Shopify vs WordPress - Which One is Better for Your E-commerce Business?

Choosing the right ecommerce platform is essential to start your business journey on the right foot.

Whether Shopify or WordPress is better for you depends on a variety of factors. These include your business needs, budget, technical prowess, and other project limitations.

Keep in mind, that it’s not always about how hard you row, but the boat you’re in, so making an informed decision about using Shopify vs WordPress is essential.

In this article, we’ll compare the two based on their ease of use, pricing, customization options, e-commerce functionalities, and more. So let’s dive in.

In this section, we’ll compare specific aspects of Shopify and WordPress directly, so you can get a better grasp of each platform’s advantages and disadvantages.

You can get your Shopify store started in a matter of days, or even hours if you have a good idea of what you want and how to do it.

With Shopify, you don't need coding knowledge to manage your own e-commerce store, products, orders, and e-commerce operations.

Moreover, their customer support is available 24/7 and ready to help if you face any issues.

Then, you’ll need to install themes and plugins like Woocommerce to give it e-commerce functionalities.

Afterward, you’ll have to configure your plugins to process orders and payments.

In Shopify’s case, you can just use your main admin panel and set your preferences with a few clicks and you’re good to go.

In essence, WordPress is free to use. Note that we’re referring to WordPress.org and not WordPress.com which has paid plans.

Here are Shopify’s paid plans at a glance:

Read more about Shopify Pricing in 2024.

Moreover, Shopify has extra transaction fees for each order that your store processes. These include a card processing fee and an extra transaction fee if you aren’t using Shopify payments.

In comparison, WordPress does not have direct e-commerce costs or functionalities but relies mostly on WooCommerce instead.

It’s important to understand that the card processing fee is not unique to Shopify but a universal commercial practice.

Even if you use Stripe or any other secure payment processing provider with WordPress, you'll still be charged a card processing fee.

However, the extra transaction fees for not using Shopify Payments are unique to Shopify.

The exact amount of fees you pay depends on your subscription plan.

The end result is that the more products you sell, the bigger your Shopify bill becomes, and the more incentivized you are to upgrade to a higher plan.

It’s important to know that WordPress also has processing fees, depending on the processor. Moreover, these depend on whether the sale happens inside or outside the US. Often, their fees are higher than Shopify’s.

Here's an example of Paypal's payment processing fees:

Table Source

At a glance, Shopify has a few hundred themes, compared to the thousands of WordPress themes available. However, having more themes doesn’t necessarily mean they’re better.

All of Shopify’s themes are vetted through a strict process, whereas WordPress themes aren’t vetted at all.

Moreover, all theme updates are inspected by Shopify to ensure they’re secure and work as intended. Usually, when WordPress themes and plugins get updated they break your store.

However, when it comes to diversity and the raw amount of options available, WordPress is a step ahead.

WordPress plugins, such as WooCommerce, offer numerous payment gateway options and various marketing tools like email marketing, social media integration, SEO capabilities, and cybersecurity features.

But taking advantage of this diversity requires caution, extra maintenance, and some technical expertise.

WordPress is a content managing system (CMS) at its core, while Shopify originated as an e-commerce platform.

However, as of 2021, Shopify also has advanced CMS functionalities while retaining an edge over WordPress with regard to sales and marketing functionalities.

For example, with its many apps, Shopify allows you almost limitless opportunities to upsell, cross-sell, multi-channel promotions, visitor behavior tracking, and much more across various online marketplaces.

Shopify comes with all the marketing, shipping, inventory, and analytical tools that you need built-in. Some of its most liked features include abandoned cart recovery, discount codes, and multi-channel integrations.

Note, that both Shopify and WordPress (through WooCommerce) let you:

• Sell products

• Change shipping rates

• Create product variations and personalizations

• Run discounts and promotions

• Process payments securely

• Create and accept gift cards

• Generate automatic or manual tax rates

• Include cross-sell and upsell functionality

The main difference is that everything e-commerce-related in Shopify is easier to set up, whereas WordPress requires a bit of technical expertise.

