Shopify and WooCommerce are the two most popular e-commerce platforms right now.
Shopify boasts itself as the out-of-the-box e-commerce solution.
WooCommerce builds upon the biggest content management system (CMS) in the world: WordPress.
WooCommerce is an e-commerce plugin for WordPress. It is not a standalone e-commerce platform.
In fact, WooCommerce is owned by the creators of WordPress.
What are the differences between these two?
And which one should you choose for your online store?
After reading this article, you’ll be able to tell which solution is best for you.
So, let’s get started.
Shopify vs. WooCommerce: Fees
There are three popular Shopify plans:
- Basic Shopify at $29/month
- Shopify at $79/month
- Advanced Shopify at $299/month
These are the popular Shopify plans.
The plan you choose will greatly depend on your needs.
All the three plans let you add unlimited number of products to your store. The file storage capacity for each is unlimited.
However, if you want fraud analysis from Shopify, professional reports, and the abandoned cart recovery functionality, you’ll need to upgrade to Shopify or Advanced Shopify.
There’s also another Shopify plans called Shopify Plus and Shopify Lite.
Shopify Lite is the lowest plan on the Shopify e-commerce platform. It allows you to sell your product on social media. The cost is $9/month.
Shopify Plus is for big enterprises that receive hundreds of thousands of orders per week. The price for Shopify Plus isn’t available because it will have to be custom-built for interested users.
Basic Shopify or Advanced Shopify is enough to get you started on the Shopify platform.
WooCommerce is an open source software that is available for use on WordPress for free.
Here’s the link to install the WooCommerce software on the WordPress platform.
What are the fees associated with using WooCommerce?
Before you can use WooCommerce, first you’ll have to host your WordPress site with a reputable web host.
I won’t be recommending any web host because there are lots of them out there to choose from.
No web hosting service will give you unlimited file storage.
Price varies based on the quality of the web hosting service.
Shopify wins here because they take care of web hosting for you. You don’t have to worry about the reputation of any web host and the quality of their service because Shopify is also the web host provider.
Shopify vs. WooCommerce: Setting Up Your Online Store
After installing WordPress on your web host, you’ll have to set up your WordPress site.
When you’ve done that, you can now install the WooCommerce plugin on your WordPress site.
The next step would be to activate the plugin.
WooCommerce has an Onboarding wizard that will take you through the set-up process.
In this set-up process, you’ll be able to select the default currency for your store, the city where your store is located, and how you want to be paid.
Setting up your store on Shopify is super easy.
Shopify has a guide to take you through the process.
Shopify has other guides on topics like “Store Management,” dealing with taxes, shipping, analytics, and customers on the Shopify platform.
Shopify vs. WooCommerce: Adding your first product
If you’ve decided on the product to sell, it’s time to start adding your products to your e-commerce platform of choice.
How do you go about that if you’ve chosen Shopify?
Shopify has a video on how to go about doing this. The video will only take you 3:36 minutes to watch.
By watching the above video, you’ll see that adding your first product to Shopify is easy.
You need a product title. That is the name of your product, of course.
You need a product description, explaining what the product does and more details about it.
There’s also a place to upload the product image to Shopify.
Other details such as prices, product color and sizes should be included.
The more visitors know about your product, the better it’ll sell.
Adding product details on WooCommerce is also easy like Shopify.
If you’ve been using WordPress for awhile, you’ll find it even easier than beginners.
Adding a product on WooCommerce is like publishing a new blog post on WordPress.
Just like Shopify, you can enter your product title, description, images and other unique data.
And keep in mind that you need more than just product details to convert visitors.
Most shoppers are unlikely to convert in their first visits.
That is why you need OmniKick.
OmniKick helps you effectively collect shoppers’ email addresses and get them to follow you on social media.
Sign up today to see how it works. It’s free to start using OmniKick.
Shopify vs. WooCommerce: Using Payment Gateways
What is payment gateway?
According to Wikipedia:
“A payment gateway is a merchant service provided by an e-commerce application service provider that authorizes credit card or direct payments processing for e-businesses, online retailers, bricks and clicks, or traditional brick and mortar.”
Payment gateways let you receive payments from shoppers on your online store while ensuring security.
Currently, there are 95 payment gateways available on the WooCommerce platform.
Authorize.Net and Stripe are my favorite payment gateways.
Shopify has their own default payment service called Shopify Payments.
But they also allow their users to use third-party payment gateways.
PayPal, Stripe, Authorize.Net, 2CheckOut, and Amazon Payments are the most popular payment gateways on Shopify.
Shopify offers over 100 payment gateways compared to 95 offered by WooCommerce.
But you don’t need lots of payment gateways. You are only going to be using one.
Shopify offers you more options to choose from, but it doesn’t really matter.
Comparing Shopify Apps to WooCommerce Extensions
Apps or extensions let you extend the functionality of your online store.
They are called “apps” on Shopify and “extensions” on WooCommerce.
The Shopify App Store has over 1,200 apps.
There are apps for product sourcing, marketing, sales, social media marketing, shipping, inventory, accounting, customer service, reporting – almost anything that makes your store run smoothly and helps you sell more.
Here are some really cool Shopify apps and what they do:
- Oberlo: A marketplace of products you can import directly into your Shopify store. You receive an order and Oberlo ships it for you.
- MailChimp for Shopify: MailChimp is one of the most popular email automation and marketing services. This app lets you integrate your MailChimp account with Shopify.
- Order Printer: Quickly and easily print receipts, invoices, labels and packing slips with this app.
- Product Reviews: Allows you to collect and display customer reviews on your product pages.
- : This app lets you display your free shipping offer in a slide-out bar and show progressive messages when customers put more items in their shopping carts.
