Neto vs Shopify: Which is the Best Fit for Your Australian Business?

Swanky are a Shopify Plus Expert agency with clients stretched across the globe and offices in Australia, France and the UK. For years, we’ve championed Shopify as the most flexible, reliable and affordable ecommerce platform for businesses of every size. But this doesn’t mean we think it’s all things to all people.

From different business structures to unique functional requirements and integration needs, we know that there are a range of different factors that come into play when choosing an ecommerce platform for your brand.

Today, we want to give you a holistic review of our preferred platform – Shopify – and the local incumbent in Australia – Neto – to help you decide which one is right for you. 

What is Shopify?

Shopify was born in early 2004 when Tobi Lutke, the platform’s German-Canadian Founder, decided to take his passion for snowboarding into the online space with his own ecommerce store; SnowDevil. While creating an online space to market and sell his products, Tobi struggled to find a reliable platform that was easy to use and customise.

The technical and cost limitations imposed by the available ecommerce platforms left Tobi feeling restricted, frustrated and unable to turn his designs and ideas into realities. Still, rather than giving up, Tobi was driven by this dissatisfaction to create his own improved ecommerce solution for business owners just like him.

Shopify was originally designed to be user friendly and reliable – with the value of ecommerce managers’ time and money in mind. To this day, the multi-channel platform’s aim is to make it easier for makers, creators, designers and artists to take their products to market locally and globally – without the costs and limitations of older, self-hosted technology.

As a result, merchants using the platform don’t need to spend anywhere near as much of their time or money maintaining their website. Instead, they are free to actively promote, market, build and grow their businesses.

Over a decade later, Shopify is one of the largest out-of-the-box ecommerce solutions in the world. More than 800,000 merchants from all over the globe use Shopify to sell their products – and the platform currently has a global merchant turnover of more than $55 billion USD.

The phenomenal growth that Shopify’s clients have seen over the last decade has led the platform to rapidly scale along with them. Originally a Canada-based platform, Shopify has now expanded to service international markets; increasing their internal teams, the quality of the product and the features available to ecommerce managers as they go.

For example, the introduction of several internationalisation features in 2018 enabled Shopify users to expand into new regions and marketplaces – while other recent updates are even allowing merchants to showcase their products in Augmented Reality!

In particular, the APAC region is one of Shopify’s fastest-growing markets. The platform’s leading enterprise solution Shopify Plus is currently trusted by some of Australia’s biggest brands, including Muscle Nation, Koala Furniture, HiSmile, Nude By Nature, Honey Birdette and Triangl Swimwear.

Shopify is trusted by hundreds of the biggest brands across Australia.

“One of the biggest advantages of Shopify Plus is that peace of mind that we get being with the biggest platform with the biggest players on it.”

Justin Gaggino, Chief Operating Officer at HiSmile

Catering to the needs of businesses from startups to global enterprises, Shopify has plans to suit a wide range of different business requirements. As much as these plans may vary, they do have some important things in common; user-friendliness, reliability and the capacity to help Australian businesses scale and grow.

Shopify’s Chief Operating Officer Harley Finkelstein, who helped transform the company into a global industry leader. Image source: Speakers.ca

What is Neto?

Neto is the homegrown hero for users in the Australian market. Supporting over 3,000 businesses across the country, it’s a new but growing platform which is adapting and evolving as it goes.

Designed and developed by a team in Brisbane, Neto – like Shopify – finds its roots in its Founder’s own business challenges. In early 2009, Australian entrepreneur Ryan Murtagh found that eBay’s management tools were too limited to keep up with his store’s rapid growth. His response? Developing his own cloud-based solution for Australian business owners just like him.

Neto was designed to help Australian businesses manage every aspect of their business from a single tool. As a combined point of sale (POS) and online package, Neto also has the ability to integrate with other channels via applications and extensions – although this does come at an additional cost.

Thanks to being designed by Australians, for Australians, Neto does have some clear local benefits. One of the most crucial is Neto’s eParcel integration for Australia Post (which is serviced via app integrations in Shopify).

Since 2015, Neto has also been partially owned by Telstra; Australia’s leading telecommunications and information services company. This has helped Neto to scale quickly, access new resources and better serve Australian merchants.

