Finding the Best Magento Alternative for Your Business

Moving from Magento to Shopify is one of the Cart2Cart most popular migration directions (according to our in-house statistics). Therefore, we’re often asked about how to recreate the previous eCommerce functionality on a newly-established platform. Read the post to discover what Shopify alternatives of Magento extensions you should install to supercharge your eCommerce store.

When it comes to expanding the out-of-the-box features and functionalities of the shopping cart, both Magento and Shopify offer a comprehensive collection of add-ons. There are thousands of applications developed for both shopping carts. More specifically, there are 5,000+ extensions in the Magento marketplace and 4,400+ apps in Shopify App Store) that can be downloaded and installed. With such a huge number of integrations, you can be more or less guaranteed to find the corresponding Shopify alternatives for your Magento extensions.

To help you recreate the functionality of the previous store on a new platform, Cart2Cart has carefully vetted the most popular Shopify alternative apps for Magento extensions. Integrating the offered applications with your new store is very simple. All you need to do is to click a couple of buttons and you’re all set. Most add-ons have lots of reviews so you can be confident in their security and in-depth functionality.

Accounting & Finance

Every merchant can manage accounting transactions with much higher efficiency with the help of the accounting & finance software integrations. Both Magento and Shopify offer various functional modules including accounts payable, general ledger, trial balance, payroll, etc. They aim to automate various routine business processes and push accounting workflow to an entirely new level.

Magento extensions for accounting & finance

Magento merchants most often leverage the following extensions for accounting and finance:

• QuickBooks (keeps track of the income and expenses issues, as well as stores data about customers, products, inventory management)
• OneSaas (automatically syncs sales with QuickBooks Online)
• Embedded ERP (facilitates easy stocking, purchasing and order preparation process)
• Saasu Accounting (automates any recurring sales and expenses)

Shopify apps for accounting & finance

Contrastingly, the following Shopify extensions have all the functionality required to manage all the merchants’ busywork inherent to bookkeeping:

• FreshBooks (makes bookkeeping easy, fast, and secure)
• Xero Bridge (integrates sales data to Xero account with ease)
• Kashoo (help business owners automate much of the administrative work behind bookkeeping)

Checkout & Payment

Just like how eCommerce platforms take the hassle out of developing and maintaining an online store, checkout and payment add-ons optimize the checkout processes and make the payments fast and convenient for customers.

Magento extensions for checkout & payment

Let’s now read about the top extensions of this kind that are often used in Magento stores:

• One Step Checkout (streamlines all checkout steps from 6 to 1 to speed up the whole checkout process)
• Stripe (allows you to accept and process credit and debit cards, and mobile wallets like Apple Pay and Google Pay)
• TaxJar Sales Tax Automation(automatically calculates sales taxes for you)
• Sage Pay & Subscriptions (helps merchants gain recurring payments through the subscription model and provides strong security layers)

Shopify apps for checkout & finance

You can use any of the following Shopify apps for reducing the lengthy checkout process and increase your online sales:

• One-Click Checkout (easily update their site to provide quicker options for buying)
• Add-To-Cart & Checkout Booster (motivates customers to finish the checkout and prevents cart abandonment)
• Subscriptions by ReCharge (allows customers manage subscriptions from their website, while merchants can decide when to bill the customers)
• Partial.ly (helps to create flexible payment plans options for your Shopify store)

Shipping & Fulfillment

Online retailers are well aware of how it is vital to manage shipping and order fulfillment, and how it can be overwhelming. To provide customers with an effective and timely shipping strategy and to ease the whole process, the corresponding extensions are often used.

