Magento Open Source vs. ShopKeep

Magento Open Source is an excellent choice for businesses that need a highly customizable and scalable solution and (most of all) have the technical resources to support it. It's ideal for mid-to-large-sized businesses with complex product catalogs that require complete ownership and control, particularly those with complexities such as multi-country/multi-currency stores.

Incentivized

ShopKeep can maintain up to 10,000 individual stock items. This is perfect for a cafe, coffee shop, wine bar, small retail store, etc. If you're inventory exceeds the 10,000 items then it may not be a fit for you. Also, ShopKeep works with Apple tablets only (iPad 2 or later). If you prefer Android or PC based tablets then this won't work for you.

Incentivized

• It is very good when it comes to search engine optimization as it makes a good use of keywords and tags to improve the SEO score. It increases the chances of ranking up of the eCommerce store in the search engine rankings.
• It makes the store in a very optimized way and despite being a very advanced system it is still very lightweight when it comes to website speed. The pages have a comparatively low loading time and a good speed.
• It provides a lot more advance reporting features which are very helpful for businesses to do their planning.

Incentivized

• ShopKeep provides solid pre-sales support. They did a pre-sales screen-share demo that helped us ensure that their system would handle the needs of the business, and they assisted us in making decisions around which hardware would be appropriate.
• ShopKeep's hardware seems well thought out and well integrated. One exception is issues with the connection between their recommended iCMP credit card scanner and the register. Other than that, the hardware works well together.
• The register has excellent configurability and customization capabilities, and handles a large variety of products easily. High-volume products can have their own buttons on the register. Products can be added to a purchase by using these buttons, by scanning a bar code with an integrated bar code scanner, or by doing a live text search.
• The register is also easily configurable to handle product options - either multiple options like pizza toppings, or exclusive options like regular or decaf coffee.
• The ShopKeep system can handle hybrid retail/quick serve/restaurant scenarios with grace. This was a factor that eliminated many other systems that are optimized for one or the other, or where the products for handling retail are completely separate from the products for handling quick serve/restaurant operations. Since this customer has a location where there is a quick serve counter, a restaurant, and a retail gift shop all in the same location, ShopKeep's ability to handle all of these kinds of transactions from the same platform is a powerful advantage. ShopKeep also recently added functionality to transfer open tickets between registers, so that if a customer starts out with a cup of coffee at the quick serve counter, their ticket can be picked up and added to at the gift shop if they wander in there to purchase items.
• ShopKeep has a Back Office system that can be accessed through any Web browser, or through their mobile app. The Back Office system is used to import and export data, manage inventory, configure the iPad registers, set up product options, manage employees, and report transactions, sales, product costs & margins, and other data.
• Discounts, returns and credits are relatively easy to handle from the register, and the system can be configured to require a manager to approve these kinds of transactions, or not.
• Bulk imports and exports are handled well by ShopKeep's Back Office. When setting up initial inventory, products can be added through Excel, then imported as comma-separated values (CSV) files by uploading them through the Web browser. Once inventory is established, adding or modifying items can be done directly through the Web interface.
• ShopKeep has a mobile app that can be used by owners or managers to remotely access real-time snapshots of sales and other important data whenever they wish.

• Magento is not easy for a layman who is not tech-savvy to manage the website.
• Magento is one of the only modern shopping carts in which one must manually clear the cache and "reindex".
• Magneto has a lot of technical glitches - more than most of the other shopping carts we work with. Most are minor.

Incentivized

• They are completely understaffed in the engineering / product development.
• They are a disaster in inventory control.
• Financial reporting is inadequate.

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.

Because we expect the current issue with the credit card reader disconnecting from the register to be solved with an upcoming software update, and we like many of the features of Shopkeep.

Magento has a relly step learning curve. This means that you need to find experienced developers who can lead junior ones, otherwise the overall development process can be a disaster. However, once you are comfortable in developing on the platform, the customization capability are basically limitless and you can adapt the platform to any use case you can imagine. Also, there are many alredy developed marketplace modules that can solve, out of the box, many problems you may face.

Incentivized

The register functionality is excellent, both from a learning standpoint and an operations standpoint. Cashiers learn how to use the register quickly, and the registers can be configured with hot buttons for fast-moving products. Setting up product variations and additions is straightforward. The web-accessible Back Office has good features, but lacks enough granularity to provide a store manager with the ability to modify inventory settings without giving them access to all of the financial reports as well.

Occasional long waits [5 minutes or more] or call-backs needed for telephone support. Email support replies usually take several hours. Support personnel are generally friendly and knowledgable.

If moving from a "dumb" cash register system, spend all the time needed to get starting inventory and product costing and pricing correct. Shopkeep has good tools for reporting inventory, margins, and other critical business info, but the information is only useful if the starting figures are accurate.

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

ShopKeep is an inexpensive choice iPad POS system that comes with all of the tools needed to do business without any long-term contracts or expensive fees. It also offers free 24/7 phone and email support along with online live chat during business hours. Coffee Shop Manager offered some of these items, but they also tied you into a long-term contract and you were charged fee after fee for support, etc. Also, the CSM system was big and took up a lot of space compared to ShopKeep's integration with an Apple iPad tablet.

Incentivized

• Better Total Cost of Ownership than bespoke e-commerce solutions due to being open source and the wide range of free/commercial extensions available to extend the platform.
• Often more extensive to set up and maintain than other open source alternatives, such as WooCommerce.

• I was unable to manage inventory
• ShopKeep didn't integrate with my accounting software. I had to double enter all financial data.
• Without inventory controls, all of my financial information was inaccurate. It is impossible to grow a business without accurate financial information.

Incentivized