Q:

Difference between point of sale like shopify and ecommerce solution like magento

I'm migrating to an ecommerce platform that would help me sell my products online to a wider user base.  I am told Shopify/Zepo is an online shop for small businesses and Magento/woocommerce are solutions.  What exactly is the difference between a "shop" and "solution"?  Or what if I build a site from scratch?  Where do I start from? 

A:

Shopify/Zepo are SaaS ecommerce platforms which can handle milions of visits/transactions per day if your store is a real success. 
Magento/woocommerce are 'own hosted' tools/platforms. 
Both are ok to start with, but if you think you'll do good, be careful on the last ones.  They might seem cheap at the beginning but they can eventually ruin your business. 
When starting it's always wiser to start with a SaaS tool which has no upfront costs and allow you to download all your data (products, customers, orders) in case you want to move to another platform. 
Starting with Magento or WooCommerce will force you to have a sys team or a web developer almost permanently doing server-packages updates and so, let alone security, performance and scalability issues.