| |

Fixing 502 Error on Magento Cloud

Fixing 502 Error on Magento Cloud

502 Bad Gateway error might be an error that could happen especially, in a particular Integration (Development) environment. This error could be very hard to analyze if after checking the Magento Cloud configuration and Internet speed, the Engineering team is still not able to determine the root cause of this error.  

This article is intended to briefly summarize the possible root cause of error 502 and the recommended solutions to mitigate it. 

Most of the time, and in some particular Magento Cloud Integration/Development  environments, error 502 is caused by the following reasons.

  1. Overloaded database.
  2. Too many cron jobs running simultaneously.

Overloaded database

Integration and other environments than Production and Staging, are supposed to be used for developing and/or testing, so a database trim might (products deletion mostly) might be necessary in order to have only a representative sample for developing/testing.

Too many cron jobs running simultaneously

Cron jobs might reduce memory performance in an environment that is not fully optimized to be used for production. So the best idea here would be to run them in  groups in order to avoid missed or pending jobs.

A database check would be necessary in advance for getting a clearer idea on the current cron jobs status. For example:

MariaDB [main]> select status, count(*) from cron_schedule group by status;

+———+———-+

| status  | count(*) |

+———+———-+

| error   |      535 |

| missed  |     5392 |

| pending |      574 |

| running |        1 |

| success |      852 |

+———+———-+

MariaDB [main]> select job_code, status, count(*) from cron_schedule where date(created_at) = CURDATE() and status = ‘missed’ group by job_code, status;

+———————————————–+——–+———-+

| job_code                                      | status | count(*) |

+———————————————–+——–+———-+

| catalog_event_status_checker                  | missed |      107 |

| catalog_product_frontend_actions_flush        | missed |        6 |

| catalog_product_outdated_price_values_cleanup | missed |        5 |

| consumers_runner                              | missed |       75 |

…

| indexer_reindex_all_invalid                   | missed |      130 |

| indexer_update_all_views                      | missed |      138 |

+———————————————–+——–+———-+

As seen in these examples, many cron jobs are not being executed, so splitting the cron jobs and running them in groups can be done by updating in .magento.app.yaml. This is to avoid serial execution and to further reduce memory consumption. An splitting example would be as follows:

First identify the current groups that can be utilized in the system:

[email protected]:~$ find . -name cron_groups.xml

./vendor/amasty/base/etc/cron_groups.xml

…

./vendor/magento/module-message-queue/etc/cron_groups.xml

./vendor/magento/module-staging/etc/cron_groups.xml

./vendor/mailchimp/mc-magento2/etc/cron_groups.xml

Based on the output above, the cron jobs can easily splitted into groups:

# Default Magento 2 cron jobs

default:

        spec: “*/10 * * * *”

        cmd: “php bin/magento cron:run –group=default”

    …

consumers:

        spec: “*/19 * * * *”

        cmd: “php bin/magento cron:run –group=consumers”

    staging:

        spec: “*/21 * * * *”

        cmd: “php bin/magento cron:run –group=staging”

The above suggestion is only for some particular Integration/Development environments.  How granulated the jobs group should be splitted is up to every scenario and environment.

In this particular example, after grouping the cron jobs, pushing the changes and clearing out the cron job tables, the changes will be reflected in the database.

MariaDB [main]> select status, count(*) from cron_schedule group by status;

BeforeAfter
+———+———-+| status  | count(*) |+———+———-+| error   |      535 || missed  |     5392 || pending |      574 || running |        1 || success |      852 |+———+———-+
+———+———-+| status  | count(*) |+———+———-+| error   |        0 || missed  |        0 || pending |        0 || running |       12 || success |      24 |+———+———-+

Note: The database info is accumulative over the time.

And finally, it is worth mentioning that this configuration is defined at the file app/etc/env.php, and each environment can have its own env.php with its own configuration.

| |

Website UX in 2021 Cause Visitors To Leave Your Website

As the growth of internet and technology, most websites today are using all types of popups to display deals, track performance, provide latest news, or make sure users understand the services that your website are providing etc. However, the more popups you use, the more likely it would bring a negative effect to  your users, causing them to leave your website, and decrease conversion rate.

Here’s an example of the most common popup display types you’d see in most websites in 2021. Is your website using any of these popups as well?

Astral Web specializes in website designs that are user experience friendly. Contact Astral Web today to help optimize your website user experience, improve session durations, and increase conversion rate!

| |

Magento Open Source vs Commerce & How to Choose

Transcription:

Hey, everybody. This is Ori from Astral Web and in today’s video, I’m going to introduce to you the difference between Magento Open Source and Magento Commerce versions. I’m going to introduce all the information you need to know and try to help you and point you to the direction of choosing which one you should choose for your business. Now, in addition to the information we’re providing, I really want everybody to ask questions, comment on the YouTube videos, and I’ll try to help you guys with specific cases because this video is fairly general.

It’s going to give you a lot of information, but your specific case will help you decide which one you need to choose, and if you share more in the comments, I’ll be happy to direct you into this case. So a few things before we start. So number one, Astral Web, our company, is we’re Magento partners, so I just need to disclose that. And second thing is we’ve done tens of projects with Magento and Magento Commerce and we understand very well which ones you should fit for which one.

Not all cases need to use Magento Commerce, not all cases need to use Magento Open Source. So this is an informational video to try to help guide you and share information, share knowledge. Okay? So what I’m going to do is we prepared a slide that we’ve been using for a while and I want to share a little bit of some things. And in addition, we have two versions, we have a backend of Magento Open Source and a backend of Magento Commerce so you can see some differences.

I want to show you some visuals in addition to just talking. Okay? So let’s jump in right now. Okay, great. So first thing we have here is there’s actually three versions in Magento for the actual commerce part. Okay? There’s the Open Source, there’s the Commerce, and the same Commerce also has a Cloud.

So let’s explain what the difference is first. Okay. So Open Source, first of all, all of the Magento versions, the code itself, the software itself is all open source, which means you have full access to all of the code itself and you can use them in different ways. Okay?

So first of all, the version which they call Open Source, and again, they’re all open source, just the name of it is called Open Source, it’s free, there’s no annual fee. You don’t need to pay anything to Magento. You get some base functionality, which is very, very good in Magento, and that’s it. You have to develop by yourself. You use the code itself, which has basic functionality. You have to set up and pay for your own infrastructure, which is the hosting, for example, AWS, or Linode, or any other company.

And the license that you can use is open source, OSL-3.0. This is kind of the, let’s call it business license, right? It’s the license which shows what you’re allowed to do with the software itself. Okay? The second version is the Commerce version. Commerce version, you’re paying Magento or Adobe, you’re paying them an annual fee based on your GMV, based on your annual sales.

You make an agreement with them, either sign a one, two, three, or more years forward, you tell them how much you’re going to sell, and then they charge a fee for that based on how much you sell. So a company that’s a smaller company may be selling a million or 2 million a year, you’ll have a lower fee. Someone that’s…a company selling 20, 50, you know, million, they’re going to pay a higher fee. Okay?

And that’s in negotiation with them. So what you need to do is contact Adobe and get some quote. They’ll ask you to answer some questions and go from there. If you’re not sure, you can also contact us, we can help bridge that but again, you can, you know, do anyway. Now, with Commerce, you pay an additional fee but you also get more things than the Open Source. Mainly what you get are a few things.

Number one, you get additional functionality, which we’re going to go over in the slide. You get a lot of more functionality than the Open Source version. You can do a lot more. A lot of them are related to marketing features. What can you do with your customer? How can you interact? How can you engage them?

