s some more background info.

Now I have to make a choice between wordpress/woocommerce and magento. Myself, I work at the biggest affiliatemarketing network in the Netherlands so I see a lot of well performing webshops come by. I rarely ever see a good webshop running wordpress. It is usually Magento, Lightspeed or their own cms. Lightspeed is like 600 euro’s a year lol. For that money you can run Magento with very nice paid plugins. Wordpress would be even cheaper. But the fact that everything is magento and lightspeed, is that because wordpress SEO or traffic is bad? Like is there something wrong?!

I do not have any coding background, I did a marketing study. So to take that into consideration. I do however am handy with computers and also normal programs like after effects, premiere pro, photoshop and just fixing general problems in my pc. But no coding. I’m going to create a website where I sell gallery art and metal printed prints. So it is going to be a webshop with not thousands of products but perhaps a total of 2-300 designs in the long run, not sure if I will make them one size or possible to order in multiple sizes. At the beginning I will do around 10 designs. I also want to sell b2b but how I want to let that take form I’m not sure yet.

Now I have to choose either magento or wordpress. For magento I will follow your guide Craig, but it looked quite a lot harder than woocommerce. Also I heard wordpress is lighter to run and will have better loading time and speeds than magento?! is that true? I’m going to do webhosting at TransIP and starting with the starter package. My domains are already registered. Also I heard WP rocket was a very good plugin for speed but for Flatsome, the best woocommerce theme it caused picture loading issues. So wp rocket is kinda off the table. Also wordpress has yoast SEO which I heard decent stuff about?

What im also wondering is lets say i DO use magento. What will I as a small business notice that is nicer and better than wordpress? Or like featurewise? I did register a .nl domain but also the .com domain btw, i was thinking about doing .nl for national and then for like DE and BE do .com/Be and .com/De.

Remember I have no coding experience, but I heard on wordpress plugins dont slow the site down as long as they are quality plugins. So that makes it easy for me to add functionalities right?

I have some more questions but lets start with this. REALLY hard choice, I always want to have the optimal option when I do my research.

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Hi @Rijsberman and welcome!

As I mentioned to you recently, the choice between eCommerce Solutions is individual to the requirements of the person. Almost the same as debating:

  • Audi vs BMW
  • Android vs Apple
  • Red vs Blue

The best we can really do is weigh up the Pros and Cons to help people make an informed decisions - Rather than a gut feeling.

The “natural” progressions seems to go along the lines of something like Shopify > WooCommerce > Magento. With each “upgrade” being prompted by the business hitting a glass ceiling. But with the ability to do more customisation comes the headache of feeling overwhelmed. And obviously the more you can do with something, the more likely you are to break it.

I’m glad you mentioned about Magento Plugins (AKA Extensions/Modules). It’s a common misconception that you can build a Magento 2 store for nothing. But in order to make any real enhancements, you’ll either need to spend money on existing solutions or customisations.

In reference to SEO, you can make any platform work well for you with some tender-loving-care. The majority of your positive SEO comes from your actual content.

So, I don’t have any qualifications for coding. I wouldn’t call myself a developer, but I know enough to get me by. Hiring Magento 2 developers will be expensive and painful. Checkout this post (Where to find a Magento 2 developer?).

If you’re going to be learning on the job, you need to prepare yourself for a lot of headaches and frustrations. You won’t find an answer to every problem you come across on Google. You will have to work stuff out yourself. This is because everyone’s Magento setup is completely unique, due to the infinite customisations you make. I’ve been working with Magento since 2013 and I still get stuck on a problem for days/weeks.

Magento 2 vs WooCommerce loading speeds depend on how well optimised your Web Server Optimisation and Magento Custom Code is. There won’t be a clear winner here.

Remember to take into consideration that Magento 2 is “fit-for-purpose”. It’s an eCommerce platform design with one thing in mind… Sell stuff. WooCommerce bolts onto Wordpress, which tries to do everything but doesn’t really master in any. - It’s like having 2 options to chop down a tree. Do you use a Wood Saw or a Swiss Army Knife?

I’m not sure about the domain names. Personally, I’d be tempted to use one domain for SEO purposes. Then segregate your languages with a suffix. e.g. domain.com/de, domain.com/be, domain.com/en.

You mention that a good Wordpress plugin won’t slow down the site… Same applies to Magento so that argument can’t be taken into consideration.

On a final note… I’ve stressed a few times that learning Magento from scratch is hard. There are no shortcuts. If you don’t have the time to put in and learn new skills then take that into consideration. I had to learn a lot of new skills to do several tasks. And obviously, whilst you’re learning new skills you’re not actually doing the task at hand. Thankfully, I’m very persistent and not easily deterred when knocked down. So, those personality traits have helped. It’s like the idea of building a house from scratch sounds cool to me, but where the heck would I start? I’d need to learn carpentry, building, tiling, painting, etc…

For an Enterprise level business the solution to these problems are simple. Hire a decent team of Developers or an Agency. The resources they will spend is Money. For a Small Startup the only “free” resource you have is Time.

I hope some of this reply helps. It would be good to get the thoughts of others here too.

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Thanks for the welcome :smile: I really appreciate the time you take for the replies. I thought even more about the whole woocommerce vs magento thing and decided I will go with magento. For my starting store I probably won’t need too many plugins. Maybe something for SEO, but thats about it. I was also thinking about a visual builder. What is your advice on this? I wanted to buy the one from Landofcoder, but now I found out adobe released a fully functional one themselves in update 2.3.1 (it’s called page builder). https://magento.com/blog/magento-news/magento-2.3-new-tools-fuel-your-growth-2019 Do you know anything about it? Looked reaaally good from what I saw, but there are no videos on youtube. Nothing. This means I can save like 200 euro’s instantly. Also, Ultimo is grid, Porto is bootstrap. Will this both be fine for a pagebuilder? I dont really know exactly the difference.

