In an age where hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent on eCommerce, it’s not surprising that there are many options out there for you to choose from. Choosing the right platform for your eCommerce store can be a daunting task. It is challenging to know which platform will be best for your business with so many options available. In this article, we’ll compare the two most popular eCommerce platforms for building your own online store: Shopify and Woocommerce. We’ll look at the pros & cons of each and help you decide which is best for your needs before your buy.
What is Shopify?
Shopify is a leading eCommerce platform that powers the world’s best entrepreneurs in retail, wholesale, manufacturing, food service, and more. From graphic design to inventory management to customer service, Shopify offers everything an entrepreneur needs to succeed. Shopify also provides a complete commerce solution with apps, eCommerce software, and mobile commerce platform to help businesses succeed. Shopify powers more than 500,000 online stores. It has clever marketing tools that help out with SEO, design, customer service, and inventory management. The site is also great for collecting payment information through Shopify’s built-in payment system.
What is WooCommerce?
Woocommerce is a free plugin of WordPress that allows users to create their own e-commerce website by integrating it with their existing WordPress site. It can make a shopping cart within a single domain and offers a variety of features such as products, orders, customers, and many other options. The platform has over 10 million downloads on the WordPress Plugin Directory and more than 500,000 active installations. WooCommerce is also designed to integrate seamlessly with WordPress, making it simple for non-technical users to set up their own online stores that are powered by the world’s most popular content management system (CMS).
1) Cost
Shopify
The Shopify app is a little expensive, but it makes up for the price by being easier to use. Shopify Basic starts at $29/month, and Shopify Plus starts at $79/month. You can also sign up for a free Shopify account, but if you want to use the app’s more advanced features, you’ll have to upgrade to a paid plan.
WooCommerce
If you need a free, open-source solution, then WooCommerce might be the right choice for you. It is built on PHP & MySQL and is fully customizable. Obviously, it is loaded with fewer features, and you need to have good technical knowledge for operating your eCommerce site over WooCommerce.
Winner: WooCommerce
2) Ease of Use
Shopify
Shopify has drag-and-drop building, which means you can create your site in minutes. You don’t need to be a programmer or designer to make edits either. The dashboard is more straightforward and includes:
- A robust CRM module.
- Easy-to-build custom checkout pages.
- The ability to add video tours of your store on your homepage.
Shopify is a lot easier to use for beginners. The interface is intuitive, and the platform offers more free templates. It also has more detailed help articles, which means that you can get started without reading through several different tutorials. Shopify provides a broader range of customization options for those who need them. In March 2018, Shopify released a new app called Shopify POS. This new POS brings the power of Shopify to your physical stores with all the features you need to manage sales, inventory, and customer relationships. Your entire store’s data will sync automatically with your online store.
WooCommerce
In comparison to Shopify, Woocommerce seems clunky with a cluttered interface that’s not as user-friendly. Woocommerce is more complicated to learn than Shopify. For example, tons of features are hidden behind the scenes on WooCommerce versus being visible on Shopify. You’ll have to spend a lot of time browsing through the back-end of the website to figure out how everything works, which can be frustrating for newcomers who don’t have any experience with coding. Woocommerce is suitable for you if you have the ability to add a variety of different features, from widgets and shortcodes to menus and custom sidebar setups.
Winner: Shopify
3) Performance
Shopify
Shopify offers fantastic performance because it stores live data directly on its servers. This means that there is no delay in loading pages, and the site loads almost instantly. The downside to this is that you are limited to this volume of traffic. You can create products and immediately post them or edit them on the fly. Thanks to its responsive design, the Shopify app looks great on any device. For instance, it’s designed to be displayed beautifully on your smartphone so you can take it with you as you go about your day and place orders as they come up.
WooCommerce
Woocommerce is not nearly as fast or reliable as Shopify, but it may be sufficient for low-volume stores on shared hosting. WooCommerce has a higher load time than Shopify. A WooCommerce store loads in about 10 seconds, whereas a Shopify store loads in under 5 seconds. The performance of WooCommerce is not as stable as Shopify. Also, because Shopify offers an integrated credit card processor, it offers lower rates than Woocommerce. The site runs faster and more reliably with less stress on the server.
Winner: Shopify
4) Scalability
Shopify
Shopify offers excellent scalability, which is essential if you’re looking to grow your business. If you ever need more than the 200k monthly visitors that Shopify’s free package offers, then the enterprise plan provides higher limits. Shopify offers unlimited bandwidth and unlimited storage space. You can add a total number of products and inventory items to your store, and you’ll never have to worry about running out of reach. The Shopify Publishing platform includes a wide variety of flexible shopping features such as Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel integration, and more.
WooCommerce
Woocommerce also offers unlimited stores, but there is no limit on monthly visitors. It’s been proven that WooCommerce offers a lot more power and flexibility for those who want to customize their online store, but it lacks the scalability of Shopify. In other words, you would eventually need to upgrade your hosting plan on WooCommerce if you want to have many clients or sell a lot of products on your website.
Winner: Shopify
5) Payment Methods
Shopify
This is one of the defining reasons why merchants are choosing Shopify over other eCommerce systems. Shopify has several different payment methods that you can choose from. Shopify, unlike Woocommerce, offers the ability to accept payments through cards, PayPal, Stripe, and Apple Pay. You can use Shopify Payments, their own payment processing system, or use a third-party processor like Stripe. These services are easy to set up, and they come with fraud protection, fraud detection, and chargebacks built-in.
WooCommerce
There are two different options for processing payments in WooCommerce. The first is by using an “external” plugin that allows you to pay with a credit card, PayPal, etc. The second is by connecting your store to a third-party payment processor. The downside to this method is the fee that will be charged for each transaction processed. You can use PayPal and Stripe and many other methods such as Amazon Pay, Google Wallet, Skrill (Moneybookers), and even Bitcoin.
Winner: Tie
6) Support Options
Shopify
Shopify offers live chat and email support. The live chat has a wait time of 7 seconds on average, with the longest wait time being 27 minutes. They also do not charge for any support. Woocommerce does not have a live chat, but they have a forum where users can get help from other members, which is free. However, they do offer premium support for a fee of $9 per month or $99 per year, which entitles customers to unlimited phone, ticket, and email support.
WooCommerce
WooCommerce has a ton of free documentation to help get your store up and running. The WooCommerce support team is available every day, so it’s an excellent choice if you need installation help or have questions about how products work. You can find more information on the Woocommerce forums, but it’s not an official support option.
Winner: Tie
7) SEO Friendliness
Shopify
Shopify is a platform that’s well equipped for SEO. It automatically makes your store maps and web pages readable by bots and crawlers, which means you’ll rank higher in search engines and get more traffic to your site. You can also use Google Shopping to show products on Google Shopping Search Results, allowing you to tap into the world’s largest search engine and boost your sales. Plus, it’s easy to use with no coding required. Woocommerce also has an SEO-friendly system that lets you customize the URLs of your products and blog posts.
WooCommerce
WooCommerce can be a bit overwhelming for beginners as there are a lot of settings to configure. If you insist on using WooCommerce, make sure you hire someone who knows how to optimize your site for search engines.
Winner: Shopify
Conclusion
We have compared Shopify vs Woocommerce, two of the most popular eCommerce platforms in the world. We looked at features, pricing, and other aspects in order to determine which one is better. Overall, when it comes to ease-of-use, performance, payment method, security, scalability and SEO friendliness, Shopify is the best choice. If you want to build your own eCommerce store on these platforms, you can take help from WooCommerce or Shopify development companies in India.