Neto’s Founder and CEO, Ryan Murtagh. Image source: Enterprisetimes.co.uk

In addition to helping out smaller Australian merchants, Neto has also developed its own enterprise solution, Neto XL, to cater for big Aussie brands such as Tent World, Wahu and Healthy Being.

Some examples of Neto’s biggest Australian customers.

“The Neto team is driven towards innovation and ongoing development. That’s critical because now we can be confident our website is current – without having to do any maintenance, backups and updates ourselves.”

Jon Burrell, Managing Director at Tent World

As Jon Burrell’s comment demonstrates, Neto’s ethos aligns almost exactly with Shopify’s own. But while Neto is just starting up in the ecommerce industry, Shopify is already one of the biggest players on the market. As a result, the two platforms differ in terms of the functionality they can offer their customers and the scale they operate on.

Now that we’ve covered the basics of what each platform has set out to do for small and enterprise-sized companies alike, let’s take a look at the practical merits of each of their plans for businesses of different sizes and stages – and consider how best to go about choosing the right platform for you.

What can these platforms offer small businesses (<$500,000 AUD annually)?

As a small business owner myself (an online camping store if anyone is looking for a tent!), I’m very familiar with the needs of a small but growing business. Reliability, ease of use and value for money are my core needs and everything beyond that is either a unique business requirement or a beneficial secondary feature.

When it comes to my own business, I sell directly on my online Shopify store, occasionally in person (when I host other hikers on “come and try” treks) and also on Facebook. I’ve tried selling my products on marketplaces like eBay but found that the margin eBay took was the money I wanted to make! I know that eBay can work as a channel after several $1000s of sales, but it definitely wasn’t a good fit for me.

If you also have a smaller business in need of an ecommerce platform which will give you the best value for money, let’s take a look at the options both Shopify and Neto provide.

Plans for small businesses

Basic Shopify

A basic plan for small to mid-sized merchants looking to get started or beginning to grow.

Pricing: $29 USD per month

Notable features:

• A cloud-based solution with a global CDN (Content Delivery Network)
• Unlimited product listings and sales
• Multiple sales channels available in the same plan (such as online marketplaces, POS and social media selling)
• Basic finance, acquisition and marketing reports (although we’d still recommend using Google Analytics on top of these)
• The option to manage your website from 2 user accounts
• Customers can use discount codes on your store
• Automated abandoned cart email functionality
• Multi-location inventory (4 locations)

Security and support:

• Site-wide SSL certificate (to keep you and your customers’ information secure)
• Built-in fraud analysis
• 24/7 support

Design:

• Built-in theme editor
• Built-in blogging engine

Payments:

• Access to Shopify’s own express payment solution (Shopify Pay)
• Access to Shopify Payments (the simplest way to accept payments online)

Transaction fees:

• An Australian credit card rate of 1.75% and 30c per transaction and an international CC rate of 2.9% + 30c per transaction
• An extra 2% charge will apply when customers use non-Shopify payment gateways (such as PayPal, AfterPay, Braintree or Stripe)

Standard Shopify

Designed for smaller but fast-growing companies.

Pricing: $79 USD per month

Notable features:

• A cloud-based solution with a global CDN (Content Delivery Network)
• Unlimited product listings and sales
• Multiple sales channels available in the same plan (such as online marketplaces, POS and social media selling)
• Professional reporting and custom reporting (giving you greater insight into your sales trends as you customise your reports to suit your business’ needs)
• Number of available user accounts increased from 2 to 5
• Customers can use discount codes on your store
• Automated abandoned cart email functionality
• Customers can buy and use gift cards on your store
• Multi-location inventory (5 locations)

Security and support:

• SSL certificate (to keep you and your customers’ information secure)
• Built-in fraud analysis
• 24/7 support for businesses around the world

Design:

• Built-in theme editor
• Built-in blogging engine

Payments:

• Access to Shopify’s own express payment solution (Shopify Pay)
• Access to Shopify Payments (the simplest way to accept payments online)

Transaction fees:

• A lower Australian credit card rate of 1.6% and 30c per transaction and a lower international CC rate of 2.8% + 30c per transaction
• A lower extra charge of 1% when customers use non-Shopify payment gateways

Neto Medium

A plan for smaller and steadily performing businesses.

