Shopify vs WooCommerce - Which E-commerce Platform is Best?

Let’s take a peek at the Pros and Cons of both Shopify and WooCommerce:

Shopify and WooCommerce are similar in their purpose but greatly differ in their process and philosophy.

Out of the box, Shopify is one of the most robust and sophisticated e-commerce platforms in the world. With the utility that Shopify brings, it's no wonder that over 4,000,000 merchants keep their stores on Shopify.

While some developers may find the platform limiting because they can’t modify it completely, people without a technical background love it for its simplicity and intuitiveness.

Simply put, Shopify trades away some flexibility for ease of use and reliability. It’s like bowling with bumpers. Moreover, Shopify’s quality control extends to every part of its ecosystem, namely its themes and apps.

WooCommerce is one of the most popular e-commerce plugins for the open-source website builder WordPress. In terms of popularity, there are over 4,000,000 stores supported by WooCommerce.

Since there is no centralized quality control, each plugin you install is maintained by different developers, which means there are differences in the quality, support, maintenance, and security of each plugin.

Setting up an online store on your WordPress site with WooCommerce is incredibly rewarding as you get total creative freedom to customize every bit of your store.

Moreover, you can save some money as WooCommerce is technically free and you can find most of the extensions you need to get started for free.

• With Shopify, you can get your store set up and running in less than a day, especially if you know what you're doing.
  
  You don't need to worry about separate domains, hosting, SSL, or other compliance protocols, as Shopify does them for you automatically.
  
  Out of the box, Shopify comes with an intuitive admin panel that lets you customize your store's design and functionalities, manage your products and orders, start selling across multiple channels, and much more from the get-go.

• Moreover, Shopify takes care of all updates of your themes and plugins and ensures they never break your store.
  
  Its robust inventory management features allow you to track stock, manage product variants, and organize inventory levels and sales trends.
  
  Overall, you need zero coding skills to set up and scale your store on Shopify.

• With WooCommerce, you have to configure your domain and web hosting from a separate provider. Then, you’ll need to get an SSL certificate for your site.
  
  Afterward, you’ll have to install WordPress.org and then download the WooCommerce extension. Only then can you start configuring your store.

• Keep in mind, that you'll likely have to add extra plugins and integrate them into your store to get the functionalities you want.
  
  However, ensuring all plugins with their varying versions are working without breaking your store, in the long run, is a separate task on its own.

Popular ecommerce platforms like WooCommerce and Shopify have different pricing models. WooCommerce is technically free, while Shopify has a monthly subscription cost. However, the picture is more nuanced than that.

Moreover, you’ll face extra card processing fees depending on your payment processor and the market you’re selling to. However, these processing fees are a staple of the world of commerce.

In combination, these factors make it somewhat tricky to properly budget what WooCommerce is costing you. Moreover, while you’re likely to save some money with WooCommerce compared to Shopify, you’re also likely to pay extra with your time.

Shopify requires a paid monthly subscription for its platform. The amount you pay depends on the exact plan you select, as each successive one brings more powerful features and benefits that larger businesses can leverage.

Here are their prices at a glance:

* Shopify Starter doesn’t allow you to build an entire store, but you can hook your social media with Shopify’s backend to start selling directly from your social media profiles. Shopify Plus is an enterprise solution for high-volume merchants.

Realistically, most merchants can get everything they need from the Shopify Basic, Shopify, and Shopify Advanced plans. For more details about each plan, you can read up on Shopify pricing.

If you aren’t sure whether Shopify is worth it, you can get started with a 3-day free trial, no credit card required. This won’t allow you to actually sell products, but you’ll be able to try out Shopify’s features and admin panel. After this, you can get a one-time $1 for three months deal where you can use the platform to its fullest and decide if it fits you.

This difference in numbers comes from the fact that thousands of independent developers can create and share their themes on WordPress, without any verification or quality control process.

Whereas on Shopify, there is a strict centralized vetting process for creating and uploading a theme. 

The result is that Shopify themes usually have a more polished feel than those on WordPress, which improves your conversion rates and overall sales.

WordPress themes can also work fine, but you’ll need a bit of elbow grease to make them work the way you want.

Selecting a theme that’s right for you is much easier with Shopify, thanks to the filtering options at Shopify Themes.

You can search for themes by price, industry, catalog size, and features. On WordPress, you have to preview and explore each theme manually. 

Buying a Shopify theme is a one-off payment and can set you back anywhere between $140 to $400 dollars. However, it’s not at all required if you just want to get started and explore the platform.

Moreover, professional Shopify developers can leverage your free theme and customize it for you, if you need a more specific solution as your store grows. 

• When it comes to raw customization options, WooCommerce comes ahead of Shopify, since it’s open source and you can customize all of its aspects fully. 

• While this flexibility gives you total creative freedom, it does come with added instability, so you need to have a sophisticated development skillset to leverage it fully. 

• The difference is that on WooCommerce you have to rely on extra plugins for every small operation, while Shopify has an impressive range of marketing and features that you can take advantage of in a few clicks.

