When it comes to starting an online store, there are many things that you should take into consideration. Besides the quality of your products, marketing strategies, and data security, you also have to choose the right e-commerce platform for your business.
Today, two E-Commerce giants are fighting for the best spot—Shopify and WooCommerce. But which is better for your business? In this blog, we’ll demonstrate a detailed comparison between the two platforms to help you. Let’s get started!
Image Source: pexels
An Overview
Before we begin with the comparison, let’s talk about the basics of these two platforms.
Shopify
Shopify is an all-in-one e-commerce platform that streamlines the complex processes of setting up and managing an online store, from product selection and purchase to payment processing, shipping, and returns.
With Shopify, businesses can quickly reach a worldwide audience and have a powerful, comprehensive platform to manage their sales.
WooCommerce
WooCommerce is a free, open-source eCommerce plugin that allows you to use the most powerful content management system (CMS)—WordPress—and run an online store. Given its open-source nature, you can easily customize every aspect of your online store and even add custom extensions.
And like Shopify, it can also help you build an online store to sell digital or physical products, manage inventory, set up payments, and more.
Which E-Commerce Platform is Better?
When choosing an e-commerce platform to use, there are various things you should consider. Below are a few of them:
Cost
Pricing is maybe one of the first things you should look at when starting an online store. And Shopify has set pricing, ranging from $25 to $399 per month. Whereas WooCommerce doesn’t. However, it’s worth taking note that even WooCommerce needs you to pay for hosting, security, and domain, unlike Shopify, which includes those on their plans.
Ease of Use
When it comes to ease of use, you can rely on Shopify. Since it’s a fully hosted platform, you won’t need to install, manage, or even update any software. It will take care of everything, especially on the technical side, such as your domain name, hosting, and any security (SSL) certificates. There’s no need for you to even worry about backups either, as it will do the job. After you sign up, all you have to do is choose the design on various Shopify themes, and you’re all set to customize and add your products.
However, although WooCommerce might need a little more legwork, including the sourcing of your own web hosting and security, you can easily do it with Bluehost. It has dedicated WooCommerce plans that include a free domain name, an SSL certificate, and even a WooCommerce auto-install.
Scalability
Sure, you’ll do anything to grow your business. But what happens when your store starts to get more traffic?
In Shopify, it’s easy since it handles the technical parts of your store. All you have to do is upgrade your plan to cater to a large audience. That’s it!
Meanwhile, since WooCommerce is a self-hosted platform, you are responsible for maintaining security, backups, and updates of your website. The only good thing about it is that you’ll have better control over the specific resources you need to upgrade, making sure you don’t pay for something you don’t really need.
Third-Party Integrations and Add-Ons
Installing plugins and apps is also one that you should pay attention to. And in this, WooCommerce beat Shopify. Since it’s an open-source platform, it heavily relies on plugins. There are over 50,000 to choose from to help you manage your website better. On the other hand, Shopify has more than 1,200 free and paid apps to offer.
Payment Options
When selling online, you’ll need to have as many payment options as you must for added convenience to your customers. And while both WooCommerce and Shopify have over 100 payment gateways, including Stripe and PayPal, Shopify will still charge you 2% per transaction unless you upgrade to a more advanced plan or use its very own Shopify Payments. On a side note, WooCommerce will only charge you the transaction fees by your payment gateway or bank.
Customization
Your user interface (UI) is also another factor that will affect your business growth as it creates the first impression on your visitors. In this round, Shopify wins, as its templates are more polished, and you can even use code to customize the themes. Additionally, Shopify themes are optimized for mobile users, unlike WooCommerce, which depends on the theme you choose.
Marketing Elements
Marketing is a crucial part of any business’s success. Thus, you have to pay attention to this. In this round, we picked Shopify because it has a wide range of marketing tools, such as multichannel selling and a system of native emails email marketing, which enables you to reach potentially millions of social media users. In contrast, WooCommerce requires plugins and manual configurations to do all those.
Selling Features
Shopify also gets a point in this battle. Since multi-channel selling and shipping are already included in the plan, the hassle of looking for plugins and setting them up will be gone. In addition, Shopify has abandoned cart recovery, unlike WooCommerce. This makes it easier for customers to complete their orders without filling out their details one more time.
SEO
SEO is another thing that plays a significant role in any company’s success since it increases your visibility. And here, WooCommerce takes the win. Since it runs on WordPress, there are plenty of SEO plugins available for it, including Yoast SEO. These tools can help you dig deep and add detailed titles and meta descriptions to your pages. You can even customize URLs for users to find them easily. Furthermore, you’ll have access to many SEO guides and prompts to help you throughout the building process.
Security
We’ll give this point to Shopify as it’s a hosted platform, which means that the platform itself takes care of security, like your SSL certificates. In addition, it’s already PCI-DSS compliant, so there’s no need for you to set it up yourself.
Support
Both platforms have 24/7 support through live chat, calls, and emails. The only difference is that the support you’ll get from WooCommerce will come from the plugin you install. But nothing to worry about because every plugin has a dedicated support team to help you. Plus, WooCommerce still has a knowledge base, tutorials, and videos like Shopify to help you navigate.
Final Thoughts
With everything mentioned above, we can say that Shopify has better features. However, the right choice will still depend on your situation and preference. If you have a budget and like a hassle-free platform with sleek templates you can customize easily and robust security, choose Shopify. Meanwhile, if you lack resources but want greater control over your site’s hosting and design, you may opt to choose WooCommerce.
Contributing Author Profile
Regi Publico is a full-time writer who is also an artist for fun. She takes pride in her towering collection of books and loves reading about anything under the sun. She is passionate about sharing her knowledge through every article that she writes. She has active Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn social channels.
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