Pricing: $199 USD per month

Notable features:

• List up to 5000 items online
• 2 sales channels included (although a fee of $49 per month applies per additional sales channel, such as eBay or Amazon)
• Option to provide real-time shipping quotes for your customers
• Option to upsell to customers at cart
• Option to provide gift vouchers and a gift messaging feature
• Multi-location inventory control
• Built-in returns management
• Product cross-selling function
• Abandoned cart email functionality
• Multi-carrier integrated labelling and manifesting
• Mobile label printing
• An integrated rewards program (although ProductReview.com.au’s rating of 2.6 stars across 60+ reviews regularly references a difficult developer and customisation experience)
• Capped sales at $250,000 annually

Security and support:

• An SSL secure shopping cart (to keep your customers’ data safe)
• 99.9% uptime guarantee
• Local support in Australia

Design:

• A choice of over 70 free website templates
• A built-in web design editor

Payments:

• ‘Buy now, pay later’ options
• Split payment options
• Option to add non-integrated payments

Transaction fees:

• No transaction fees

The winner for small businesses

While Neto wins on the simple shipping integration front and its native (although limited) rewards program feature, Shopify’s uncapped growth capability, multi-channels and ability to scale outside of Australia make Shopify the obvious choice for businesses at this stage who are looking to succeed and grow.

In fact, Neto’s capping of your number of product listings – as well as the amount of sales you’re able to make each year – could be a serious challenge to the growth of your company.

To give a very simple example, one of our existing Shopify clients currently spend $29 a month on the Basic Shopify plan. They also use a few additional paid apps, taking their monthly subscription to roughly $75. On Black Friday this year, they had an unexpectedly excellent day in sales – selling over $100,000 USD worth of products before 9am! Had they been on Neto, this would have maxed out their plan almost instantly, as they had already been selling for the majority of the 2018 sales year. With Shopify, however, they were able to enjoy the results of their hard-earned success.

What can these platforms offer large businesses (>$500,000 and <$2,000,000 AUD annually)?

At Swanky, we identify this phase of business growth as the point where our clients go from proving their business model to refining it, structuring their teams and starting to focus their efforts on rapid expansion.

Essentially, entering this stage means you’ve established your product or service, identified your customer base and things are really starting to tick.

At this point, the things we see our merchants getting the most value from are internal staff accountability, marketing channel refinement, marketplace refinement and process improvements.

This is also the point when ambitious businesses begin to take additional growth steps, such as opening additional stock or POS (point of sale) locations and stepping into new international markets.

Without a doubt, this transitional period can be quite a stressful time for many business owners as both their team and commercial risk continues to grow. However, at the same time, it can be a particularly rewarding phase; the point where business owners start seeing the results they want and begin to feel they’ve really ‘made it!’

So, if you’re a rapidly growing business looking for a platform that will cater to these growth needs and help accelerate your expansion during this exciting time, what can Shopify and Neto offer you?

Plans for large businesses

Advanced Shopify

A premium plan for companies requiring additional features for scalability.

Pricing: $299 USD per month

Notable features:

• A cloud-based solution with a global CDN (Content Delivery Network)
• Unlimited product listings and sales
• Multiple sales channels available in the same plan (such as online marketplaces and social media selling)
• A custom report builder feature and advanced customer reporting functionality
• Number of available user accounts increased from 2 to 5
• Customers can use discount codes on your store
• Automated abandoned cart functionality
• Customers can buy and use gift cards on your store
• Calculated carrier shipping (allowing you to provide your customers with accurate shipping rats)
• Customers can choose from various shipping options (such as standard, express and one-day delivery)
• Multi-location inventory (8 locations)

Security and support:

• Site-wide SSL certificate (to keep you and your customers’ information secure)
• Built-in fraud analysis
• 24/7 support

Design:

• Built-in theme editor
• Built-in blogging engine

Payments:

• Access to Shopify’s own express payment solution (Shopify Pay)
• Access to Shopify Payments (the simplest way to accept payments online)

Transaction fees:

• Australian credit card rates of 1.4% and 30c per transaction (significantly lower than the transaction fees of Shopify’s Standard plan)

Shopify Plus

An enterprise-grade plan for large-scale businesses and high-volume merchants.