And more functionality and tools that help you do more. There’s some really, really cool tools about it and we’re going to jump into it. And then in addition to the functionality, you also get support from Magento. So if there’s core bugs, if you have some questions, how to do certain things, you have support. You have an account manager and you have a ticketing system which you can open tickets. With Open Source, you’re fully responsible yourself to do these things.

Okay? And then the hosting itself, the servers hosting, you have to do it yourself. The last thing is the business license is…the business license is a little different from the OSL. There’s actual business license which allows you, protects you and allows you to use it based on the agreement in the payments you make.

Okay? And then the third version is Commerce Cloud. It’s the same exact software as Commerce but the only difference is instead of you taking care of the infrastructure, the servers, AWS, Linode, whatever it might be, Magento has a neat system, a very closed system that works very easily to deploy code to manage the infrastructure. Right now, they actually do use AWS but they take care of that.

You have a nice web interface and command line interface for your developers to easily deploy things. And in addition to the software itself, excuse me, the servers themself, you also have some additional things like a CDN use Fastly, which uses like a Varnish type. So it makes your website very fast. You have monitoring like New Relic which monitors the servers.

And obviously, they issue your SSL certificates and all these things related to the serving of the data, the infrastructure. It’s really, really nice, it works very well, and easy to deploy itself. Okay? So now we have three versions we’ve covered. They’re really just two versions, which is Open Source and Commerce, and then there’s a Commerce without servers and a Commerce with servers, which they call Commerce Cloud. Okay?

So let’s jump into the actual differences between. Okay. So first of all, Open Source and Commerce versions, Commerce and Open Source, everything looks the same. The core code, the core functionality is all the same. If you go here to sales, right, in the Open Source version, you have sales, and orders, and shipments, and refunds, right? And if you go here, so everything is basically the same.

In the backend, Commerce just has more functionality, more things you can do. Okay? So this is the difference. It’s not a different version really, it’s the same core but they’re doing things slightly more enhanced or, in some cases, a lot more enhanced. Okay. So what do you have here? So in regular in both versions, in Open Source and Commerce, you can process orders, manage your catalog, manage your customers, do some marketing things like promotions, SEO-related things, reviews, manage your pages, your content, view basic reports, set up your store, set up your system, for example, your user permissions.

All of these stuff are really the same on both. Now, what do you have here? Let’s talk about the things that you basically have in Commerce. So first of all, what I’m going to do is I’m going to link, in this video, all of our tutorials to both. We have a ton of tutorials for both Open Source and for Commerce. I’m going to link both of those.

We have some playlists for both and if you really want to go deep into each functionality one by one, we’ve basically made everything. Okay? And including the Commerce one. So if you want to go, this video is a general one to help understand everything. Okay. So what do you have that’s special to Magento Commerce? Okay?

So what is special about Magento Commerce? First of all, abandoned cart. If a customer goes to add something to their shopping cart, you can send a reminder email to them and say, “Oh, sorry, you’ve abandoned yesterday your cart.” You know, “Here’s a reminder or here’s a coupon,” or things like that. Everything I’m saying here in Commerce versions in the next two pages are only for Commerce. Okay?

So abandoned cart or everything we’re talking about is core code because this is open source. You could obviously expand Open Source, but in Commerce, it just comes ready to go. So what do you have? Abandoned cart. So what you can do, you can go here to Marketing in the Commerce version, you can set up email reminders and you can set up some kind of rule in saying, “Okay, I’m going to add a rule and say, ‘now, I want to remind my customers who have added to cart but not purchased after one day, one hour, etc.'” You can set up multiple follow-ups.

And email reminders also has…you can send reminders to people who have added to their wishlist. So email reminder is actually abandoned cart plus wishlist. So for example, you can send an email once a month to customers that have added products to their wishlist but never purchased them, right? Just to remind them, “Hey, I know you like these, why don’t you purchase it?” Okay?

Second thing, admin actions log. What that means is when…anyone that logs into the backend, they’re called an admin, administrator, okay, even if they have full permissions or just partial permissions. Anything they do, for example, save a product, add something, edit, change the status of an order, a promotion, you can actually log that in the system. So you actually have a section you can log and see what they did, what the admin did.

So, for example, if someone deletes something by mistake, you know which person actually did that. You can monitor step by step what they did. Okay? Action log is right here. Okay? And this is a nice thing to know, especially you can keep track who’s logging in, who’s doing things. Are they viewing?

Are they editing? Are they logging in? Did they change any passwords, anything like that? Okay? Next one, B2B. This is a whole different topic for a video, but B2B, if you need…if your store is selling to businesses, business to business, not to consumers, because Magento is originally made for consumers, B2C, you’re a business, you’re selling to a customer buying your product.

But if you’re selling to other businesses, for example, you need different business flows, you need to give credit instead of the, you know, maybe you’re selling something very high value and you have credit with your company, you can give them a net 30, net 60, you can work with them differently. You’re selling to the business, not to the customer. Businesses can have multiple roles, they can have a lot of different things.

So this is really, if you need…if you’re selling B2B, for sure, you would choose only Magento Commerce, right? But we’ll talk about what to choose when a little later. BI and custom reports. The reports in Magento, Magento Open Source, they’re very basic. Okay?

You don’t want to make too many business decisions on it. They’re just basic reports, very simple things like orders and products, they’re just simple tables. Okay? Let me log in. One second. Okay, let me refresh this. And so what the reports are for both of them, they’re very simple.

I can see orders. For example, I can see here, I’m going to select just some example. Okay? And then I can see reports, simple tables, I can export them. Both versions have the same, but Magento Commerce has BI Pro or it depends on which package you have. But what they do is there’s another system, which you can see here, right here, and you’re going to have some additional reports that basically have an external system that you can click and you can actually view more enhanced reports.

And most importantly, you can build your reports. And so it’ll use something kind of like SQL commands and then you can actually build anything. With any data you have in Magento, you can build them. Super valuable. You can make low stock reports, custom reports for your boss, automation, you can do a lot of things.

This is a really nice feature that you can pay for or that comes included in your Commerce version. Okay, next one. So next one is the CMS Hierarchy. So CMS are basically content pages. When you go here, you go to build basically a page. When you go to Categories, let me explain what that actually means, Hierarchy. When you manage your products, your categories in Magento Open Source or Commerce, you have categories and categories can be categories, subcategories, sub-sub-categories, like a level here, kind of like a tree, right?

This level, and then this is a second level and third, so you have levels. Now, content pages in Magento Open Source, are just pages by themself. They have no relation to each other. They’re just one page, two page, they have no relation. You can link them in a nice way on the frontend where the customer sees but they have no relation. In Magento Commerce, you can build relationships.

You can build a relat-…for example, FAQ might have the main FAQs and the categories of the FAQs which are considered subpages, and then the actual FAQs themselves. So you can have multiple levels on many different things. You can build nice breadcrumbs and you can have relationships between pages. That’s what Hierarchy means.

Okay. Let’s go here, so Hierarchy. Okay, next. Let’s go here. Content staging, this is a really nice feature. So what you would do is when you save something, for example, I want to save a product page, now, for example, my, excuse me, like a content page, maybe I have a page called promotions or something like that or content or a product, now, let’s say I want to set live at midnight tomorrow, some kind of special promotion.

In Magento Open Source, I’d literally have to go at midnight, at 11:59, edit that in the middle of the night, and then click on something and save it. Now, with Commerce, what you can do is you can schedule changes. So you can set up the changes forward, I say. You can say, for example, “Okay, tomorrow at 11:59, I want to set live this change and then I automatically cancel that change a week later.”

