If you aim to thrive in the ecommerce industry but still use WooCommerce, you’re missing out. In recent years, Shopify has made a huge leap into achieving the best conversions in online retail ever. Plus, the Shopify team releases its updates with the merchant’s convenience in mind, which makes it among the best platforms for selling goods and services.
This article proves these statements based on the advantages and disadvantages of Shopify and WooCommerce. However, it’s up to you which platform to choose – WooCommerce or Shopify.
What is Shopify?
Shopify is a leading ecommerce platform allowing easy setup even for non-technical merchants. It’s a fully-hosted platform, which means you don’t need to bother about choosing an additional hosting provider. It also offers many other features out of the box, like SEO, marketing, sales, and security functions.
To leverage Shopify’s advanced features without losing your WooCommerce data, try WooCommerce to Shopify migration with experienced developers.
What is WooCommerce?
WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin with ecommerce capabilities. Just like with any WordPress website, to start your online store, you need to purchase a domain and hosting services, choose a free or paid WooCommerce theme, and add quite a lot of plugins to make your website work properly.
WooCommerce vs. Shopify
According to Statista, Shopify has a larger market share than WooCommerce among websites with over ten thousand, hundred thousand, and one million traffic. Meanwhile, WooCommerce has a larger overall market share. This might mean that established and growing companies prefer Shopify as their ecommerce platform, while businesses that are just starting their ecommerce business often opt for WooCommerce.
Let’s compare these platforms based on their features.
Easy of use
As it’s been said, Shopify is much easier to set up and use than WooCommerce. It has an intuitive dashboard, provides a comprehensive onboarding process, and leverages a drag-and-drop theme editor for making changes to your storefront.
WooCommerce requires familiarity with WordPress products; without prior knowledge, the setup process can be time-consuming. This can make it less appealing to novice online merchants looking for a straightforward solution.
Cost
Shopify has multiple subscription plans. Shopify Basic starts from $24/month and includes the full set of features, including SSL certificate and ecommerce automation. If you wish to extend your store’s functionality, you can additionally install free or paid Shopify apps.
Shopify transaction fees range from 2% for the Basic plan to 0.2% with Shopify Plus.
WooCommerce has no subscription fee, which is why many startups initially choose this platform. However, you need to purchase a hosting service starting from $5/month and some essential plugins, like a security package, which costs from $9 to $20 per month. These extra costs add up, potentially making WooCommerce a more expensive option.
WooCommerce transaction fees depend on a payment gateway and start from 2.9% and $0.30 per transaction.
Marketing features
Shopify offers in-built marketing features, such as email marketing solutions, marketing automation, analytics with over 60 reports, and more.
WooCommerce requires integrating third-party services and plugins to extend its marketing functionality.
Sales features
In the Shopify dashboard, you will find multiple sales channels for promoting your products on social media and online marketplaces. It also includes profound shipping and payment solutions for customer convenience.
WooCommerce provides shipping, order, and payment options, which sometimes require the installation of additional plugins.
Scalability
Shopify and WooCommerce are both scalable platforms. However, in the latter case, your scalability opportunities depend on your hosting provider as well. The more powerful hosting you need, the more it will cost you. Shopify, on the other hand, allows for easy scalability, and if you need more capacity, you can just switch to a higher Shopify plan.
Integrations
If necessary, you can extend Shopify’s functionality with apps and third-party add-ons. The Shopify store has a vast library of free and paid apps.
WooCommerce also offers many plugins and extensions that you can install for free or at a cost.
Security
Shopify provides in-built basic security, including secure user browsing and protection from fraud.
WooCommerce security depends on the plugins you install. Some of them, like All In One WP Security & Firewall, provide really solid protection. You can also get additional security layers through your hosting provider.
Support
Shopify provides round-the-clock support via email, phone, and chat. You can also easily find answers to your questions in the Shopify community and forums.
Although WooCommerce doesn’t offer customer support, its specialized forums contain a lot of information.
Conclusions
What’s your choice after reading this post: Shopify or WooCommerce?
By choosing Shopify, you have many more options out of the box and more time to develop your business instead of solving technical problems, as well as an opportunity to scale at any time you want. WooCommerce, on the other hand, provides free access to its platform and more freedom for experimentation since it’s a self-hosted platform with a massive base of plugins. That’s why beginners in ecommerce sometimes choose WooCommerce. However, they often switch to Shopify once they value their time.