These are just a few Shopify apps that can help you create a profitable online store. There are many others.
Extensions are WooCommerce’s versions of WordPress plugins.
Here are some wonderful WooCommerce extensions that make the platform an ideal place to run an online store:
- Metrilo: This extension provides you marketing metrics to make informed marketing decisions. It puts all your WooCommerce metrics in one place. Examples of metrics are One-time buyers vs. Returning, Cart abandonment rate, Average number of orders per customer, Revenue per visitor, Average order value, and a lot more.
- YITH WooCommerce Zoom Magnifier: This extension shows a bigger size of your product image when shoppers mouse over it.
- WooCommerce Currency Switcher: Allows shoppers to switch to different currencies and convert prices in real time.
- ShipStation Integration: This extension helps you ship faster—and cheaper—with branding tools that will wow your shoppers.
- WooCommerce Google Analytics: As you may already know, Google Analytics is the world’s most popular marketing analytics tool. This extension lets you use Google Analytics on WooCommerce.
Both Shopify and WooCommerce offer amazing apps and extensions that will help you sell more on your online store.
In this section, I don’t think there’s any winner. They both work incredibly well.
Shopify vs. WooCommerce: Designs
Most e-commerce newcomers tend to focus on other aspects of the business and completely ignore design.
They believe that if they have a great product or offer a better service, and get traffic to their sites, consumers will just start buying from them.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way.
Design is a big part of e-commerce. Design is something you should be willing to invest in. Design is something you should pay attention to when building your store.
A bad design won’t help visitors convert. It will turn them away.
Web shoppers value design a lot these days.
It tells them a lot about an e-commerce site.
Both Shopify and WooCommerce have great themes that will make shoppers stick on your online store.
Below is a great Shopify theme.
Can you see how cool and neat it is?
And below is the Bazar Shop, a WooCommerce theme I like a lot.
There are lots of talented web designers out there making amazing themes for Shopify and WooCommerce.
So, when it comes to themes, there’s no winner between both.
Shopify vs. WooCommerce: Comparing Both Through Web Performance
This is where the Shopify vs. WooCommerce debate becomes interesting.
Performance is an important factor when choosing between Shopify and WooCommerce.
Many new e-commerce entrepreneurs find it difficult to choose which one is better when it comes to performance.
After reading this, you’ll know which is the right choice for you when considering performance.
First, Shopify is easy to use and set up.
One of the reasons why it’s easy to use is because you don’t have to worry about performance. Everything is taken care of by Shopify.
Shopify ensures that your site is always available.
They have the infrastructure to make sure that people can buy your products with zero issues.
It’s their platform. They protect it.
This is very different with WooCommerce, where you have to find a reputable web hosting provider for your WordPress site before installing WooCommerce on it.
You have to take care of HTTPs, making sure that your URL has “https” in front of it to provide security and data encryption to shoppers.
This is the reason some people choose Shopify over WooCommerce.
If you’re less technical, then Shopify is the best platform for you when it comes to performance.
But if you’ve been using WordPress before now, then WooCommerce is perfect for you.
Why?
Because WooCommerce offers much more freedom than Shopify.
You can do a lot more things with the WordPress ecosystem than you are allowed to on Shopify.
With WooCommerce, the sky is your limit.
It can be extremely frustrating if you’re not technical and decided to jump on WordPress.
When it comes to performance, I can do a lot of things Shopify doesn’t allow.
Some little things you can do on WordPress and WooCommerce that will make your site faster and more efficient.
Here’s my advice to anyone finding it difficult to choose between these two:
If you’re new to web technologies, start with Shopify.
If you’ve been working on web technologies and are familiar with WordPress, HTML, CSS, HTTPS, then start with WooCommerce.
WooCommerce lets you use your experience to create something better and faster.
Stores Using Shopify and WooCommerce
Let’s check some nice online stores using Shopify.
Negative Underwear is powered by Shopify.
The company’s goal is to help women feel confident in their own bodies. They don’t want to rely on push-up pads or bows for women to feel sexy.
And it must be working for them since this Shopify store’s revenue grew 150% just a few years after they launched.
Taylor Stitch is another favorite Shopify store of mine.
Over the years, Taylor Stitch’s customers have shared amazing stories and pictures from fly fishing trips, motorcycles crashes, hurricane cleanups, and wedding days.
Since the launch of the store, their revenue has tripled each year. Just three years after their launch, the company made $1.5 million in sales and is continuing to grow since then.
Now, let’s talk about stores using WooCommerce.
GhostBed Mattress uses WooCommerce to power their store.
Marc Werner launched the GhostBed mattress brand, so consumers can skip the showroom and find their perfect mattresses online without ever leaving home! WooCommerce makes this possible.
Dinesen also uses WooCommerce for their online store.
Dinesen is a family-owned Danish wooden flooring company, and today they ship their products worldwide from Copenhagen, Denmark.
Shopify and WooCommerce are both amazing. Offline and digital-based brands are using them to power their stores.
Both Shopify and WooCommerce dropshipping is also very easy to set up.
When it comes to choosing between Shopify and WooCommerce, both do nice jobs and have cool features any e-commerce business owners want.
Conclusion
Shopify and WooCommerce are amazing e-commerce platforms that let you start an online store where you can sell anything to anywhere in the world.
But to really achieve extraordinary success, you need a lead generation and growth tool like OmniKick.
OmniKick lets you collect emails on your store and increase your following on social media.
Sign up for OmniKick today. It’s free.
This is a really great take on the two platforms, in fact one of the best I’ve read. Thanks for taking the time to research thoroughly and produce something useful to people trying to choose the right platform.