And you can set up all these changes right here. You can set up schedules and you can see that it’s really, really nice to do that. Okay, next. Credit. You can allow your customers to purchase with credit, not just with money, with your credit card, they can actually purchase with credit. So they can earn credit and, for example, when you create a refund, instead of giving them real money back, you can put credit in their account and they can use that for future purchases.

Okay. Next one, customer segments. This is probably my favorite feature as a marketer for Magento Commerce. What is customer segments? So in Magento, you actually have customers and every customer belongs to a group. Every customer can belong to one group. For example, I’m not logged in, I’m logged in maybe on a VIP group, or maybe I’m a wholesaler group, or something like that.

Okay? One second. So, what can you do with segments? This is a marketing feature. You can go ahead and go to segments and you can create certain types of customers. For example, you can segment all the men, all the women, all the men that live in a certain area, all the women that have purchased more than three times that are loyal customers, and you can create all of these rules.

What these do, so let me share an example. Okay, so male, let me just share an example. So I can now create the conditions and I can group them into certain things, for example, their birthday is a certain day or their address is a certain day or their browsing history or their purchase history has done a certain thing.

And then once you do that, you create these segments, customers can belong to multiple segments, and you can report on that differently. You can create special promotions based on certain characteristics. And the coolest thing is you can actually show different content, what we call dynamic content, to customers. So imagine a customer goes to the homepage of your website and it’s a customer…first of all, there’s one customer that has never ever been to your website before.

So you can show them a certain banner and say, “Oh, new customers, welcome. We’re going to give you 10% off.” And then another customer comes but they’re already an existing customer, maybe they’re a VIP or whatever, they’ve purchased before, you can show them a complete different banner and section of the website even though it’s the same exact page.

You can create personalized user experiences based on the customer segment and you can do a lot of things. You can have special promotions that only apply to customers and a lot of different things. I love this feature. You can be super creative but your marketing team needs to spend some time. I love this feature. It’s really good. Okay, next one.

Enhanced Ecommerce. So when you sync data to Google Analytics, you obviously want to use Google Analytics to understand your visitors better, right? So customer segments is understanding them better, right? But sending the data to Google Analytics including tracking of your orders is really important. Now, Open Source only allows you to track ecommerce, just the sale, the sale and the product, that’s it, the amount of product.

This is what we call in Google Analytics, Ecommerce Tracking. Now, in Commerce version, you have Enhanced Ecommerce Tracking. What that does, it provides additional data in the backend, right? You can have funnels, you can see how many viewed with…how many visited with product views, add to cart, checkout.

You can understand where the funnel drops and understand your customers better and also understand much more data. And so this is included in Commerce. You have both GTM, Google Tag Manager integration and it automates it with Google Enhanced Ecommerce so you don’t need to add additional coding to really understand your customers even better. Okay, so next one.

Next one is gift cards. You can offer different types of gift cards to your customers. It’s pretty straightforward. Okay. A multiple wishlist. So Magento Open Source has…your customers can add their products to a wishlist but only one. Here, customers can make their own wishlists.

They can have multiple wishlists. This is my birthday wishlist, this is my wedding wishlist, this is my, etc. Page Builder, this is my second favorite feature for Magento Commerce. It’s really cool. So, content, so when I go to a page, it doesn’t matter if I’m editing a product description, or a page description, or a banner, or anything, so any section that I go here, when I create something, let’s say I want to edit, visually, I want to edit.

So in Magento, when you create a description of a product, or a page, or something, you either have to use the very basic WYSIWYG. So let me show you what that means. So basically, it’s a simple editor that kind of looks like Word. You can bold things and add a picture and just change the layout, very, very simple ways. The second way you can do, for example, is you obviously need a developer to make code and make it the way, the beautiful way you want.

So this is Open Source version and if I want to edit the privacy policy page, I can just go here, use the editor, and I can just do very basic thing like indents, bullet points, you know, align left, align right. I can’t really make it really nice or I can make some basic things. But with Commerce, what you can do is you can go ahead and use the Page Builder and you can create simple things like this, right?

So you can go here and you can drag everything here. For example, I want to add a new row here and I want to add a column. Let me add another column. Let me space it out this way, right? So I have, you know, different versions right here. This looks a little better. And now, I can add some heading here, I can add some text, I can add some pictures, videos, sliders, a Google Map, and you can just easily add stuff right here.

It’s super simple. So, you know, buy now, you know, today only promotion. And you can make it really, really nice and just easily drag and drop. I love this feature. It’s really, really good. Most of our clients, most of the project use it. They really like it.

You can do scheduling, obviously, like we talked before, and just create things, simple, like, something like this, it’s so simple. You can create it very easily. Okay. Next one is private sales, okay? So you can basically create restricted times and areas on the website that are only private to certain customers. So, for example, if you have a certain customer group, you can send them an invite, send them to a section that no one else can see on the website.

Maybe there’s a certain category that’s not visible. Next one is product recommendation engine. This is also a really cool thing. Adobe from last year, from 2020, they started adding Adobe Sensei, which is their AI, to help provide product recommendations. So if you have a widget, for example, recommended products or you may also like or the widget, the products on your homepage, you can run it through Adobe’s AI and they will do product recommendations.

Instead of you choosing what to show to the customer, you can select sections, which ones to use the AI to better promote products and provide better product suggestions to your customers to increase your order, you know, value cart, your orders, etc. Next one is reward points. So based on customer actions, for example, if you register, we’re going to give you some points, they can spend those points on the checkout.

So is it their birthday? Is it a, excuse me, birthday is not included. Have they registered, have they purchased, have they reviewed, and have they invited others? Birthdays we’ve done, but we had to customize the code for that, so my apology. Next one is RMA, super important. In Open Source, when a customer purchases, there’s no way for them to contact the business to make a return, right?

Return management, RMA. So what they have to do is fill out a contact form, and then all of the communication in Magento Open Source for returns or replacements has to go off the website. Here, there’s a module that both the customer and the business can manage, communication chats, which products to return, which products, you know, shipping labels, all these things. RMA, probably my third favorite and most popular feature of Magento Commerce.

Next one is scaling for large websites. If you have a business that has very high traffic, Magento Commerce has split the databases into three instead of one for Open Source and you can do a lot higher traffic. You can do things much better.

So this is for high scale, really, really important for big businesses. And the last one is Virtual Merchandiser, which means you can also drag and drop how your products look and display on the category pages. Okay? This is an easy way to just prioritize them. You could do that via numbers, just click, click, but here, you can also do it via just drag and drop. Okay.

These are the main features. Other than that, obviously, we talked about you get support, which is really important, you get a different business license and things like that but these are most of the features. So, my favorite features from these are the customer segments, as I talked about, the RMA, the Product Recommendation engine, and for sure, the Page Builder. I love the Page Builder, our clients love the Page Builder.

I think that’s probably the favorite feature of most of our clients that use Commerce, the Page Builder. So what else do we have here? So everything, you know, obviously, I’m just going to recap here before I jump into the next part. So the versions are the same, Magento Commerce just has a lot more stuff. Okay?

That’s really simple. They look the same, they act the same. There’s a few other features that I didn’t cover, and one important thing I want to cover here is when you create access roles, when you actually allow new admins to log into the backend, Magento Commerce has a feature that you can segment, for example, I want them to only see, for example, let’s say orders, okay? Now, because Magento is built very well for multi country and multi projects, multi websites within one admin, the Magento Commerce version also has a way for you to segment, for example, only seeing the sales or the orders but you can also segment them by website, store, store view, which means this country can be seen only by this admin and the other country can be seen by the other admin.

