Shopify Plus solves enterprise ecommerce challenges like high costs, platform complexity, slow scalability, and maintenance overhead more efficiently than Magento. Shopify Plus offering a fully managed infrastructure, predictable pricing, built-in security, automated updates, and streamlined operations.
Enterprise businesses require eCommerce platforms that help accelerate growth, and increase efficiency, not limit them.
And yet, many businesses on Magento find their in-house teams juggling with the platform architecture, technology requirements, maintenance, upgrades, security challenges, and more.
While Magento is a flexible platform with rich features that work brilliantly in the beginning, as businesses scale, the platform starts getting complicated.
That is why many merchants using Magento are shifting to Shopify Plus. The platform solves many problems posed by eCommerce systems that Magento fails to.
In this blog, we look at 10 ways that Shopify Plus helps eliminate and reduce merchant intervention, solving problems, making functions smoother and more efficient.
A peak into the 10 ways Shopify Plus solves eCommerce problems
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Platform complexity: Shopify Plus offers simpler infrastructure and intuitive interfaces compared to Magento's complex architecture requiring constant technical oversight
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Predictable costs: Shopify Plus has transparent monthly pricing including hosting and security, while Magento involves hidden costs like retainer agencies and ongoing development
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Faster implementation: Marketing teams can launch campaigns and make changes without waiting for developers, unlike Magento's lengthy development workflows
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Automatic updates: Shopify Plus handles upgrades and maintenance automatically, eliminating Magento's time-consuming compatibility testing and migration processes
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Traffic scalability: The platform automatically scales during high-traffic periods without special infrastructure tuning or monitoring
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Streamlined operations: Built-in tools for order management, fulfillment, and inventory tracking reduce operational overhead as businesses grow
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Reliable integrations: Strong app ecosystem with stable integrations versus Magento's fragile custom-code connections
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Global expansion: Shopify Markets simplifies multi-store management, localization, and compliance across regions
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Built-in security: Platform handles PCI compliance, security patches, and threat monitoring rather than requiring internal resources
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Easy experimentation: Built-in A/B testing and flexibility for trying new features without heavy development involvement
10 Ecommerce Problems that Shopify Plus solves Better than Magento
From reducing complexity that comes with integrations to handling security threats to making upgrades to features easier, here are 10 ways Shopify Plus solves eCommerce problems, supports merchants, and frees up time and budgets that merchants can channel toward more strategic and creative matters.
1. Excessive platform complexity
Magento’s architecture is designed for flexibility and customization. However, it comprises multiple components, such as caching layers, indexers, cron jobs, queue processors, and search engines, which require configuration, monitoring, and troubleshooting.
Hence, what starts as a powerful toolkit can become a complex of dependencies. Changing a single element can lead to issues. This complexity also makes it hard to add new team members on the platform. For instance, adding a merchant or operations team member to Magento administration can take days or weeks.
Grasping the platform features is not easy, and hence, team members end up requiring help from developers. Routine tasks can take days.
Here’s how Shopify Plus deals with these issues:
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Reduces complexity through managed infrastructure and intuitive interfaces
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New team members can be trained without hours
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Shopify Plus handles indexing, caching, and performance optimization automatically
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Teams can manage campaigns, update content, and products without requiring technical knowledge
2. Unpredictable total cost of ownership
Another problem with Magento is that its open-source structure can be expensive over time. For instance, beyond the basic hosting and infrastructure, it requires ongoing development resources to keep the platform stable. Think security patches, performance degradation investigation, compatibility issues, etc.
Many businesses hire retainer agencies for these basic tasks, leading to added costs. The retainer agencies can become a necessity over time, adding to monthly costs. Moreover, customizations add to the costs. These unforeseen costs can mess with budgeting.
In contrast, Shopify Plus offers predictable pricing.