Pricing: Starts at $2000 USD per month

Notable features:

• Unlimited bandwidth
• High-volume traffic capacity (and the ability to process up to 8000 orders per minute per store)
• Advanced internationalisation features (such as the ability to run up to 10 stores in different regions, languages and currencies at no extra cost)
• A custom report builder feature and advanced customer reporting functionality
• A fully customisable customer checkout page.
• Access to Shopify Plus’ Flow feature (allowing you to automate everyday tasks by setting up custom back-end workflows)
• Access to Shopify Plus’ Launchpad feature (allowing you to set up, schedule and automate all business processes for a flash sale or special event)
• Access to Shopify Scripts (allowing you to create personalised experiences for your customers in their cart and at checkout)
• The option to sell wholesale with the Shopify Plus Wholesale Channel
• An advanced API limit (allowing you to integrate more apps into your store)
• A cloud-based solution with a global CDN (Content Delivery Network)
• Unlimited product listings and sales
• Multiple sales channels available in the same plan (such as online marketplaces and social media selling)
• Customers can use discount codes on your store
• Automated abandoned cart functionality
• Customers can buy and use gift cards on your store
• Calculated carrier shipping (allowing you to provide your customers with accurate shipping rates)
• Customers can choose from various shipping options (such as standard, express and one-day delivery)
• Multi-location inventory (20 locations)

Security and support:

• 24/7 priority support and a dedicated Merchant Success Manager
• Advanced security (Level 1 PCI DSS compliance – the same level of security used by banks)
• Built-in fraud analysis

Design:

• Built-in theme editor
• Built-in blogging engine

Payments:

• Access to Shopify’s own express payment solution (Shopify Pay)
• Access to Shopify Payments (the simplest way to accept payments online)

Transaction fees:

• Australian credit card rates of 1.2%

Neto 360

Designed specifically for large-scale retailers.

Pricing: $499 USD per month

Notable features:

• Access to Neto Ship (a multi-carrier solution allowing you to streamline your order fulfilment and automate your quoting, labelling and manifesting processes)
• Access to Neto Pick’n Pack (allowing you to fulfil orders across multiple warehouse locations and process orders quickly)
• Multiple sales channels available in the same plan (such as online marketplaces and social media selling)
• Advanced inventory management (allowing you to create purchase orders, run quick stocktakes and monitor your inventory across multiple warehouses)
• The ability to target at-risk or lost customers and generate repeat purchases with targeted campaigns
• Option to provide real-time shipping quotes for your customers
• Option to upsell to customers at cart
• Option to provide gift vouchers and a gift messaging feature
• Multi-location inventory control
• Built-in returns management
• Product cross-selling function
• Abandoned cart email functionality
• Multi-carrier integrated labelling and manifesting
• Mobile label printing
• An included rewards program (although ProductReview.com.au’s rating of 2.6 stars across 60+ reviews regularly references a difficult developer and customisation experience)

Security and support:

• An SSL secure shopping cart (to keep your customers’ data safe)
• 99.9% uptime guarantee
• Local support in Australia

Design:

• A choice of over 70 free website templates
• A built-in web design editor

Payments:

• ‘Buy now, pay later’ options
• Split payment options
• Option to add non-integrated payments

Transaction fees:

• No transaction fees

The winner for large businesses

When it comes to refining your marketing channels and making process improvements to your large and growing business, Shopify comes out on top. This is largely due to its greater levels of flexibility, functionality and its hands down win on the feature front.

In addition to its exclusive Shopify Scripts feature (which allows businesses to personalise the checkout experience for their customers), Shopify’s App store contains well over a thousand apps and third-party solutions to improve the way your store works, runs and presents itself. This mega-marketplace unsurprisingly remains unmatched by Neto, who currently only have about 90 apps available to their merchants.

Undoubtedly, both Neto and Shopify’s packages offer some impressive functionality to businesses of this size. But all in all, when it comes to tweaking and improving the way your business runs at this crucial stage of development, Shopify takes the cake.