So you have a lot…you have a few other features that are included but I’ve covered the big ones. Okay. So, now we’re going to talk about how do I choose, what’s going on? What do I choose, where do I start from, what is going on? So first of all, comment in the YouTube channel and we’ll be able to answer specific questions. This is the best way to know because I can give you the general, the one that fits 70% or 80% of your answers, but if you give me your exact business model, I can provide more detail.

Great. So let’s talk about when I would choose Magento Commerce. So first of all, number one is… number one is, let’s go right here. If I am a very marketing-oriented business, I want to choose Magento Commerce. Why is that?

If I’m focused just on my product and I don’t have a big marketing team, I don’t want to actually do marketing things, then Open Source might be a better fit. If I really want marketing features, I want the customer segments, I want to know more about my customers, more about in Google Analytics, I want to do content staging, which is I want to schedule new pieces of content, new event pages, promotions on time, I want to have, you know, do my abandoned carts and reminders, all of that stuff, you see, a lot of features are marketing, so abandoned cart is marketing, the Hierarchy is partial marketing, content stage is marketing, sales and marketing is credit, I want to have credit, and points, and customer segments, and understand them in Google Analytics, I need to use Magento Commerce.

If you really are good at marketing and you know how to use these tools, you will get the value and much, much more in the product by paying Magento for Commerce and using these. We’ve seen a lot of businesses that buy Magento Commerce, they don’t even have the marketing team and the staff to do that and they don’t even use all the features. It’s kind of wasteful, honestly, and that some of these features are really, really good, especially, I love the customer segments, which I’ve talked about multiple times.

So this is really important, right? Well, multiple wishlists, gift cards, marketing and sales, right? Private sales, all of these things, Page Builder. Okay? So these things, Page Builder is a… let’s talk about that, a separate one, right? RMA, so all of these things are really…there’s a lot of marketing things.

So if you have a good marketing team, they know what they’re doing, you need to give them the tools to make money for you guys, okay, to bring awareness, brand, etc. Okay, so that’s number one. Number two reason where for sure you’d need to use Magento Commerce is the B2B. It’s really hard to change the order flow in Magento Open Source. So if you need B2B, your business is selling to businesses, for sure, it’s a no brainer, because there are so many functionalities that are very specific to Magento Commerce B2B.

Okay? That’s the second thing. The third thing, which again, this is the most popular for us, is the Page Builder. A lot of our businesses, our clients, when they came from…they used to have a different platform on a different site and they came to us to upgrade to Magento, they always ask their developers to create new pages for them.

And aside from time and money, it was just not convenient. They wanted to do something, they had to wait. They had to say, “Oh, you know…” so marketers, sometimes talking to engineers, to developers is a little bit difficult because it’s hard. They kind of think in different ways. So if you have a Page Builder, you can just make it yourself. You don’t have to wait, you have much less cost, and then you can, you know, make templates and things like that.

So this is a really important feature. I’d say this is the most popular one, and the second most popular one is RMA, right? So a lot of our businesses don’t understand why Magento Open Source doesn’t have a return management. I mean, it’s a ecommerce system, you accept orders but you can’t return, you can’t manage your return, so it’s a little weird.

So Magento Commerce has it. Okay? And then the other reason, which is very important, if you have a really big website, I mean, you have, you know, high volume orders, then you definitely need Commerce for scaling of large websites. There’s very few that really need this but when you do, we have a few clients in particular, it’s really good. So scaling for large website is for very, very big ones.

If you’re not sure, you know, comment in the YouTube channel and we’ll be able to explain kind of more details about that. Okay? So those are the main, main features. Those are the ones that, for me, pretty much no brainer, if you have B2B functionality, you have a good marketing team, you got to go with Magento Commerce. Then, now there’s companies that are, you know, not, then you need to kind of decide.

So another reason why you might decide is you don’t want to take care of…either you don’t want to take care of the server infrastructure or it’s too costly for you or something like that, then you can just, excuse me, use Magento Cloud and then they take care of the infrastructure and their system is pretty easy.

Obviously, you don’t have the cost of paying for the infrastructure. I mean, obviously you pay for it in the license but the maintenance, managing it, you don’t really pay for it. And so if you hire a company and you use Magento Open Source or Commerce, you’re going to have to pay them an annual fee to maintain your site and maintain your servers.

This is already included in one and it’s pretty good, honestly. Other than that, Open Source, why would you use Open Source? Number one is maybe you’re a small starting company, you don’t have a budget for a license fee. Okay? That’s number one. Maybe, you know, you want to use Open Source because you don’t have budget, number one. Number two, maybe you’re trying it out, you’re not sure about the functionality, maybe you don’t have, you know, a marketing team that knows what to do, you just want to start out simply.

These are the reasons why you do want to use Open Source, right, mostly because of cost and time, etc. Other than that, Open source does have enough core functionality to run a business, right? And you can always buy extensions use, you know, from AheadWorks or Amasty. So you could actually get some of the functionality from Commerce and you can add it to Open Source.

Now, some of them are, you know, good quality, some are not. It really depends on it, you have to do your research or have your developers build something. So there’s some downsides of doing it, but obviously, cost is a big factor. And we also have a lot of clients that use Open Source. Open Source is pretty good, honestly. So it really depends on what you’re trying to do.

And then obviously, if you want to integrate, you want to connect, like if you have a new website, you want to build it, if you use Commerce and you have more features that are built in out-of-the-box, then obviously, your time to market, the time it takes you to develop your new site is going to be shorter in Commerce versus Open Source. But again, Open Source, you need to do your calculation.

Can I use Open Source and maybe build or buy some extensions that, you know, get closer to Commerce? That’s for your decision. In general, the out-of-the-box Commerce is always going to be better than Open Source plus some extensions because of future security updates, quality of code, and upgrading, and time, etc. but Open Source fits a lot of projects as well.

So that’s pretty much it for today. These are the main, main things. If you have specific questions, obviously follow the…we have two… I’m going to attach two playlists. One is for all of the features in…all the detailed features, so it’s just going to be hours of videos of everything that Magento Open Source can do and everything that Magento Commerce can do. And most importantly, third time we’re going to mention, tell us in the comments, what specifics you’ve, you know, what you’re looking for, what your business is about and I’ll help recommend honestly, truthfully, if you should use Open Source or Commerce.

That’s it. I appreciate you guys’ time. We’ll be making more videos in the future about comparisons between platforms, features, ecommerce, Magento, Shopify, Google Analytics, etc., etc., anything web growing, we’ll be making. Please subscribe, ask questions, we’re here to help everybody. Thank you, guys.

Appreciate it.

| |

Full Magento vs Shopify Comparison

Transcription:

Hey everybody, this is Ori from Astral Web. In today’s video, I’m going to showcase to you the difference between Magento and Shopify and help you choose better which platform is better fitting for you by sharing knowledge based on my experience. So our agency, Astral Web, we’ve been…we’re agency. We build websites. We build e-commerce websites, both with Magento and Shopify for years.

Magento, about seven years, Shopify about four years right now. And we range…our clients range from many different types of project from very small businesses to medium, to large companies, to multinational brands, enterprise, etc. And we really understand how to do that. So what I wanted to do today is just share with you the knowledge that we have and try to get you closer.

