WooCommerce and Shopify are two of the most popular online store platforms available. For those companies who are just starting to build their online store, choosing a platform would have been a complicating experience.
If you are one of those companies, you may want to know which platform to choose, how much should you pay, which one is the easiest platform, or which one offers the most suitable features for your needs?
There is one similarity between the two: you can do all the setup by yourself, even when you are not an expert in web development. Talking about expenses, both of the platforms would be cost-effective. Rather than paying for a professional developer, you will only pay the monthly fee instead.
To help you decide, below are some insights about WooCommerce VS Shopify in several considerable aspects:
Feature
Say, what are the most important features that you will need to have in an online store? Those are the catalog, inventory, payment methods, and shipping costs. Shopify, as a standalone platform, has its own applications to get the e-commerce features working.
However, Shopify has more free options on the application. Unless you want to pay more for another Shopify plugin and theme, you already get a complete feature from the basic package. If you have a big number of catalogs and products, you may want to consider Shopify as it offers unlimited file storage.
It also has an anti-fraud analysis system to avoid fake orders. If you want to go further with promotion, Shopify has discount code system. Promotional discounts will not only give benefits for customers but will also attract them to your online store. Some of other benefits that you can get from Shopify are:
- Ready for Search Engine Optimization
- Provide multi-languages
- Unlimited products and catalogs
- Make your own adjustable shipping and taxes cost
- Capability of drop shipping
- Products review column for customers
- Over 70 payment methods including portals and credit cards
- Over 100 free themes and its extensions
- Mobile commerce optimization
- You can sell almost everything, from digital to physical products
- Daily data backups
- Reports and statistics
- You can get free SSL certificate
- Can be integrated with social media
- Mobile application with advanced features
- Customers can recover abandoned online shopping cart
- You can import products information from CSV files
- Print orders
- Gift cards for customers
Shopify offers more free features than WooCommerce. However, WooCommerce might offer suitable features for you.
Creating an online store would be much easier if you are using WordPress on your website. WordPress is open source software which allows third-party developers to provide various plugins and extensions. It works with WooCommerce, too.
With slight differences from Shopify, here are the things that you can do with WooCommerce:
- It has built-in payments system via Stripe and PayPal
- You can sell various products from digital like software and applications to physical products
- You can adjust shipping and taxes costs
- Mobile-friendly website
- Unlimited products and categories
- Inventory control
- Completely control your data
- It works perfectly with WordPress theme
- More than a hundred plugins and extensions
- It offers a free Facebook advertisement and store extension
As you can see, each of them has different features which may or may not suitable for your online store. To decide, you might want to look further into the design and pricing aspects.
Design
To create the best e-commerce website, you need to have a delightful design and easy interface. The aim is to give the best online shopping experience for your customers. With platforms like WooCommerce and Shopify, you can adjust the design without having to have website design skill.
Talking about visual convenience, Shopify has one of the best ones in the market. Basically, Shopify offers 54 store templates with unique variations. Still, most of them are not free, so you need to adjust the budget to your design.
Since Shopify already has a mobile app, all of the design is responsive to the application. On the aesthetic side, Shopify has a less sophisticated and sleeker style just like most of the modern designs. The secret to it is that Shopify takes outsourced designers to work with them. It resulted in a fresh and engaging design. However, if you are buying the designers’ themes, you may want to pay more for the theme. Still, you can always choose the free themes available.
Meanwhile, with WooCommerce, you may not get the same convenience. As a plugin, WooCommerce works well with WordPress themes, and it may be all the choice you have. Underlining that WooCommerce provides one of the best online store systems on the class, it doesn’t offer much on the design.
It also means WooCommerce has a standard and flexible recommendation to cooperate with standard themes. However, WooCommerce has several built-in themes and storefront to arrange your products on the website. Not leaving the design behind, WooCommerce focuses basically on what makes an online store. If you don’t need a fancy design and want to have a practical online store, WooCommerce might be the right choice.
Pricing
When it comes to business, pricing gets the most attention. You may need to balance the expenses of making an online store with the order traffic to keep your business profiting. Talking about WooCommerce VS Shopify, each of them has different ways of pricing.
You can see the difference from the first time you visit their websites. Shopify straightly offers you to try a 14-days trial and followed by several particular package pricing that you can choose depending on your budget and needs.
While with WooCommerce, the plugin is absolutely free. Along the setup, expect to pay some expenses related to SSL certificate, hosting, and domain. Shopify offers the hosting for $29 per month, while WooCommerce price varies from $5 to $100 per month depending on your needs.
The downside with WooCommerce is that it does not offer a free SSL certificate, which means you need to pay around $100 per year to get the certificate. Talking about the initial pricing, the price between the two options can be the same. However, you need to pay attention to other extensions that might not be free on WooCommerce and Shopify.
Choosing the best platform between WooCommerce VS Shopify can be a time-consuming process. Yet, you can take advantage of the 14-days trial of Shopify and free plugin of WooCommerce to compare the interface of each of the platform.