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Shopify Plus monthly platform fee includes hosting, infrastructure, security, and core platform updates
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It does not require server management
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Does not involve surprise infrastructure costs during traffic spikes
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No necessary retainer agency expenses
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Merchants can focus on growth and strategy rather than maintenance
3. Slow time-to-market for new initiatives
In Magento, making any change can involve lengthy development workflows. For instance, adding a new banner to the homepage, launching promotional campaigns with specific pricing, etc., can involve development tickets, code reviews, staging deployment, etc. This can take days or weeks.
For enterprise brands, these lengthy timelines can have a negative impact on revenue and on the brand. This can especially affect the business during peak shopping seasons. When brands need agility, Magento can create bottlenecks.
Even though the marketing and product teams might have the innovative skills, being dependent on the development and technical teams can kill any good idea due to the platform’s limitations.
Here’s how Shopify Plus helps:
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Provides teams with tools for faster time-to-market capabilities
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Marketing campaigns can be created and launched without technical intervention
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Shopify Plus app ecosystem provides in-built functions
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Shopify enables custom development with tools that accelerate the process
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The platform makes time-to-market shorter
4. Upgrade and maintenance fatigue
Upgrades and maintenance on Magento can take a lot of time. For instance, custom modules require compatibility testing, third-party extensions require replacements, and codebase might need migration. These complex processes tend to delay upgrades.
Delayed upgrades and maintenance can pose security threats, and customers might not be able to access many features. Once upgrades happen, processes such as checkout, custom pricing rules, inventory management logic, etc., require testing. These processes can take a lot of time.
Shopify Plus handles upgrades and maintenance more efficiently:
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Shopify Plus automates upgrades and maintenance processes
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Performance improvements and security maintenance happens automatically, without human intervention
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The platform keeps upgrading continuously without requiring thorough upgrading
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Teams can focus on strategy rather than spending time on maintenance and upgrades
5. Performance uncertainty during high traffic
While high-traffic periods such as annual sales bring revenue opportunities, for Magento users, it can also bring anxiety. The platform might require infrastructure scaling, caching, optimization, among other changes.
Technical teams might need to completely focus on monitoring server metrics, look out for performance issues, and prepare for emergencies. Thus, the success during sales depends not only on marketing, but on how well the infrastructure is being managed. This uncertainty can affect business planning.
With Shopify Plus, merchants can automate processes that support them during high-traffic periods.
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The platform is designed to scale to handle high traffic
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The platform can handle thousands of transactions every minute without human intervention
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The infrastructure and serves do not require special tuning before or during sales
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As the technical infrastructure is taken care of by the platform, teams can focus on growth strategy and creative matters
6. Heavy operational overhead
As Magento stores grow, their operational complexity increases, and so, the overheads also increase. For instance, order management involves checking order status, coordinating order fulfillment across multiple warehouses, etc. While processes that work for small order numbers do not work as the number increases to hundreds or thousands.
What is more, as revenue grows, the business might need to increase resources in the operations team. Magento platform offers flexibility but it requires discipline and consistent overviewing. Without maintaining this consistency, efficiency might degrade.
Here’s how Shopify Plus fairs:
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The platform has in-built operational workflows
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Order management, fulfilment coordination, inventory tracking etc. work seamlessly at scale
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Shopify Flow automation tool removes the need for manual processes
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The platform has multi-location inventory management across stores
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In-house teams can focus on scaling without any operational stress
7. Fragile integration ecosystem
Enterprise stores require many third-party integrations to be able to provide a comprehensive set of features. For instance, ERP systems for inventory and finance, CRM, OMS for order routing, marketing automation tools, etc.
In Magento, these integrations include custom code connected to the platform’s functionality. This can make the system fragile. And so, even if one integration faces an issue, it can affect the entire system. Moreover, scaling integrations for different regions adds more complexity.
All this increases the workload of in-house teams. Moreover, it can have resources and more budgets.
In contrast to Magento, here’s how Shopify Plus functions:
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The platform provides a strong app ecosystem
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It has built-in integrations for enterprise systems
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The platform makes integrations and development easy
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The system makes troubleshooting and maintenance easy
8. Multi-store and global expansion complexity
Ambitious enterprises often expand to new geographies, have separate sites for different brands, or segments. While Magento provides multi-store configurations, it is not easy to manage them, and increases overheads.
