As the owner of an online store, you will have major decisions to make that will directly impact your business venture. What products will you sell? How will you determine the pricing? What shipping services are you going to use? All these and more are questions you need to answer before launching your site.
But before you begin the process of designing your online store – or selecting a web design agency for the development of your project – you have to determine which CMS you would like to use. And in when it comes to ecommerce, there are two major options to choose from - Drupal and Magento.
The following points shall let you do a comparison and make an informed choice:
1.Content Strategy
Drupal has a strong content system, which facilitates boundless creation of content types, all with their own custom fields and attributes, editing experience, and a set of rich media tools. It’s a breeze to set this thing up and you will be able to do all of this without touching a line of code. If providing content and information to your customers is essential for your business and that’s how you differentiate yourself from others, Drupal is the one for you.
Magento, on the other hand, has a very basic content system. You can add pages and some content to category pages, and adding attributes to products can be done effortlessly. It also has some great built-in blog modules. But once you step outside of this, you’re in custom territory. You will need two systems (like a blog or a CMS) or you will have to customize everything in Magento that will increase your cost and ongoing support.
2.Product Offering
If you’re selling products, both the platforms shall perform fairly and equally well. In fact, Magento again has a lot of features that doesn’t require individual setup. So, if you are looking for simple and no-fuss sales of traditional products, Magento is what you should opt for.With Drupal, you start with a basic product structure and are then free to build exactly what you want no matter how complex it might be.
3.Appearance/Design
Drupal has rich features for customizing your website’s appearance. It is easy to modify a site design using the available themes and make the site look unique when you are using Drupal development services.
Although, Magento too comes with available designs, both free and chargeable, you may take the help of web designers to create your online store if your budget is bigger. Amateurs must not experiment with major redesigning tasks as Magento is complex and delicate.
4.Community Support
Both Magento and Drupal enjoy the support of a strong and active international community of developers; however, the fundamental principles of development are quite different. Magento developers mainly focus on ecommerce functionalities while Drupal developers aim to broaden, fine-tune, and revamp CMS functions to deal with new ecommerce modules.
Eventually, the right CMS for your business will depend on the kind of features you are looking for in your ecommerce platform. If you only want to incorporate ecommerce functionalities in your existing website, Magento will be a great choice for you. Conversely, if you want to completely overhaul your existing site and run it on a single CMS, Drupal is what you can go for.
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