• Adding extra plugins to your store is bad because it decreases your performance and slows your website down. Moreover, they can cost you money, and the more plugins you have, the more things you need to pay attention to for maintenance.

Even the Shopify Basic plan comes with powerful features like abandoned cart recovery, discount codes, social media and email integrations for multichannel selling, and much more.

Moreover, Shopify boasts the best-performing checkout in the world, and every element in its themes is built for conversions, which amplifies the effect of its sales and marketing features on your business even further.

With WooCommerce you can theoretically have the same marketing and sales features, but you’ll have to work much harder to integrate them into your store, which slows down your time to market, pushes up your costs, and eats from your margins.

The Shopify App Store currently has over 8,000 apps, while WooCommerce has access to over 55,000 WordPress plugins.

However, just like with the themes, there is an argument to be made in favor of Shopify. While their apps and add-ons are fewer, all of them are vetted for quality and will never break your store.

Whereas in WordPress, everyone is free to develop whatever plugin they desire, regardless of how it will impact your store.

With some coding prowess, you can adjust your WordPress themes to work with your WooCommerce store just fine. However, with Shopify, you can integrate any app you want with a few clicks.

However, the issue of supporting and maintaining apps or extensions is solved better on Shopify, thanks to their centralized quality control and built-in robustness.

When it comes to the sheer scale of available payment processors, WooCommerce blows Shopify out of the water. However, Shopify features its proprietary payment processor that has some of the best payment processing fees in the world.

Let’s take a look at the cost of Shopify Payments in the US market:

However, if you don’t use Shopify Payments, you will be subject to an extra transaction fee for each order, which gets lower, the more advanced your plan is.

On WooCommerce, there aren’t any transaction fees, but you’ll still have to pay a card processing fee that depends on your payment processor.

Overall, it’s clear that even with Shopify’s extra transaction fees, your total processing fees are still very competitive and even lower than those of Square and Paypal, if you use their more advanced plans.

However, WooCommerce gives you the option to integrate many smaller, locally relevant processors worldwide in order to elevate the purchasing experience for customers.

Both WooCommerce and Shopify allow you to manage your inventory, storage, fulfillment, and shipping and set custom rules for them.

However, Shopify is one step ahead with the utility it provides with programs like Shopify Markets and the Shopify Fulfillment Network. 

Shopify Markets allows you to include shipping taxes and tariffs directly into your product prices automatically, regardless of your visitors’ location.

Moreover, you can set up delivery times to show under your product, which greatly elevates the shopping experience. However, you need to use Shopify Payments to be able to use Shopify Markets. 

• The Shopify Fulfillment Network takes things even further and completely handles the storage, packaging, fulfillment, and shipping of your products. While this brings a lot of extra costs, it takes one of the most stressful parts of commerce completely out of your hands.

• With WooCommerce, you can also automate many of your shipping and logistics processes with third-party extensions but not to the same extent as with Shopify’s Fulfillment Network.

Both WooCommerce and Shopify can support your paid advertising efforts and allow you to take total control over how you drive traffic.

However, with WooCommerce every small operation requires a different plugin.

For example, you’ll need a different plugin for tracking conversions, managing ad pixels, creating landing pages, and optimizing product feeds.

As mentioned above, the more plugins you have, the slower your store, and the more complicated maintenance becomes.

Moreover, you can track all of your campaign results in real-time and implement A/B tests to improve conversions even more.

And don’t forget that your Shopify store is backed by the best-converting checkout in the world.

WooCommerce has an edge over Shopify when it comes to SEO.

While the platforms are identical in some of their SEO aspects, WooCommerce is far ahead in Technical SEO and backend customizations, due to its open-source nature.

Some of these opportunities are off-limits in Shopify.

As with the other features, most of Shopify’s are built in from the start and easily available. In contrast, WooCommerce SEO functionalities have to be added with plugins and depend on your theme. However, you can work around any limitations by changing the code yourself.

Overall, the SEO differences between the two platforms aren’t dramatic for your business outcomes. Simply put, WooCommerce gives you extra flexibility to tailor your SEO elements to fit a more sophisticated strategy. But Shopify’s basic SEO is still solid.

• Shopify has an award-winning customer support team that’s available 24/7 via phone, chat, email, or social media.
  
  They are great for providing advice on technical issues, marketing, sales, and anything Shopify-related.

• WooCommerce has a technical support team that’s available through a ticket system but their efficiency is limited since they aren’t responsible for the support of all the themes and plugins that might cause you problems.
  
  They can still point you in the right way, but the nature of WordPress makes it harder for them to have an impact.

WooCommerce is a better choice for tech-savvy owners who desire total control and creative freedom or businesses that need to implement very custom logic in their store.

However, Shopify is our overall recommended choice for small and mid-sized businesses that value their time and want to focus on scaling their operations without technical hindrances.

Shopify equips them with all the tools they need to sell at scale from the get-go without having a technical background.

Out of the two, Shopify offers much greater utility to e-commerce businesses at every step of the shopping journey with just a few clicks.

While the platform may seem limiting in some aspects, you can hire professional Shopify designers and developers who can transform your e-commerce dreams into reality.