Do you have an amazing plan to open a new online store, but looking for help to deal with a vendor and how to manage your brand’s content? Shopify and Woo-commerce are two solutions for creating a fully-fledged online store and as you can’t decide which is the best one based on their growing popularity. Each has its pros and cons. A business owner must choose the right eCommerce platform that fits your business need. Let’s jump right into our Shopify vs Woo-commerce comparison.
Why is Shopify Unique?
Shopify is a web-based eCommerce platform, an all in one solution which allows you to create an online store, manage your products and handle payments using a single service, best for drop shipping and multi-channel selling. It is the best choice when you rely on Facebook Ads or IG marketing. It is beginner-friendly and more turnkey. However, it is not that great for large stores and SEO features for content are not as great at Woo-commerce. It doesn’t have enough design flexibility in the blog section. They have their app store, where you can buy tons of extra functionality and do hosting also; this is impressive since they don’t offer a free plan.
Pros
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Not to deal with technical maintenance and security.
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Multiple selling channels with easy integration.
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Set up is super easy
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Phone and chat support
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Many certified partners to help you.
Cons
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Rigid product URL
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Less customization and design flexibility like Woo Commerce.
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Very few free themes.
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Apps can add up and become costly.
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Share the wealth mentality.
Woo-commerce
It is a free open source plugin for WordPress, a complete solution to create an online store easily. It is the best single platform to run eCommerce and affiliate sites under one roof. It has awesome design and theme with enough features to sell and integrate for marketing automation.
Pros
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Total development control over your store and content
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The cart and WP are free
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WordPress is best for content marketing through SEO
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1-Click selling apps available
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Lots of WordPress experts are available
Cons
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Hosting, Apps, plugins can be expensive
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Need a bit of technical knowledge to operate
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Have to deal with accusation for troubleshooting
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Getting relevant support can be a hard game.
Important Aspects of Shopify vs Woo-commerce
- Ease of Use
Before you start with either of them, you need to be aware of how they work. Both platforms allow you to create an online store, collect payments, process orders, and add your content. Woo-commerce runs on WordPress and it is an open-source self-hosted platform, so hosting, domain, and files are your business. It is easy to set up, few steps needed these include installing, updating, WordPress on your website, and then installing the plugin.
Shopify is a hosted platform, it handles web hosting and security. It is one of the easiest solutions for a complete online store. The moment you create an account, they will guide you through the complete setup. They take care of the hosting for you and will give you the option to play around with your store before publishing it. You need to get your domain name and start designing, technical abilities are not required to get started in minutes.
- Theme and Flexibility
The theme is the essential virtual shop window. Shopify has its theme store, that comes with over 180 different themes. Some are premium but many of them are free. It has customization options so you can change their look and feel without touching one line of code. All the templates are responsive to mobile, so they’ll look good on any device. If you want to customize the style to your liking then premium themes offer more options and not limited to the templates. Theme forest has more than 600 Shopify themes available. Woo-commerce doesn’t have its theme store, but you can use third-party services to source them. On Theme forest, there are 600+Woo-commerce themes available, with prices ranging from $29 to $64. Free themes don’t come with any support.
- Product Presentation
Both Shopify vs Woo-commerce offer options to create product descriptions, upload pictures, let users zoom in on the images and you can easily add variation such as product color or size. You can also add product videos easily. Woo-commerce will be essentially operating within your WordPress theme, some images or galleries might not play super nice straight away.
- Shopify vs Woo-commerce Payment Options
Payment is one of the most complicated/important things to consider for your shop. Shopify offers two kinds of options, when you set up a Shopify store, you will accept PayPal Express Checkout. Credit card processing is best done through Shopify Payments and you will face extra fees from Shopify if you are using an external payment processor. You can avail this service in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and a few other countries. If you have your business in other countries, you have to rely on a payment gateway or a third party service. Whereas Woo Commerce offers different payment gateway extensions. Adding PayPal and support for credit cards via stripe is free; other options such as Authorize Net, Amazon Payments or Braintree will set you back $79 a year minimum. There are many other payment options, most of which come at a price. Both services offer a good range of payment options, but you need to consider your location and your willingness to spend on extra fees to accept all the $$ that customers can’t wait to throw at you. Shopify wins if you are in one of the few selected countries where Shopify Payment is available. If not Woo-commerce wins.
- Customer Logins and Checkout Options
Both Shopify vs Woo-commerce offer customers the choice to log in to process their payments or to continue to check out as slick incognito ninja guests. Both platforms make it easy to send automatic emails to customers who didn’t complete their purchase abandoned cart recovery. It is included in all of Shopify’s plans by default. For Woo-commerce, you have to use one of the many available plugins of which some are free. Shopify offers one-page checkout, which lets you skip the cart and go directly to the payment page, but you will need to implement it with a few lines of code. One page checkout is also available with certain Woo-commerce themes.
- Shipping Cost Settings and Carrier Integration
Both Shopify vs Woo-commerce, let you add a shipping price based on different parameters, e.g. local, international, next day delivery, etc. If you want to get a bit more technical, you can also enable real-time shipping cost estimates at checkout, which offers a super precise price based on the day your carrier will pick up the parcel. Woo-commerce requires paid plugins to display real-time rates. You can combine it with Ship station that conveniently lets you print shipping labels.