With its extra options for refining both your storefront and your marketing channels, Shopify is the platform which will best enable you to improve and grow your business.

What can these platforms offer enterprise-sized businesses (>$2,000,000 AUD annually)?

During our time working with clients at all different stages of business growth, we’ve observed and learned how a business’ core needs evolve as the brand continues to scale.

The majority of the clients we speak to during these final stages of development are either re-platforming to avoid other platform limitations or are actively looking to reduce platform costs and improve profitability.

We’ve found that the core needs of clients at this stage can vary quite a bit, as teams focus their efforts on evaluating business opportunities based on their commercial importance and using relevant data to identify areas of improvement.

But what does every enterprise-sized business require from their ecommerce platform? Above all else, what matters to clients at this stage is reliability. Business owners need to know that their platform will be operating 99.99% of the time, 365 days a year. On those wonderful occasions when they do have enormous traffic spikes (such as on Black Friday or other annual sales events), enterprise-sized businesses need to know that not only will their website and checkout pages stay up and running but their customers will have the same experience they always do.

A few other things that are crucially important for mature businesses are multi-location inventory management, business automation (to both reduce HR requirements and improve service speed) and global site speed. If you’re looking to grow internationally, having your site for the US market served from your spare room server in Australia probably isn’t going to cut it!

Ensuring that your business is operating on the right platform at this stage is absolutely crucial but, understandably, migrating a very large and well-established business to a new platform while maintaining a positive customer experience can be more than a little stressful. It’s therefore vital that you pick the platform that will both support and enhance your growth for the foreseeable future while catering to all of your current business needs.

Let’s take a look at how Shopify and Neto address these crucial needs for enterprises in Australia and across the globe.  

Plans for enterprise-sized businesses:

Shopify Plus

An enterprise-grade plan for large-scale businesses and high-volume merchants.

Pricing: Starts at $2000 USD per month

Notable features:

• Unlimited bandwidth
• High-volume traffic capacity (at its peak, the Shopify network has proven ability transacting over 8000 orders per minute)
• Advanced internationalisation features (such as the ability to run up to 10 stores in different regions, languages and currencies at no extra cost)
• A custom report builder feature and advanced customer reporting functionality
• A fully customisable customer checkout page.
• Access to Shopify Plus’ Flow feature (allowing you to automate everyday tasks by setting up custom back-end workflows)
• Access to Shopify Plus’ Launchpad feature (allowing you to set up, schedule and automate all business processes for a flash sale or special event)
• Access to Shopify Scripts (allowing you to create personalised experiences for your customers in their cart and at checkout)
• The option to sell wholesale with the Shopify Plus Wholesale Channel
• An advanced API limit (allowing you to integrate more apps into your store)
• A cloud-based solution with a global CDN (Content Delivery Network)
• Unlimited product listings and sales
• Multiple sales channels available in the same plan (such as online marketplaces and social media selling)
• Customers can use discount codes on your store
• Automated abandoned cart functionality
• Customers can buy and use gift cards on your store
• Calculated carrier shipping (allowing you to provide your customers with accurate shipping rates)
• Customers can choose from various shipping options (such as standard, express and one-day delivery)
• Multi-location inventory (20 locations)

Security and support:

• 99.9% uptime guarantee
• 24/7 priority support and a dedicated Merchant Success Manager
• Advanced security (Level 1 PCI DSS compliance – the same level of security used by banks)
• Built-in fraud analysis

Design:

• Built-in theme editor
• Built-in blogging engine

Payments:

• Access to Shopify’s own express payment solution (Shopify Pay)
• Access to Shopify Payments (the simplest way to accept payments online)

Transaction fees:

• Australian credit card rates of 1.2%

Neto XL

Neto’s enterprise retail solution.

Pricing: A monthly base price of $499 USD, plus $150 extra per month for each $250k in sales over the $1m threshold.