Now, what I’m trying to do is to share with you kind of the out-of-the-box or the more general. But every business has different requirements. So comment in the YouTube channel and specify the specifics that you need and I’ll help guide you even closer to that, okay? Happy to discuss with you guys to share this knowledge, okay? So now we begin. So I have two tables that I wanted to share that I tried to explain things.

Okay. So we’re going to go over some basic information first, and then give you requirements and recommendations along the way. So first of all, Magento, what’s the difference between Magento and Shopify? So first of all, Magento is an open-source platform, which means when you use Magento, you have full control over everything that the platform can do. And you can customize anything.

This is a very specific thing. With Shopify, it’s a closed system, which means they take care of the hosting, the code itself, and you can only customize some things. You can customize a lot of things but there’s certain things that are restricted that you cannot do, for example, URL structures of your product pages or collection pages, you can’t change that.

And there are certain restrictions about API restrictions or other things. So very simple put, if you really want to customize, you have heavy customization, then Magento typically is the way to go. If you have more simple site and you want to…you don’t want to handle all of the kind of, you know, the full customization, Shopify is a better solution. But again, these are very broad things.

Okay. So let’s talk about some quick stats. So Magento and Shopify are founded, started pretty similar times. Personally, we’ve been working with Shopify a lot later. We’ve been working with Magento a lot earlier. And Shopify over the last two or three years has really gotten better and better. And Magento is mostly in the last two to three years is focusing more and more on larger and enterprise projects.

There’s more Shopify sites than Magento. These are stats from their websites. Shopify has about a million merchants and Magento has about 250,000. From real data, they’re probably a lot lower, but the numbers are still by ratio bigger. This 1 million for Shopify is probably, you know, overall but the stores have closed and changed.

As far as app stores and marketplace, these are extensions that add on top of the out-of-the-box functionality. Shopify has a little bit more than Magento has. The ranges, Magento has typically…Magento and Shopify have kind of a lot of the same partners that make extensions like payments and promotion extensions, and shipping extensions, things like that.

Magento has some of the bigger ones like Salesforce integration, you know, CRMs, and things like that. And Shopify has a lot of functionality, marketing tools, things like that. But there’s a lot of overlap. There’s a lot more development happening and communities happening on Magento and a little bit less on Shopify. And Shopify focuses mostly on small business, SMB.

Most of the sites out of the 1 million sites are small business, really small drop shipping, one-person shows. Shopify is getting better at getting bigger and bigger clients and they have with Shopify Plus and really good in growing sites. But usually, their majority of…if you take a pie, majority of the sites are small sites.

And in Magento, the majority of the sites are about mid-market. Maybe they’re small to mid and then there’s quite a few enterprise. So it’s kind of different markets going for there. Magento uses all open source all… it basically uses PHP and MySQL. And then Shopify uses Shopify’s Liquid. So they have some different things. Obviously, HTML, CSS applies, JavaScript applies to all because it’s how you build the front end.

But the languages are a little bit different, okay? Industries. There’s a lot of overlap. But for Shopify, for example, there’s a lot of beauty, cosmetics, fashion, things like that. And in Magento, there’s a lot of manufacturers, retail. There’s a few things and one of the things that’s really big about Magento is you have B2B. So, most e-commerce sites are typically B2C, selling direct to consumer, right?

Customer goes, they buy, etc. Magento has grown to do a lot more B2B. They have in their Magento Commerce version of B2B add-on. It’s a really strong one. Shopify Plus also has an add-on for B2B, but the Magento one is really strong. And we’ve been seeing over the last few years…sorry, over the last two years, a lot more B2B projects and they really do good high, you know, high volume, high SKU, a lot of products, And the B2B is becoming more and more.

So that’s one of the focuses for Magento. Notable brands. There’s really big brands in Magento that we’ve noticed aside from us doing a lot of big brands. There’s companies like Nike, Ford, Olympus, etc. Aldo. And Shopify has also some brands, but they’re usually more bigger brands that are more simple sites like Tesla, things like that, okay?

So next one is plans. So Magento has multiple versions. They have the open-source version, which is a free, non-licensed version. There’s no cost for it. The code comes as is. And then they have paid versions, the enterprise versions called Magento Commerce, which is open source and commerce.

You have to host it yourself. Magento Commerce Cloud, the cloud… the hosting is part of the package from Magento using AWS. And then there’s also some add-ons for Order Management system. These are a separate platform that just…if you have multi-channels you have a lot of different systems, you can have one system that just manage only the orders. And then, Business Intelligence are really just reports and kind of advanced reports.

Shopify has Shopify platforms, Shopify Plans, and also Shopify Plus, and Shopify POS. So what does that mean? If you’re a basic seller, small business, in most cases or medium, you’re going to use Shopify and they have different packages that cost a certain monthly fee.

All of these are hosted by Shopify. Here all of these are hosted by you, by you as a company. So Shopify Plans, basically based on the number of SKUs and the functionality. You have basic and Shopify in advance. And that will decide how you pay a monthly fee and what features you get, and what your transaction fees are, things like that.

So what we’ll do is we’ll link in the comments. But basically, you can see here Shopify Plans, okay? And then you’ll be able to see this is the monthly fee, monthly fee, monthly fee and includes everything in one. And then, there’s Shopify Lite, which is basically barely making website. It’s more about you can just accept credit card, just a simple like Buy Now button, things like that.

And Shopify Plus is for high-volume merchants, starting about $2,000 a month, includes more functionality, more features. We’ll jump into it a little bit later. Okay. So, the simple difference, just to recap this is, Magento, you’re fully open source. You’re customizing yourself. There’s a free version, and then there’s paid versions that are annual fees based on your GMV, based on your sales.

And then, Shopify is very straightforward. This is your monthly fee. It includes hosting, includes all the functionality. So for these ones, open-source, these are the free ones. And then, Shopify, these are the basic functionality. So here we’re talking about for large businesses. The Magento Commerce, which is the enterprise version, and Commerce Cloud, and then the Shopify Plus.

So we’re comparing the enterprise features which cost extra money. So what else do you have out-of-the-box for the enterprise for the Magento Commerce version? You have Abandon Cart functionality. You can log your Admin Actions, whatever people are doing in the back end, for example, this is the backend of Shopify. This is the backend of Magento. You can basically log every action.

For Magento, someone saved the product, someone deleted something, someone made a promotion, you can see all of that. B2B functionality. That’s a big one. It’s, right, it’s selling to businesses, Custom Reports, and BI. This is a huge one. I’m going to jump a few things, Content Staging. You can schedule content to be set live at certain times.

Customer Segments, marketing features, Enhanced Ecommerce for Google Analytics, Page Builder, which is a huge one. It helps you build, create pages by yourself without a developer. Private Sales, Product Recommendation Engine. So real engine using Adobe’s Sensei, one of their basically AI or machine learning.

And RMA which is return management. And there’s just a lot of things and scaling for larger websites. In Magento… In Shopify Plus you have some different things. You have a more simplified B2B channel. You have obviously dedicated support. Also here you have dedicated support.

And you have some additional apps and extensions like Shopify Scripts and Shopify Flow, and etc., and Staging Sites. So these are kind of the functionalities, which we’ve covered. We already have some videos about Shopify, Shopify Plus, Magento, Magento Commerce, okay? Let’s talk about the advantages and disadvantages for both platforms. So what are the advantages for Magento?

Magento is really built for ecommerce only, right? And so, this is…this is a good thing. It’s an advantage over some of the other platforms like WordPress and other. It’s fully open-source, which means you can customize anything you want. Magento is really good for websites and businesses that have multi-store, multi websites. So if you’re a retailer or you’re a company that’s selling with one platform, selling in multiple countries with multiple languages, Magento is a no-brainer.