Both WordPress and Shopify use third-party software to extend their functionality, with a WordPress site you leverage from tens of thousands of independently developed addons with varying quality.

In Shopify, you get access to the Shopify App Store, which has over 8,000 vetted apps, dedicated to e-commerce.

If you wish to customize your store’s functionality, in both cases you’ll need to integrate third-party plugins or apps into your store.

In both cases, they can be either free or paid, so you’ll have to check them out one by one.

Both WordPress and Shopify give your ecommerce store the ability to integrate hundreds of internationally recognized payment processors, including all of the most famous ones like PayPal, Stripe, Square, Amazon Pay, and Apple Pay.

However, Shopify also has its own payment processing gateway called Shopify Payments.

Merchants are incentivized to use Shopify Payments, as they won’t be charged a transaction fee if they do.

WordPress also doesn’t have a transaction fee.

A caveat with Shopify Payments is that it’s available only in certain countries.

Thus, many Shopify merchants are forced to pay up to 2% transaction fees, depending on their plan.

Both WordPress (through WooCommerce) and Shopify provide excellent options for managing, fulfilling, and shipping orders. Setting up an ecommerce WordPress site involves integrating various plugins to achieve these functions, which can be more complex compared to Shopify.

Shopify offers integrated shipping solutions that enable you to sell and ship internationally while managing tariffs and taxes automatically. Moreover, you can set custom rules for fulfillment, shipping rates, and more with a few clicks.

With WordPress, you can get the same functions, but you’ll need a dedicated developer to correctly integrate different plugins into one coherent solution.

Shopify’s paid advertising features include built-in pixels, tracking scripts, and more, which are instrumental for tracking user behavior and the results of your PPC campaigns.

Moreover, Shopify offers a great degree of customization that boosts your conversions even more, through its App Store.

Furthermore, Shopify has the world’s best-converting store checkout, which means a higher ROI on your PPC campaigns than WordPress.

WordPress can be also augmented to include these features, but this requires some coding and playing around with plugins, which is drastically more complicated than Shopify’s solution which generally requires a few clicks.

In particular, Shopify forces you to follow a particular structure with your URLs, which in some scenarios can be a drawback. In WordPress, you are free to set URLs in any way you want.

Again, there is a difference in how the two platforms present their SEO tools to you.

Shopify has most of its SEO functionalities built-in out of the box, while WordPress requires you to select a particular theme and add a SEO plugin like Yoast SEO, which is also available for Shopify users.

Overall, the differences between the two with regard to SEO aren’t dramatic in any way.

The open-source nature of WordPress allows you to customize some SEO elements more to make them fit your SEO strategy.

Instead, they have a larger community that’s active on forums, provides workarounds, and helps indirectly.

Moreover, each WordPress plugin is responsible for its own customer support, which often translates into a decentralized mess.

Overall, Shopify takes the prize when it comes to customer support.

Overall, both Shopify and WordPress are great choices for launching your ecommerce platform. However, the two significantly differ in their philosophy and process.

No coding skills are needed with Shopify to get started. Moreover, if you can’t solve something on your own, Shopify boasts a stellar customer support team that’s always available.

All in all, we recommend Shopify to individuals and small businesses that don’t have the resources to have developers on hand, but also to enterprise solutions that prioritize speed and marketing growth.

On the other hand, WordPress is a good choice for tech-savvy businesses that have skilled developers on hand with one-of-a-kind requirements when it comes to their storefront and e-commerce operations.

WordPress is an open-source platform which means that all of its parts are customizable. However, this comes with the drawbacks of longer and costlier development, and rather complicated technical maintenance. You will need technical expertise.

Moreover, if you experience any issues with WordPress, there is no customer support hotline. Instead, you have to sift through forums to find and implement solutions

If you’re wondering if you can migrate to Shopify for a more secure and scalable e-commerce experience, read more about our Migration to Shopify process.

See also: Shopify vs. WooCommerce comparison