Shopify enables 3rd party calculated shipping rates if you have an advanced Shopify plan or higher. Drop-shipping business should probably look to Shopify as the platform offers native support for partnerships with Amazon, Rakuten, and Ship wire amongst others. Oberlo is a useful app for drop shipping integration. It also provides comprehensive guides about how to make the most from your stock less shop. Oberlo, a Shopify owned app, is also a straightforward way to start with drop shipping. Woo-commerce doesn’t have a native drop shipping option, but there is the Ali drop ship plugin.
- Shopify vs Woo-commerce for B2B
B2B merchants all over the world mainly use Shopify. It is a leader in terms of conversion rates and has inbuilt SEO integration which proves to work better than a basic Woo-commerce. In terms of converting visitors to pay customers in the majority of situations, Shopify has everything you need for success. The users can customize their B2B sites with functionalities that help optimize customer experience and boost conversion.
- Tax Setting
Both options let you display prices with or without taxes, Shopify calculates US and Canadian taxes automatically for you. VAT rates for Europe have to be set up manually. If you want to offer a VAT exemption for your EU customers, you’ll need a paid plugin. With Woo-Commerce you can automate your worldwide taxes, which are nice but, of course, require a paid plugin.
- Shopify vs Woo-commerce Market Share
Shopify has more than 1 Million active websites. By looking at the top 1 Million websites, it seems that Woo-commerce surpasses Shopify’s market share, having built 3.41% of online stores, vs 2.34%
- Multilingual Capabilities
Shopify users have one expensive option to duplicate the store or to add subdomains, they can now use the Langify app, which offers multiple languages and currency options for the store and checkout page. Woo-commerce enables a complete multilingual solution due to the well-established WPML plugin and costs $79 the first year and $59 thereafter. Still not cheap as chips, but it sure beats Shopify.
- Shopify vs Woo-commerce Security
Shopify is a hosted service, which means they take care of any security issues in the background. They have the power to make any security holes disappear as soon as they learn about them. Shopify is PCI compliant to accept credit card payments. With Hackerone, Shopify awards bounties to anyone who can find possible exploits making the platform safer. You can also secure your account using two-step authentication, and a free SSL certificate from Shopify with all their plans. It is possible to download a copy of your entire store, you can use a plugin like Rewind. It is free for very small stores up to 20 orders but costs go up quickly once you hit more than 200 orders/month 39$).With Woo-commerce, security is a different case. WordPress is a very known platform among hackers and therefore has frequent security exploits. As WordPress and Woo Commerce have to install on your server it is you who is responsible for security updates. If you are a solo founder and out on vacation, no one will close these security holes for you. You can reduce the risk a little bit by using a managed WordPress hosting like Site ground, Dream host, or WPEngine but in terms of security, it still won’t be even close to Shopify’s standards. WooCommerce is not PCI compliant by default. You need to set up SSL yourself with your hosting provider which is easy and free.
- Shopify vs Woo-commerce Speed
Shopify has clear and very good results of up time and page speed, it loads fast on desktop and mobile because Google punishes bad up times and slow sites. If your website isn’t fast, visitors will bounce and you’ll lose potential sales. No one is willing to snooze off waiting for a page to complete tasks. Woo-commerce depends entirely on your web hosting service, so if you have a hosted WordPress site, it is up to you to ensure that you can reach an up time of 99.95% or higher some hosting companies will even give a level agreement with guaranteed up time.
- Shopify vs Woo-commerce Speed
Shopify has clear and very good results of up time and page speed, it loads fast on desktop and mobile because Google punishes bad up times and slow sites. If your website isn’t fast, visitors will bounce and you’ll lose potential sales. No one is willing to snooze off waiting for a page to complete tasks. Woo-commerce depends entirely on your web hosting service, so if you have a hosted WordPress site, it is up to you to ensure that you can reach an up time of 99.95% or higher some hosting companies will even give a level agreement with guaranteed up time.
Shopify comes with dedicated personal support via phone, email, and live chat so you can bother their staff 24/7. Woo Commerce doesn’t have any official support unless you purchase a Woo Theme and it relies on its large community of geeks. There are plenty of forums with guides and technical steps by steps.
- Shopify vs Woo-commerce Prices
Woo-commerce pricing is the cheapest option, as it is a 0$ price tag. But once you start adding extra features like web hosting ($5-15 per month), the domain name ( around $10 per year), premium themes ($59 one-time), plug-ins and custom coding it can quickly become a money pit. You could even easily end up spending more than with the Shopify plans which are respectively $ 29/month
for basic Shopify, $79/month for Shopify (Standard), and $299/month for Advanced Shopify. It is worth noting that you get a tiny discount if you plan on paying for more than a year at once
In the end, choosing one from Shopify vs Woo-commerce which is better? Is based on your needs, there are plenty of scenarios when WooCommerce would be the better choice if you are already using WordPress and you are completely in love with it and its plugins, need multilingual support, want to squeeze the last bit of SEO juice out of your store. You don’t care about speed or scaling and just need the cheapest available option.
So if you want to build a highly lucrative online business empire, then reach out to us, we would be delighted to help you.