I’m still not really getting it , but it has to do with the processing of scaling right? Now comes the next point. Should I go for Ultimo or Porto? Ultimo is grid and it seems a better theme, BUT I like the variety in demo’s of porto waaay more. There is so much more choice to start with. Anything you can tell me about this? So I like ultimo more based on what I read/what you used in the video, but porto on the design. But also you used Ultimo in the videos, but I recall I saw somewhere that you said you liked Porto more right?? Should I just go for Porto then? People also think Porto is more bloated in general.

Also I spoke to a Dutch friend who works at semi big online marketing agency, he also said .com/nl. But in this case of a product which will be hard to sell and I need the consumers trust I should start with .nl and build the links properly. So I can someday migrate to .com/nl etc if the time ever comes.

About the time. I work fulltime, but in the evenings and weekends I work on my personal stuff. I have had it in the past that I had to learn new skills like adobe after effects (which is really hard when doing advanced 3d motion tracking/ 3dsmax integrated stuff). I think I can do it. Also a friend who runs a succesful magento webshop where he sells fireplaces, he can help me with some basics. IF my store actually starts making some sales I can some time in the feature. Also don’t have a big rush with going live, i’m looking for a few offline sales first. Then after I launch the site when it is perfect, designwise. Also going to work with hotjar and stuff if sales are actually coming in.

For the design / renders of my product page (with that I mean a page like walltones com/pages/walltones I couldn’t post 2 links because I am a new user so i had to chop the dot com off) I had the BEST IDEA. I went on freelancer.com and comparable sites and searched for indian/chinese designers. They work for like 5-15 dollars per hour depending on the quality of them. Even for 5 dollars per hour there are some guys who do amazing 3d work/ rendering/ animation. Will be a really nice and cheap way to outsource certain information pages. Like about the quality of the paper and plexiglass etc of the art.

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I’ve never needed to use a Page Builder, so I can’t offer any advice or expertise on this subject. The Page Builder that you refer to in 2.3.1 is currently an exclusive feature of the Magento Commerce Edition. This is the “Enterprise” version of Magento Open Source (which I believe we’re all using here). That’s probably why you can’t find any additional information about it, because the people purchasing the Commerce Edition license aren’t the kind of people who do YouTube videos on it.

I own both Ultimo and Porto. I reckon they’re completely on-par with each other. The only real difference to pick one over the other is how it looks. I personally prefer the look of Porto.

Just be a little wary with outsourcing work, especially with more complicated projects. I had a small rant about that in this post (Where to find a Magento 2 developer?) :slight_smile:

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If you want, feel free to keep a Diary of your journey on here. I tend to find these things help keep you in check by noting your success and failures. Also, good for motivation as well because it makes you a bit more accountable for the milestones that you set yourself.

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I think I am going to use the page builder of landofcoder (https://landofcoder.com/magento-2-page-builder.html) looks really good, nice reviews and people say the code is clean. Would be way easier for a starter like me then immediately doing it all with code. (I want to learn, but a visual builders helps me imagine it better too.

So sad it is only for the enterprise edition:( I understood that we would get it too. But probably way later then.

And @digitalstartup I did a lot of research so I want to make a big post asking you about some stuff. Can you upgrade my permissions so I can link as many links I want? Then I can write the next post. Got a lot of questions about extensions and SEO and stuff.

I watched A LOT of your youtube stuff, the two 40 minute sessions (which were freaking amazing by the way, very high quality) and also I read about + saw the video about the outsourcing work rant (the ‘WTF have you been #3’ video I believe) The outsourcing on my part is purely product design jobs/ some renders so that will be fine!

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Also I willl make a diary of my progression there! I see nobody did that yet so might be fun for you to see aswell. Most information on magento I currently have, I got from you.

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Hmm I read and researched even more, but also the lack of information on some matters on the internet made me to change my mind. I am going to go for wordpress/woocommerce. Reason why, I am for this webshop selling high quality art prints which will only have 2 different sizes per design. I will only have 100-200 product MAX. I will start off with like 15-20. I think for what I need, wordpress is better. I do have big plans for some other stuff but that will come later. First I need to decide how to fill this one in

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No problem. Good luck :+1:

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I read the majority of the thread, but not every word.

I’ve been in ecommerce for nearly 20 years and my suggestion would be to look at either a SaaS solution or go with a managed Magento Solution such as Nexcess. I think they are probably the best at this point. none are perfect, but i’ve used nexcess a lot over the years and they are very good. I’ve been with them for 8 years.

One of the things you should do is find out what kind of requirements you need for your store. By requirements, I mean look at how you want to present things on the front end. Makes lists to help you. Then how do you want to process orders or do you have special requirements for the backend. If your out of the box SaaS works well with a theme that you like then that will get you going very quickly and will last a long time. You can’t necessarily look at cost if you’re setting up a serious business. Sure, you don’t want to pay $500 USD for hosting a month when you can easily do something for $50 a month. Once you’re down in that lower range, please don’t count the dollars. You will shoot yourself in the foot by saving a couple bucks. Security is huge too. Going with a SaaS will help hugely with that as all functionality and security is on them, so you don’t have that responsibility.

That is just my opinion with someone that has no coding or site development abilities yet. You will if you stay in the ecommerce game though. It is inevitable. One thing to point out though, when/if you decide to move out of the SaaS, it will kind of be a pain to make a proper transfer to Magento. If you REALLY think this is going to be a long term business (be honest w/yourself) then I would shoot for Nexcess with M2.