Magento extensions for shipping & fulfillment

Magento store owners usually make use of the following extensions to organize and automate the process of products shipping:

• Shipping Suite (creates multiple shipping options, set shipping prices based on product weight, create rules for shipping prices, and much more)
• Order Management (allows to quickly handle the orders making sure that order it corrected and shipped on time)
• Delivery Date (allows to enable the delivery dates and times, and display them on the required pages)
• Custom Stock Status (makes it possible to create various stock statuses and assign them to any product types either manually or automatically)

Shopify apps for shipping & fulfillment

Now have a look at the best alternative Shopify apps for shipping and fulfillment to see which one you’d like to use instead of your previous Magento extensions:

• Easyship (helps to give your Shopify customers flexible shipping services and options)
• ShippingEasy (provides an online shipping management tools that help you to get your Shopify orders in and out smoothly)
• Pre-Order Manager (lets you take advance orders from visitors to your store with a pre-order button for out of stock items)
• Store Pickup + Delivery (allows you to give your customers the option to pick up their orders or maybe do local deliveries in your area)
• Back In Stock Product Alerts (lets your customers to be notified when a product they want is back in your store)

SEO

Needless to say that SEO plays a crucial role in any eCommerce store success, since the higher the website ranks on search results, the more customers it can get. Magento and Shopify have good built-in SEO features, but in most cases they’re too basic. Therefore, store owners who want to provide greater user experience, tend to invest in some of the add-ons.

Magento extensions for SEO

Magento has a bundle of outstanding extensions aiming to boost the SEO performance significantly. The most often used are as follows:

• SEO Suite Ultimate (allows to create customized canonical tags for products, automate robot.txt file editing, optimize URL structure, and generate SEO reports)
• Image Optimizer (optimizes the images so that the online shop doesn’t drop in loading speed)
• Improved Layered Navigation (displays multiple filters and handy widgets to help visitors find the products they need)
• Advanced SEO Suite (helps to fully optimize your site for search engines and SEO)
• Defer JS (resolves the speed issue by improving the PageSpeed score)

Shopify apps for SEO

Alternatively, there are a number of Shopify apps allowing you to optimize your store for SEO. The most popular apps used by store owners are the following:

• Plug In SEO (allows to check, fix and optimize all SEO-related issues)
• SEO Image Optimizer (quickly and easily optimizes images)
• SEO Manager (makes it easy to understand and implement SEO measures that will help a store rank better in search engines)
• SEO Doctor (scans for SEO issues and can automatically fix them)
• Yoast (checks all pages and posts for SEO strength and provides recommendations for improvement)

Security

Security remains one of the top concerns for all online entrepreneurs. Despite the fact that Magento boasts of it’s out-of-the-box security, store owners still make use of some extensions to additionally secure their store.

Magento extensions for security

Here are some of the best security extensions used to make the Magento store and customer data more secure:

• Two Factor Authentication (helps to protect the e-store by requiring to add extra security information when logging into the back office)
• Google Invisible reCaptcha (provides a captcha system that will prevent bots and spam from logging in, purchasing, and wreaking havoc on your ecommerce store)
• Astra Security Suite (allows not worry about any malware, credit card hack, SQLi, XSS, SEO spam, comments spam, brute force, or any other threats)

Shopify apps for security

Shopify, on the other hand, offers a variety of security apps aiming to keep your and your customers’ data safe:

• Locksmith (allows you to put a “lock” on specific items including collections, prices, products, shopping carts, entire pages, and more)
• McAfee Secure (automatically scans stores for data breaches, malware, and malicious activity)
• Rewind Backups (automatically saves product information, themes, inventory, prices, images, and more on a daily basis)

Apps needed if you’re moving store database from Magento to Shopify

With the right apps incorporated into your store backend, you can significantly improve the process of the database transfer from Magento. Based on our experience, we’ve hand-picked the list of the Shopify apps necessary for migration.

• • Store Migration App (enables effortless import of online shopping data across various platforms)
  • Product Reviews (adds customer reviews feature to the products)
  • Stamped.io. Product Reviews UGC (helps to gather reviews from real customers and use them to promote brands, products, and services)
  • Bulk Account Invite Sender (sends bulk email-invites to customers to activate their accounts)

Final Slice

By integrating the right apps on your Shopify eCommerce website, you will not only recreate the previous Magento functionality, but also enhance your overall productivity. So, start using the above-mentioned Shopify apps on your store and soon you’ll optimize your business processes as well.