Notable features:

• Advanced multi-channel options
• Advanced retail reporting with actionable insights
• Open API
• Access to Neto Ship (a multi-carrier solution allowing you to streamline your order fulfilment and automate your quoting, labelling and manifesting processes)
• Access to Neto Pick’n Pack (allowing you to fulfil orders across multiple warehouse locations and process orders quickly)
• Advanced inventory management (allowing you to create purchase orders, run quick stocktakes and monitor your inventory across multiple warehouses)
• Integrated reward programs and personalised product recommendations
• The ability to target at-risk or lost customers and generate repeat purchases with targeted campaigns
• Multi-location inventory control and stock management
• Built-in returns management
• Product cross-selling function

Security and support:

• Priority support and a dedicated Account Manager
• An SSL secure shopping cart (to keep your customers’ data safe)
• 99.9% uptime guarantee
• Local support in Australia

Design:

• A choice of over 70 free website templates
• A built-in web design editor

Payments:

• Advanced flexible payment options (allowing customers to choose their preferred method of payment)

Transaction fees:

• No transaction fees

The winner for enterprise-sized businesses:

In our opinion, Shopify can be the only real option for businesses in this advanced stage of development.

This is largely because while only around 3000 businesses are currently using Neto, Shopify serves over 800,000 merchants around the world – and there’s a lot to be said for having this level of experience and credibility in the ecommerce space.

When migrating your business to a new ecommerce platform, you need to know that it will be around to support you in the long term – as well as that it can handle your site’s heaviest traffic surges.

Shopify Plus has proven itself able to not only support this kind of rapid business growth but also accelerate it. Among its 800,000+ users, Shopify caters for major Aussie brands such as Muscle Nation, Koala Furniture, HiSmile, Nude By Nature, Honey Birdette and Triangl Swimwear – to name just a few! Time and time again, Shopify Plus has managed these businesses’ enormous traffic spikes and remained speed-optimised and efficient, even during peak periods (which can see thousands of customers shopping online at once). 

“Due to the competition rising in the retail space and with Amazon continuing to grow in Australia, retailers are looking for technology that allows them to move faster and innovate through experimentation. We’re seeing businesses select Shopify Plus because they want to unlock growth through simplifying their technology stack, automate critical business functions through Shopify Flow and innovate with the latest advancements in commerce like multi-channel and AR/VR.”

Rhys Furner, Head of APAC Partnerships at Shopify

Rhys Furner speaking at Shopify’s Commerce+ event in Sydney.

Although Neto also caters for hundreds of larger Australian brands (such as Tent World, Wahu and Healthy Being), the platform is still essentially a newcomer to the ecommerce world. Neto is still learning and adapting to suit larger business’ needs, while Shopify has already proved itself worthy of thousands of enterprise businesses’ trust.

So, while both platforms have some strong business automation options, an impressive uptime percentage and local support, Shopify’s sheer scale, years of experience and greater market share make it the most reliable option for enterprises by far.

So who wins overall?

Clearly, there are a number of merits to both of these frontrunners in Australian ecommerce. However, we do have to pick a winner.

On one hand, the fact that Neto is designed with local markets in mind makes it an ideal choice for Australian businesses looking to keep up their steady success in the Australian market and simplify the way that they manage their store.

For example, Neto has Australian shipping covered – although it’s worth noting that they only have one international shipping courier partner – and their shipping features in general are excellent, allowing businesses to streamline the order fulfilment and dispatch process by automating all of their quoting, labelling and manifesting tasks.

However, we shouldn’t overlook the fact that Shopify’s support team in Australia is actually just as large as Neto’s, with 24/7 support available to businesses in every country.

Additionally, as our comparisons above have shown, Shopify takes the lead when it comes to security, app integration, customisation, multi-channel capability, technical support and payment gateways.

Ultimately, we believe that the overall winner should be the platform which has proven itself to scale businesses most effectively; not only supporting merchants through heavy growth periods in their local market but helping them to expand their reach internationally as they go. Selling into new regions and multiple seasonal markets is a great way to diversify single market risk and future-proof your regional business.

When we consider things from this perspective, Shopify’s uncapped growth capability, integrated multi-channel functionality and capacity to expand businesses into non-Australian international markets make it an obvious first choice for businesses at every stage of their development.

In short, both platforms have a lot to offer businesses of all different shapes and sizes. But if unimpeded growth is your ultimate goal, Shopify is the platform for you.

Looking to replatform or build your store with a leading Shopify agency in Australia?

Contact Swanky’s friendly team of ecommerce experts and find out how we could help.