It’s just the best solution out there. Flexibility, scalability, you can do anything you want. There’s a lot of editions. You have a free edition and then, you have the paid enterprise editions that have more functionality. You can support a huge amount of SKUs. We have projects with hundreds of thousands of SKUs of products and Magento works well.

B2B eCommerce is a big one. It has really good strong core functionality. The features out-of-the-box are much better than Shopify’s feature out-of-the-box. There’s a lot of third-party integrations. There’s a big community. If you have a problem, you Google it, you’ll see a lot of communication in the forums, Stack Overflow, talks. Obviously, we make a lot of videos, things like that.

And there’s a big security focus or a lot of security updates regularly. Adobe is pushing it. And it’s just a really good platform. I really like Magento. I like Shopify as well but we’ve been really…most of our businesses doing Magento because we feel it’s the superior product for the type of businesses that we do. So we have more mid-market and enterprise clients, so that’s why we like Magento more.

But for small businesses, I like Shopify as well. So let’s talk about Shopify’s advantages. It’s also an e-commerce first platform. It’s really good at security. Why? Because Shopify, it’s a closed system. And just like Apple etc., they control certain things that you can do, and you can’t do.

And if they let you customize less things, it has better security. The more you close, the less holes or less potential there is. The other advantage is Shopify sites are much cheaper to make. They’re much simpler. You can launch quicker, quicker time to market. They cost less. You have to, you know, you have to manage less things.

If Shopify takes care of the servers, and then here, you have to take care of the servers in Magento, you’re paying less money. You have less headaches for that stuff. You pay Shopify to do that for you. And the other good thing about Shopify is you have a lot of apps. And you can add functionality by clicking, not asking the developer. In Magento, you have to ask a developer to either create something or install something for you on the server.

With Shopify just like Apple, you just click it works. It’s a really good thing for Shopify, okay? So the simple recap of this is a few things, if you really want to customize, you have a lot of customization requirements, all kinds of special integrations, APIs, you want to do special things, Magento is the go-to thing. If you want a simple just click, install an app, you want to take care of less…spend less money on your own IT, your own MIS, own server people, you want to go with Shopify.

So these are kind of some of the things. You want to launch quicker, you want to spend less money, Shopify. You want to build a beast, you want to build a bigger thing, multi-country, growing, flexible, scalable, you want to use Magento. What are the disadvantages and they’re basically the opposites of this. Magento takes longer, more money to build. Magento is slower to launch, right? It takes longer because it’s built.

Because you’re building more custom things. Magento requires you to do your hosting. Magento requires you to update your security regularly. More of the security is on you versus Shopify, less is of the security is on you. Shopify’s disadvantages. You can’t… There are certain things you can’t customize.

You have to do all these workarounds, make apps and all that stuff. There’s system limitations. There’s like, for example, you can only have a hundred variant products by default, like a hundred, like, for example, you’re selling a shirt and you have a size and color. You can only have a hundred of those. In Magento, there’s no limit. Now, there are workarounds for that, but just the date, the native platform has certain restrictions which you need to be aware of.

Another disadvantage, I think this is an advantage and a disadvantage. But there’s a lot of apps in Shopify that you just click and it works. But the disadvantage is because Shopify’s functionality is limited out-of-the-box and Magento has more things, when you need to expand, you need to extend your functionality, you need to install a lot of third-party apps.

But these apps are done by different providers. You’re going to find one company that does like marketing apps, and one company that does product customization, and one that does email marketing. So you’re starting to add so many different companies’ apps and they don’t necessarily work together well with them and they don’t…not every company is supporting the apps in the best way.

So if they’re down, for example, maybe you’re using a third-party company to do, for example, upsells, I don’t know. And then, their server is down, you are down, right? Your functionality is not working. With Magento, everything is…all the extensions, everything is done on your side. So you’re responsible for the code.

You can buy those or you can make it yourself, but you’re responsible. So if you’re up, you’re up. Now, if the third party is up, you have to start monitoring, like which one is up, sometimes you have support. We’ve seen a lot of issues with consistency and quality of different third-party apps. So you have to select carefully and you have to hope that they’re really supporting, and they’re making money, so they keep your apps running.

Well, this is the reason why we’ve actually started building our own Shopify apps because we’ve noticed that there’s a lot of missing link between the quality and consistency of app maker. So this is a kind of advantage, but also a disadvantage for Shopify. What about the cost structure? So with Magento, you’re paying based on your GMV, depending on how much you’re selling in the year, you’re paying for that.

With Shopify, it’s very straightforward. You’re paying a certain monthly fee and that’s it. Okay. So out-of-the-box, what type of products can you sell in Magento, okay? You can sell a lot of…a lot more things you can do a Shopify. You can sell simple products just, you know, click here, buy it. Configurable products like the t-shirt.

The customer can choose the size and the color, and then they can buy it. Virtual products, a product that’s…is not physical. You’re not shipping it. It doesn’t have a weight. It doesn’t have a shipment. It has digital. So for example, subscribe to this say, you know, pay some money and receive some access to a back end that you can access like a free, like a newspaper, digital newspaper, something like that.

Downloadable, a buy this, and download something like maybe sell an mp3 or something like that. Bundles, build a computer, right? You can select from which CPU you want, which GPU, which etc. and then you can buy it. Grouped, showcase a lot of products, customer can select what they want. Gift card, this is for Magento Commerce.

Buy a gift card and then reuse it later, send it to someone, for example. Magento’s products, one of the really good things about Magento is, the products are fully customized. We have attribute and attribute sets. What that means is, if you’re selling different products, like a t-shirt would have color and size. But a computer would have GPU, CPU, motherboard, ram, etc., so you can set up all the configurations to manage your products in very specific ways.

In general, aside from products, Magento has fully customization on so many things. The way you charge taxes is so custom. You can make…you can fit all the different business types for all across the world. The way you customize your products, the way you customize your customers, those are all fully customizable.

With Shopify, this is what you get and that’s it. What else do you have? You have multi inventory options. In Shopify, you also have that. You have Auto Associations. You can connect upsell, cross-sells related products. You can connect those manually and you can also automatically decide some kind of rule in Magento and then, you can actually recommend other products.

And obviously, in the commerce version, Magento has product recommendation engine, which is a huge thing that more and more platforms will use in the future. Okay. With Shopify, you have very small things. You have simple products, just buy it. Variants are similar to configurable products, which is the t-shirt, select this blue color and buy it.

Virtual and gift cards, okay? There’s no customization on product attributes. You have to use apps to do that, but the apps kind of suck honestly. There’s so many limitations you can do with it, you can achieve it but Magento’s customization on products are much, much better. You also have multi inventory, which is a great feature and Inventory Transfer. This is a nice feature which you can actually monitor how you have incoming stock that’s about to become part of your inventory, okay?

And Magento really the…just to summarize this, Magento has more product types. And it also has a way for you to customize each product with attributes and attribute sets. It’s a really good thing to have, okay? Orders. What can you do with orders in Magento? Oops.

You have front-end and back-end orders. You can customize the order flow. This is a big one. In Shopify, you can have front-end and back-end orders. You cannot customize the order flow. Order flow goes something like this for Shopify. Place an order, order gets created, ship the order, complete the order.

Very simple one, two, three. In Magento, you have invoices, shipments. You have creating the order, and most importantly, custom statuses. You can change the flow. You can have 13 steps if you want. Review the order for spam, ship it partially, prepare the order, pick and pack, etc., etc. Do this, do that.

