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Now, let me set a scene for you that a D2C founder in 2025 cannot avoid. You have the best idea in the world for a product. You’ve got a hot team on your hands, your marketing lead is full-funneling left and right with full campaign concepts lined up, and the excitement in the room is palpable. The only barrier between you and your first sale is a vehicle that you can crank as fast as your ambition will let you and get there.
There has been a lot of change in the D2C space over the past decade. A methodology that began as a small niche has now surpassed the traditional retail model for brands looking to cultivate real customer engagements and manage sales channels. But as the tide changes, founders, CTOs, and e-commerce managers are faced with a pivotal choice: What platform will serve you best to drive an accelerating D2C brand come 2025?
For the majority of companies that are iterating on their commerce strategy, Magento and Shopify still remain the best platforms, but for different reasons and with different focuses. Magento was so successful in its breadth of use cases, mainly due to it being an open-source tech that was crazy flexible and a very strong enterprise community ecosystem for the complex-to-enterprise scale brands. And instead, Shopify has become a serious contender as it offers everything you need without the need for a DevOps team, and is fully managed and faster road-to-market for D2C (direct-to-consumer) brands, irrespective of their size or experience.
This post takes a look at Magento vs Shopify in moving into 2025 and some respective pros for D2C brands.
Legacy Platform with New Obstacles: Magento in 2025
Magento (now Adobe Commerce) is still a powerful solution, and its customizable platform gives merchants a lot of flexibility, which is valuable for brands with a complex B2B process, brands running multiple stores/brands, or are creating a really unique customer experience. It's no surprise that some of the biggest brands in the world are still on the Magento platform.
The above benefits do have drawbacks, though, for merchants that value speed, ease of use, and agility:
1. Notable Developer Dependency
Magento's flexibility is great - until you need to change something simple. Want to add loyalty programs or make a single change to checkout? You'll be calling developers.
If you're a non-coder (i.e., literally anyone else), Magento's admin could be less of a "user-friendly dashboard" and more of a "choose your adventure (and hopefully don't crash the site)".
And this development support isn't cheap either. A Forrester survey research in 2024 indicated that Magento brands under-represented their developer dependency, relying on development resources around 40% more than Shopify brands.
2. Self-managed hardware:
When you run Magento, it's like running a restaurant, but you're the chef and dishwasher. Yes, you have all the power, but you have to do all that cleanup, too.
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DIY Hosting: You pick your servers, and you own the whole stack. When Black Friday comes, it will be your team frantically trying to pay bills, with no "help desk" to call when things get hot.
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PCI Compliance: You, too, are required to pass all security testing and audits. If you've always wanted the job title of compliance officer, this is your chance.
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Professional Management: All this requires hiring the IT resources or agency to keep this all maintained: less time growing your business, and more time "doing server yoga"
3. Slow Time to Market/Long Development Runway:
Starting or upgrading on Magento is like watching a pot boil. Except, the pot is all code, and the stove is the developer's calendar.
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Long Timelines:A new store or large update can still take weeks (if everything goes to plan), while custom projects? Bring lunch, cause you're gonna be there a while.
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Missed Trends:In the D2C world, trends are moving at TikTok speed. By the time your Magento site is ready to launch the campaign for that viral trend, the world is already on to the next dance move.
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Real-World Oops:We had one fashion brand that needed to get a themed landing page to jump on a trending TikTok look. It took weeks to get it made and on Magento. On Shopify, they would have launched it before the trend even died down.
4. Complex Upgrades
Upgrades are always complicated on Magento; it is never as easy as "push a button",
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Big Version Upgrades:There is real work and complex steps involved to get from Magento 2.4 to 2.5 or another latest version. Organizations will have to move, migrate data, migrate extensions, and sometimes complete a rewrite of code. It's a whole project, not something to do on a weekend.
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Cost and Benefits:The time and money invested into upgrades can be reinvested to improving customer experience or marketing.Like going to the dentist for a cleaning, but for your website, a lot of brands postponed updates to avoid the headache, leaving them exposed to security issues and missing the latest features.
Why the Most Clever D2C Brands are Doubling Down on Shopify
Shopify is a SaaS solution that was built from scratch with the purpose of simplifying e-commerce. This has a few major benefits for D2C brands:
1. Rapid Launching and Iteration Speed
The plug-and-play deployment of Shopify allows D2C brands to develop and launch aesthetically pleasing stores in a matter of weeks instead of months. The easy-to-use interface and pre-existing themes help achieve such rapid launch velocity. Speed and adaptability are critical to managing competitors and trends in D2C.
Example: After moving to Shopify, Laird Superfood decreased product launches by as much as 50 percent, creating launch campaigns in a matter of days instead of weeks.
