The companies under consideration include Magento Go and Shopify. As reputable hosted solutions, they both offer stability and security as well as numerous common features:

• Many free and paid themes which can be fully customized using CSS.
• Easy to manage product additions or edits
• Inventory tracking and sales reporting
• Optional customer accounts with order status, history, address management, etc.
• Flexible shipping options – set by price, number of items, weight, etc.
• Ability to create non-shopping related pages for your website (ie. About Us)

Here’s where the two solutions differ:

1. Pricing. Shopify’s base price is $29 per month plus a 2% transaction fee. This fee is in addition to whatever it costs to process credit cards, PayPal account fees, etc. Magento Go starts at $15 per month with no transaction fees.
2. Support. Shopify offers phone support with all plans. Magento Go only offers phone support with it’s $65+ per month plan. Email and forum support are offered will all plans.
3. Blog. Shopify contains built-in blog functionality. Magento Go doesn’t, however you can maintain a separate WordPress blog and connect it with a free app. This increases your time/cost though, as you must pay for/maintain hosting separately for the blog.
4. Customer Accounts – With Shopify, you can’t create a customer account until you have purchased something. With Magento Go, you can create it at any time.
5. Features – Magento Go includes all features with every plan, while some Shopify features are only available with upgraded plans (ie. coupon codes) or through 3rd party apps. Magento Go has more built-in functionality for reporting, marketing/promotions, and social media integration.
6. Phone Orders – Magento Go allows you to manually input orders from the back end. Shopify does not.
7. Payment Processors – Different options are available with each solution. If there are specific payment processors you wish to use, you should review the lists of what is supported. Shopify: http://www.shopify.com/faq/what-is-a-third-party-processor. Magento Go: http://go.magento.com/payment-gateways/. In general, Magento Go offers fewer options.
8. Design – Shopify has more flexiblity with store design as you can access the HTML, CSS, and scripts, while Magento Go only allows modification to CSS.

Which is better? I can’t objectively say, as I have only used Shopify. There was a bit of a learning curve on the customization side, but the results are outstanding. Still, there was enough frustration in the process to make me open to exploring Magento Go. Have you used either of these? What’s your opinion?