And you can have variants like if this thing happens, do that, if the other thing happens, complete the order. And this is a huge thing for it. In addition to Magento out-of-the-box, both of them have full and partial refunds, full and partial refunds. And Magento has RMA. So when a customer wants to return something, they can go online themselves, click on their order, say I want to return this thing.

And then there’s a communication between the order flow, you can return the product and eventually, get a refund. Shopify doesn’t have it. You need to have an app for it. And it’s such a basic feature. So RMA is really important. Customer management. Shopify has customer groups, and you can tag them to create customers and then tag them via tags.

So basically, you can make group. These are the VIP. These are the regular customers, etc. Magento has customer groups and customer segments for commerce. So customer segments means you can create things like these tags, but you can actually set certain promotions based on these. And you can do things like dynamic content. So if a certain customer is on a page, they can see a different banner or a different product from other customers.

So there’s more functionality in marketing on Magento than Shopify. Shopify has the good tags, which is a nice feature, but you have to start using apps to achieve other things. Magento Commerce has this out of the… out-of-the-box. And then, Magento Commerce also has customer attributes. So when someone registers or someone checks out, if you want to collect more information than just name, email, password, with Magento, you can create it just click, click, click.

And with Shopify, you have to have a developer doing that. And it’s much more complicated in Shopify. So layout and themes. What is the most focus for most companies? They want to have a beautiful website. So both Shopify and Magento have a lot of different themes you can select from, some are free, some are paid.

And the…you have limitation on the themes, right? You just… Usually companies for Shopify, they just click. They use it. That’s it. In Magento, you can really customize everything much more than you can with Shopify. And a big thing for Magento Commerce is you can actually have the page builder.

You drag and drop. You click. It just works really, really well. It’s so easy to create pages, embed videos, animations, movement, blocks, products, maps, all these kinds of things, okay? Shopify obviously has apps for page builders. But again, we noticed that Magento… the theme, if you notice what’s going on, Magento is much more customizable.

You can customize the products out of the box, the customers, the pages. And in Magento, you need to use apps to achieve those and you have some restrictions, right? So marketing, let’s look at marketing. Magento has a lot of marketing things, advanced promotions, catalog promotions, cart promotions, special prices, tier pricing out-of-the-box, right? Tier pricing means buy this, it’s $10.

If you buy at least 50 of them, it’ll be $8 per piece. And you have each group like the VIPs can have this or the loyal customers can have a different price. You have abandon cart, you have content scheduling, you have just…you have a ton of features, private sales. You can invite people just for exclusive sales, you have Magento…you have Google Analytics eCommerce, you have a lot of things out-of-the-box.

In Shopify, out-of-the-box, you have the abandon cart, which is both. You have basic promotions, which are much simpler. Shopify’s promotions are either $1 off or a percentage off based on some basic information like the cart amount or the cart amount or maybe a date or something like that.

In Magento, you have a rule-based engine. You can combine promotions. You can set this, and this, and this, or this. So you can have all these rules. You can create much more advanced promotions. The good thing about Shopify is there’s easy integration with Google, Facebook, Amazon, eBay, a lot of these channels. In Magento, they’re…most of them are not so easy to integrate.

You need a developer to integrate it. So this is really a good advantage for Shopify. They have something called channels and channels easily allow you to integrate. For example, you want to start a Google Shopping campaign. You can click a few clicks, read a little bit, set it up and you can already start selling, promoting…shopping ads on Google. In Magento, it’s more complicated. But because…part of the reason it’s more complicated is because you have a lot of different products.

You have more customization like you have bundle products in Magento and you don’t have that in Shopify. So it’s easier to integrate more simple products in Shopify. And it’s…by the way, it’s really good. The Shopify channels is one of the biggest features that we like, for Shopify. In Magento, you have to do a little more effort to do that. Let’s talk about…

This is one of our… For most of our clients…most of our clients use Magento. And the reason for that is they’re larger brands and they sell multi countries like they sell, for example, in Taiwan, in Europe, in Australia, in New Zealand, and in North America, right, U.S. So we like to… Our clients require a lot of customization. I want this country to have this functionality, this country to have that functionality.

And I all want it all in one system. I only want it in one system. In Shopify, if you use Shopify Plus you can have multi countries in the same platform. But there’s a lot of limitations. And if you have regular Shopify, not Shopify Plus, you literally have to make for every country a different website.

You’d have to register multiple Shopify accounts. And each one would be its own country if you really wanted some customization. So that is not good. So Magento is really good for customization, flexibility, scalability, and growing for more countries. Payments. Both of them are pretty similar, honestly. Shopify makes it easy to accept payments.

Magento has some out-of-the-box like PayPal, and Braintree, and things like that. So I would say they’re pretty similar. There’s more payment gateways, like the not less popular ones on Magento than Shopify, but Shopify has a pretty good list as well. So I think they’re pretty close. Integrations, there’s a lot of lists for both of them.

SEO friendliness. I would say they’re both pretty similar. Magento is slightly better in SEO because it’s open-source. It means you can customize anything. One of the things you cannot do in Shopify, you can’t change the robots.txt. You can’t change the URL structure of products, like, you can change the product name in the URL, but you can’t change the /product/collections.

You have certain limitations. And it’s an advantage and disadvantage, right? It’s more secure. You can’t change things, harder to make mistakes and break the site but you can customize less. So I really like Magento for the SEO itself. Security. Both are focused on security.

Shopify is slightly better. So I want to correct myself for a second. So they’re both strong security-focused. But the difference between both of them is, Shopify can be slightly better in security because Shopify is taking care of the security and you’re taking care of less security, because there’s less things you can customize, break, or ruin the security.

In Magento, there’s strong security, but aside from the core code, whatever you customize in the code because you’re adding extensions, you have to take care of it. So if you do a good job of security, they’re very…they’re similar, right? They’re both secure and good. Magento releases a lot of security updates which is a big one. But more of the security is on you as the company and more of the security is on Shopify.

So this is the big differences. If you know what you’re doing, website is good. If you outsource something and you find the bad company that doesn’t have security practices and you add an extension on Magento, you have more problems. So it’s really about who’s managing it. This is kind of the responsibility in the security. Both of them are very strong, and they’re both better than a lot of others like WordPress and others.

And this is the difference. Okay. So multi-region. This is why I talked about. This is basically my favorite, one of my favorite things for our clients. Magento is just beating Shopify in multi-region, multi-country, multi-language. The reason for this is when you…even if Shopify has some things for multi-region, you will…

Basically, every country has to follow mostly the same kind of function of the same kind of settings. Magento allows you for each country, each language to have complete different settings or shared settings. So, for example, in Taiwan, for example, the tax is included inside the price, right? So when you buy something for $100, the final price is $100.

But in U.S. when you buy something, the $100 would be maybe on the product, but then when you go to checkout, you have to pay plus, you know, for example, 9%. So you can easily in the backend setup settings for each country, this is the currency, these are the tax things, these are the promotions. And every single setting in the back-end has, you know, basically your settings themselves.

So for example, if I go here to store configuration in Magento and I want to set up my default…sorry, one second. I want to set up my default settings for the countries I allow to ship to, I can specify those.

So I go to any setting, and I change my country here and then I change the setting. There’s so many things you can do out-of-the-box without a developer and customize for every country, every currency. You can have so many things. So localization, right? So for certain countries, Shopify is really a build more for kind of, you know, North America and Europe, really, North America is the biggest focus and then Europe.

