Magento is an open source e-commerce web application that was launched on March 31, 2008 under the name Bento. It was developed by Varien (now Magento, a division of eBay) with help from the programmers within the open source community but is now owned solely by eBay Inc. Magento was built using parts of the Zend Framework. It uses the entity-attribute-value (EAV) database model to store data. In November 2013, W3Techs estimated that Magento was used by 10% of all websites worldwide.

While Magento as an open source platform offers hundreds of templates and extensions; Shopify, which requires its own language (Liquid) is a relatively smaller platform offering a limited template of only 200. Moreover, Shopify lacks the extensiveness of Magento as it does not have many reporting and customization options as the latter. In short, Shofify can be an excellent choice for those running small websites and need it within a short period; while Magento is the perfect choice for those who need a robust and reliable e-commerce platform.

Magento is free to download, while Miva is ‘paid’ though not pricey. Even though Magento do not offer any loyalty program or reseller discounts, it allows you to use product reviews and the wish list features, which however is not available with Miva. And last but not the least, while you require to use PHP for Magento; the language used for Miva programming is Custom.

One of the biggest advantage of BigCommerce is its ease to set up, besides its affability to focus on international shipping. While Magento offers a fairly simple and easy to use framework; with BigCommerce there is every likelihood of a business getting stuck with complex plug-ins and limited third party support.

You can actually add ecommerce plugins to the popular WordPress platform. However, since WordPress was basically designed as a blogging platform that now allows ecommerce through plugins; so why use e-commerce on a key blogging area. Why not choose customized e-commerce solution – Magento if at all e-commerce is slated to be your website’s key business activity?

While Magento is an open source platform, in XCart the code is defined. Moreover, XCart is quite complex to customize and lack the flexibility of Magento.

Although every ecommerce solution has its definite advantages and disadvantages, it is important to have a clear concept of your prime business priorities while choosing the right platform for your e-commerce website. So you need to contemplate as to which one will benefit you the most; because every business has individual requirements for creating the right system. Magento is one of the most preferred by business across all sections from start-ups, to SMEs to large enterprises.