Aspects such as localization, configurations, maintenance, tax rules compliance, shipping methods, etc. have to be in sync across stores. This can require custom development, making the system more complex. Moreover, it becomes hard to maintain consistency across regions. All these factors make global operations hard.
But Shopify Plus is designed to support global expansion and multiple stores. Here’s how:
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Its multi-store approach reduces overheads
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The shared infrastructure makes launches in new regions easy
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The Shopify Markets tool helps with localization, currencies, languages, taxes, duties, etc.
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The dashboard provides an overview of different regions and brands
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Makes updates, features, and improvements easy
9. Security and compliance responsibility remains internal
With Magento, the responsibility of managing security and security compliance is on the merchant. For instance, tasks such as new security patch monitoring, testing, and deployment, assessing third-party extensions impact on security, server hardening, firewall configuration, etc. have to be done by merchants.
These security-related tasks require expertise, tools, resources, and time. For merchants, all this increases overheads.
With Shopify Plus, security is taken care of by the platform. Here’s how:
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The Platform is Level 1 PCI DSS compliant
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Shopify Plus manages security patches, infrastructure hardening, threat monitoring
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The platform decreases security threats by hosting sensitive payment processing outside the merchant’s environment
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Shopify team handles compliance framework related tasks
10. Limited agility for experimentation
Ecommerce brands constantly need to add something new - features, capabilities, etc. For this, they need to experiment and run tests. However, with Magento, experimentation can add up to the costs and risks. For instance, testing a new checkout flow might require heavy involvement from the development team.
With different teams queuing up for support from the development teams, experiments can take a long time. If adding new features is timely, the process could end up being futile. As a result, processes slow down and budgets increase.
Here’s how Shopify Plus fairs in contrast to Magento:
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Shopify Plus includes tools that support experimentation
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The platform is flexible, allowing testing without customization
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The platform’s built-in A/B testing app and third-party optimization tools integrate easily
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Conducting experiments is streamlined and does not cost much
Summing up: Should you shift to Shopify Plus?
If you’re an eCommerce business that wants to scale and grow, and are struggling with Magento’s limitations, making a move to Shopify Plus can be a smart decision.
Shopify Plus provides multiple built-in features to support eCommerce stores. By automating these processes, brands can reduce dependency on their in-house teams, and function with higher efficiency and confidence.
If you’re looking to explore Shopify Plus, contact our experts at XgenTech.
Frequently Asked Questions About Shopify Plus vs Magento
1. Is Shopify Plus better than Magento for enterprise ecommerce?
Yes. Shopify Plus offers faster deployment, lower maintenance, predictable costs, and built-in scalability, making it easier to manage than Magento for enterprise businesses.
2. Why do enterprises switch from Magento to Shopify Plus?
Enterprises switch due to Magento’s high development costs, complex infrastructure, slow upgrades, and heavy maintenance compared to Shopify Plus’s fully managed platform.
3. Which platform is more cost-effective: Shopify Plus or Magento?
Shopify Plus is more cost-effective because it eliminates hosting, security, and upgrade costs, while Magento requires ongoing development and infrastructure expenses.
4. Does Shopify Plus scale better than Magento?
Yes. Shopify Plus handles high traffic, global expansion, and flash sales automatically without custom infrastructure, unlike Magento.
5. Is Shopify Plus easier to manage than Magento?
Shopify Plus is significantly easier to manage due to automated updates, built-in security, and a user-friendly admin, while Magento requires technical expertise.
6. Which platform is better for faster time-to-market?
Shopify Plus enables faster launches with ready-to-use enterprise features, whereas Magento projects often take months due to customization and setup complexity.
7. Is Shopify Plus more secure than Magento?
Shopify Plus includes built-in PCI compliance, hosting security, and automatic updates, while Magento security depends heavily on third-party management.
