OpenCart vs Shopify 2020 Comparison - Key Differences to Consider

- Shopify is hosted platform, offers monthly fees.

- Marketing tools: Shopify gives you access to a huge range of marketing tools including coupon codes and discount system, email marketing system, free advertise credits, store statistics and various social media platforms integration.

- Quick & easy to set up: Shopify is extremely easy to set up and use with no technicalities related to development and hosting of the online store. Shopify itself offers the software and hosting that is needed for launching the website. The admin interface is clean and user-friendly and pretty intuitive.

- Security and Reliability: Shopify takes care of upgrades and maintenance the servers in order to keep the security and reliability. You do not need to worry about sensitive customer information as credit card details, plus impatient customers.

- Sets up a mobile version of your store by default: Shopify provides a free built-in mobile commerce shopping cart, therefore, your Shopify themes are mobile responsive and look great on all devices and your customers can shop freely wherever they are.

- SEO Friendly: Shopify comes with a powerful Search Engine Optimization (SEO) features. It allows to design landing pages for the campaigns, which is a big distinguishing factor from other E-commerce platforms. You have access to advanced analytics to learn where your customers are coming from so you can tailor your marketing accordingly. Besides, it also support friendly URLs, meta descriptions and automatically generated sitemap.

- Customizable: Shopify is available with lots of free and paid themes for the Shopify Theme Store, along with hundreds of Shopify themes from various developers. So, it is simple to creat a beautiful and unique online shop that fits with your brand identity.

- App Integrations: With over 3,200+ apps available, Shopify lets you easily add some extra features and functionalities for your online store like: reviews, loyalty programmes, customer wish list, in-depth analytics, print labels and more.

- Multiple shipping and payment gateways: Shopify supports dozens of payment gateways, but it also offers its own Stripe payment option and makes it simple for the store owners to set up the payment gateway.

- Customer support: Shopify have an excellent customer support service. Their team is available 24 hours per day, 7 days per week via phone, email or web chat. Besides, there are number of community forums and support documentation.

- OpenCart is open-source software, free to use.

- Easy to Operate & Develop: OpenCart allows you easily operate and update your OpenCart store using a single admin panel. So, you don’t need to hire a developer to manage your business. If you has experience with PHP and knows the MVC structure well, you can very quickly get familiar with the matter, and respectively, start making extensions and modify topics.

- Unlimited Products Selling: OpenCart popular eCommerce platform is suitable for a wide range of online stores from a  small one with a few products to a very large one with unlimited products. Besides, you can display product reviews, ratings and comments on any product page.

- Multi-Store Functionality: With OpenCart, you can set up and manage several different stores using a single admin panel. It allows you to sell different brands through different stores. Then, you can localize each store for different countries by setting different default currency, language... Also, it is possible to use different themes for each store.

- Multilingual & Multi currency: OpenCart lets you sell in any langue and currency then you can reach more users from different areas.

Payment & Shipping Methods: OpenCart is compatible with almost all current payment gateways such as: PayPal, Sage Pay, E-Way, Amazon Payments, WorldPay, and many more through this platform. It also integrates most comment shipping.

- Report & Matrix: OpenCart allows you to track your business activities with its set of reports and matrics. You can customize the reports to fit your businesss's needs. Besides ability of calculating the total amount of sales per day/week/month, you also have a possibility to track which products customers are most interested in.

- Plenty of Themes & Extensions: OpenCart is well known for its high level of functionality. There are lots of OpenCart extensions developed by various providers. Even, some of them are free for download. You can easily expand your store possibilities. In the other hand, there are tons of OpenCart themes available, both free and paid, for giving your store a slick, attractive, sales-worthy look.