2. Lower Total Cost of Ownership
Shopify operates under a straightforward, subscription-based SaaS model, where merchants have to pay a fixed monthly fee, which goes beyond mere hosting costs to include security, maintenance, and minor updates, and stay clear of any other charges or technical difficulties.
Or consider that a 2024 Forrester study found that brands switching from Magento to Shopify reduced their total cost of ownership by an average of 35% over three years, due in part to lower infrastructure costs and diminished developer dependencies.
3. Inherent Performance and Security
Shopify offers 99.99% uptime, does the SSL certification and PCI compliance for you, and has a global CDN so your site is fast and reliable everywhere.
For instance, a Shopify Plus fashion brand processed over 300,000 concurrent visitors, 0% downtime during Cyber Week 2024 due to the platform's strong foundation.
4. Robust App Ecosystem and Integrations
Shopify as an app-driven platform (over 12,000+ apps in the app store as of January 2025) — this lets brands be nimble, move quickly, and get functionality (i.e., subscriptions, a loyalty program, marketing automation, etc) that usually costs a pretty penny in other platforms with the click of a button. This provides brands the agility to pivot and innovate, monitor and launch functional upgrades at an unprecedented pace, and to challenge customer experience and engagement targets by beating planning schedules and timelines.
5. Enterprise-Ready Scalability with Shopify Plus
Shopify Plus is best suited to high-growth brands, DTC or wholesale merchants who require managing multiple stores (and/or localized/optimized content), multiple currencies and requires access to advanced automation tools (such as Shopify Flow, Launchpad automation). By giving DTCs the power to go global and automate operations without having to deal with legacy or enterprise platforms, Shopify Plus is contributing to the next wave of companies that will change us as consumers.
Case in point: In 2024, Shopify Plus merchants facilitated over $100 billion in GMV in volume without a hitch.
Why are we even talking about Shopify vs Magento?
Because brands are still treating this as a technology decision when it is not, it is a strategy decision.
Think of this as choosing an engine for a race car. Sure, it’s considered a mechanical part. But it is not just how the car operates; it is the deciding factor in whether or not you can win the race altogether. Your e-commerce technology does not just hide in the background; it defines how fast you can launch, how nimble your team can be, how easy it is to experiment, and ultimately how fast you can grow.
And in today’s D2C world, where attention is scarce and competition is rampant, speed and experience are both important models for growth.
This is why migrating from Magento to Shopify is more than just pressing an export button and starting over. This is not a simple back-end upgrade – this is an infrequent opportunity to rethink your e-commerce engine altogether. When brands switch platforms, they usually aim to:
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Rethink UX/UI: Modernise stores for improved conversion and interaction
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Maximise Conversion Paths: Implement upsell, cross-sell, and checkout best practices
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Improve Analytics: Leverage the ability to use Shopify integrations to extract more insight about customer behaviour.
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Optimize Processes: Leverage fulfilment, shipping, and inventory all in one place.
A correct migration can create growth opportunities and efficiencies.
Shopify: More than a Platform: It's a Growth Engine
If you’re still apprehensive about the platform…
We're in a community now and with tech … because we don't say ecommerce in 2023 that we're building and scaling on Shopify, we only think about a community. Rather than doing it all by yourself, the ecosystem within Shopify includes vetted partners, apps, tools, agencies, and experts to help you get started and grow, and scale your brand.
Take into account the partners' badges by Shopify so it is easier for you to trust them as “professionals”, you can also check them at Clutch or Shopify reviews, whether they have case studies with real results or not.
Shopify just feels more comfortable to me as a building platform. Because, of course, it is a team effort. So, as long as there is a Custom Theme (Complex Integrated is even better) an M2 Certified Partner is just brilliant- Anything you need, they can provide. Instead of having to write the same code, or fix the same thing that's broken, over and over again, you're part of an ecosystem that you really only need--and can--focus on your brand, on your actual brand, in terms of identity, in terms of operating your brand.
My biggest piece of advice? never build alone. Hire a Shopify Partner who is knowledgeable in the region and can tell you what works, sharing helpful tips. Leverage the Shopify community and resources they have built to help you with your store and customer success. Let Shopify and the efficient networks it has constructed do what they do best.
I hate to say it, but suffice it to say — I’m hula hooping down Broadway: waiting until 2025 will be your next best choice to going with the wrong vendor. Move fast and build well; if that is the guide you are aiming for, Shopify will get you there.
Take into account the partners badges by Shopify so it is easier for you to trust them as “professionals”. You can also check them at Clutch or Shopify reviews, whether they have case studies with real results or not.
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