Magento Open Source vs. ShipperHQ

It's well suited for large eCommerce stores as it requires much effort to set up and the development cost for setting it up is high. It's less appropriate to use Magento where you are looking for quick development and launch of the store. Also, it is required to have a developer or sometimes the entire tech team to manage an e-commerce store, so you may need to hire a few PHP developers.

Incentivized

ShipperHQ is almost too heavy-handed for our use case. We are only a single-origin shipper so we don't need the advanced functionality of multi-origin or drop-shipping. It is suited much better for organizations that have multiple origins or that use drop-ship facilities, or even a company managing multiple different eCommerce websites. We opted to go with it because of its great reviews, combined with less than stellar reviews of the competition.

Incentivized

• Magento is perfect if our web design client likes a specific pre-made template and wants a fast solution.
• Magento allows us to customize its open-source code to create additional features and functionality.
• Magento saves small businesses time and money if they only need a simple solution.

Incentivized

• It is easy to batch process orders.
• It quickly calculates rates to compare.
• It is easy to keep track of orders for future review.

Incentivized

• Not the simplest of solutions to use or maintain from an end-user perspective
• Other platforms are better with regards to SEO in our experience
• Fairly sluggish and slow compared to other platforms without the correct server specification and performance optimization work.

• The user interface is a little tricky. It is not as easy to navigate as other shipping apps.
• I wish that ShipperHQ had the functionality to print shipping labels and manage shipments. We currently have to use a different third-party app for shipment management.
• I would also like to see the option for adding shipping rules if shipping management was integrated.

Incentivized

It's the dominant force in the SMB open source market. With the continued support of eBay/PayPal, Magento will continue to evolve and should be a market leader for some time.

I give ShipperHQ a 10/10 because the software does exactly what it says, and has a rock-solid support team to help get everything set up. The features are pretty easy to use and implement.

Incentivized

I'm not giving a 10/10 because I did need a little hand-holding to get through the initial setup. Overall, it's not that difficult to use once you understand how to apply custom dimensional rules.

Incentivized

Their support is the primary reason I elected to purchase a premium. They helped a lot with the initial set up.

Incentivized

In looking at a different platform to migrate to from Magento 1, we looked primarily at Big Commerce, Shopify and Shopify Plus. Our host was very negative about Magento 2, but we determined after a couple years it was due to the fact it had even more complexity (and very different) than Magento 1. Shopify Plus was attractive, but the cost factor for two sites led us back to Magento 2.

Incentivized

USPS only allows you to use their services (obviously). It was sluggish and often offline. The shipsaver insurance saves us money. We had to guess shipping costs for items instead of entering their weights and sizes ahead of time. It integrates with our e-commerce site. Glad we have it now.

Incentivized

• Delays in development leads to missed timelines and opportunity loss.
• High cost of development and maintenance may currently outweigh the growth.
• Better handling of customer and order information makes for better customer service.
• Excellent API has been a boon for integration with our ERP

Incentivized

• ShipperHQ is reliable and requires little to no maintenance, which for a small crew like ours is invaluable.
• ShipperHQ also offers the option to display either retail shipping rates or our discounted rates to our customers. This is handy because we can display those discounted rates, which results in higher conversion and fewer abandoned carts due to high shipping costs.
• One negative, however, is that since ShipperHQ lacks the ability to manage shipments, we have had to use another third party app which increases overhead.

Incentivized