So we call kind of the Western world, right? So they’re more payment gateways, more integration, more apps, more things in English. With Magento, it’s also built for that same market, but because it’s open-source, and there’s such a big community, there’s more things that are fitting, for example, Asian countries or, you know, other countries that speak different languages, like, you know, Europe, French, German, etc., so you’re going to have more things for that.

Okay. B2B functionality. Magento is killing it. Magento functionality is a real B2B channel. Shopify with Shopify Plus, this is B2B channels in Magento Commerce only. And so with Shopify, you have to do Shopify Plus. Shopify Plus B2B channel is much more basic.

It’s pretty nice, honestly. But it’s much more basic in function. This is a real B2B business flow. And this is a basic B2B business flow. And I think Shopify will be improving that over time. Education. In order to start using, Shopify is easier to use for a user for the business to run, manage their products, promotions, orders, Shopify is a little bit easier.

Magento takes longer time to learn. And it’s because this is more custom, this is more easy. Reports. Magento Reports out-of-the-box are not good. Shopify has better reports out-of-the-box. But if you use Magento Commerce, then you have BI and you have a lot more things. And you can also customize your own reports.

So depends which version you use. Magento has full APIs. They have APIs, rest APIs, GraphQL, they have a lot of stuff. Magento also has the PWA functionality, PWA Studio. I’m going to add that right here. And then, Shopify has also a lot of APIs. Shopify Plus has all of the APIs.

And then you have really cool things. One of my favorite for Shopify Plus is called Shopify Flow, which…flow…which you can set up automation. So these are the things here. So I just want to say…provide a small recap, and then go to the last thing, which I gave some scores. So in general, I like both of them. Magento and Shopify are good platforms.

They’re a little bit different. So Shopify is mostly smaller businesses, and they’re trying to get into more mid-market. And Magento is more mid-market going more and more to enterprise. So they’re kind of different. Magento is open source. You can customize anything. You pay more money for that, right?

It costs more. It costs more for your developers. You have to do the hosting yourself. Shopify, you can customize less. They take care of more. It’s easier to maintain. It costs less.

It’s a little bit easier. So it really depends on what you’re trying to do. So let’s go over kind of this scoring that I gave it and then I want to have a summary. And then most importantly, you guys ask questions and I’ll be able to help more. So let’s look at this. Okay. So this is some score.

Now, what I did here is I gave out-of-the-box scores that fit a lot of projects, but depending on your requirement, you know, there’s going to be, you know, differences in this. Okay. Ease of use. I would say that Shopify is easier to use than Magento by a very default. And the reason for that there are less functionality.

You can customize less things. Functionality. There’s more… Magento wins. There’s more functionalities out-of-the-box than Shopify, especially Magento Commerce versus Shopify Plus. Customizable. Fully open-source.

I can customize more things. With Shopify, I can customize less. I need to use more apps. And I rely on those app makers to be reliable and strong, etc. Security. They’re both strong on security but again, you’re doing more of the security yourself on Magento. Shopify is doing more of the security on their end.

Uptime. They’re both pretty similar but more responsibility is on you. If you have a bad team, then you have less, you know, uptime. You have more problems. With Shopify, they’re really pretty good on the uptime. Website speed. Out-of-the-box, Shopify is a little bit better, especially because of themes they have.

Magento is not. You have to do a lot more effort from your server-side and your coding side to make Magento faster than Shopify. But obviously, if you’re professional, you know how to do it. So I would say out-of-the-box, slightly less. SEO. You can do more things. It’s fully customized.

You can customize more things. Here you have some limitations in Shopify, right? Support. For Magento Commerce and Shopify Plus, I would say they’re pretty the same. It’s not that… They have some pretty good support. Magento has been improving their support lately.

And I would say they’re kind of two out of three, both of them, pretty similar. Integrations. Depending on which business you are it’s a little hard one for me to do because I would say maybe Shopify is two to three, Magento Commerce has pretty good in a…sorry. For integrations, Magento has more integrations for mid-market.

For Shopify, there’s a lot more for small business. So for our business, I would say better for… If you’re medium, mid-market, Magento has better integrations. But if you’re small business, maybe Shopify is better. So this is kind of…both of them are kind of between two and three, but for mid-market Magento wins.

Release time to market. So if you are a new business and you want to release it, Shopify sites cost less, so cost less on average and they can be released to market quicker. Magento project costs longer, which means they take longer to build, which mean takes longer to release to market.

So this is my summary, everybody. So I really appreciate this. Let me know again in the comments what your specific requirement is, give me some examples. And I want the community to share more and to talk more about this so you can help choose it. Shopify is great. Magento is great. This is the reason why our agency only does these two platforms.

We really like both of them. They’re for different customers, depending where you’re selling, depending what you’re selling, who you’re selling to, and what you need to customize to have your business fit the platform and your platform fit the business. So hope you enjoyed this video. We’ll be making more and more comparisons. Let me know what you guys are looking for.

Appreciate all the videos and take care guys.

| |

Laravel 8 URL rewrite issue fix

On the Web, there are many Nginx configuration examples for supporting Laravel. The configuration is quite simple, however, when using Laravel 8 the following error might be displayed.

InvalidArgumentException

Can only instantiate this object with a string.

The error is not very descriptive but this issue is explicitly addressed in Laravel documentation for versions 4.2~5.3, regarding URL re-writes, which requires adding the following line in the Nginx configuration file.

location / {
try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$query_string;
}
It is not clear why the documentation lacks this information for Laravel versions > 5.3; however, you can add this line in your Nginx configuration if you are facing the same issue.

| |

To The Moon+ Shopify Apps

In 2020, Astral Web has released a range of apps for Shopify store owners to help grow online and extend shops with needed functionality.

We will continue to add new Shopify apps and listen to our customer requests.

To The Moon+ Agree to Terms

Require terms and conditions consent before customer checkout

To The Moon+ Alt Text

Get maximum SEO value for your product images alt text tags

To The Moon+ FAQ

Easily create a great FAQ section for your store

To The Moon+ Bars

Tools to guide customers with sticky bars to checkout

| |

Disable Audience Ads in Microsoft (Bing) Ad Campaign

To be honest, we were initially a bit surprised by the positive performance of several campaigns on Bing Ads (now Microsoft Ads). For several of our clients, it has a significantly higher ROI than Google Ads, albeit with a smaller audience.

However, when viewing campaign performance for a couple clients, I noticed that the portion of ads served via the “Microsoft Audience Network” had a conversion rate that was significantly lower than that of Search Ads.

To get a quick look view of this, you can compare the columns Search Ads Total vs. Audience Ads Total on your Campaigns or Adgroups gridview.

Bing Ads grid view showing "Audience ads total"

To Disable Adience Ads:

This can be done at either campaign or adgroup levels:

  • For Campaigns: Campaigns > Settings > Advanced Settings > Other Settings > Audience Ads. Set Bid Adjustment to Decrease by 100% to disable entirely.
Bing Ads decrease audience ads bid at campaign level
  • For Adgroups: Adgroup > Set Bids > Other Settings > Audience Ads > Set Bid Adjustment to Decrease by 100% to disable entirely.
Bing Ads decrease audience ads bid at adgroup level

Note that, ad the adgroup level, there are additional options to control the delivery platforms that ads will be served on, described by Microsoft here.

It’s definitely looking at their delivery networks and figuring out what has the best ROI for your campaign. I just wanted to share the answer to those of you who see discontinuing the Audience Bids as an easy way to stop wasting money 🙂