Shopify vs. Woo Commerce: which platform is best for Online Store Builders
Indication:
Before we start with our in-depth evaluation of the two most popular e-Commerce platforms on the web, we must cover the basics and highlight platforms that make these platforms stand out.
What is Shopify?
Shopify is an all-in-one e-commerce solution that makes it laid-back for you to create an online store and lets you start, grow a business, accept payments, and manage your inventory, all from a single platform. With Shopify, you don’t need to worry about any technical aspects of managing an e-commerce site such as web hosting, security, caching, etc.
What is Woo Commerce?
It is open source and built for WordPress. it lets you sell anything online using WordPress. It allows you to influence the most powerful content management system (CMS) and use it to run an online store.
WordPress is the most popular website builder on the planet powering 53% of all websites, and what many don’t know Woo Commerce is the most popular e-commerce platform (yes even more popular than Shopify). Because of the open-source nature of Woo Commerce, you can customize every aspect of your store and easily add custom extensions.
The pronouncement to choose between the two platforms depends entirely on your needs and skill level.
Interval #1: Design
How Shopify Does Design
One of Shopify‘s top selling points is the visual quality of its themes. In my opinion, they look fully great out of the box. Shopify comes with more than 44 poles apart store templates, of which 10 are free. What’s more, is that each of the Shopify themes has exceptional variations. Therefore, you’re precisely getting more than 100 separate designs.
its’s designs aren’t created in-house, by the way. They’re subcontracted to a group of professional web designers who certify they’re as current and as attractive as they can be. We like this attitude because you get creativity from a wide variety of companies and people, making for a better selection. Inopportunely, the price tags on the finest Shopify themes go as high as $180. But what you get in exchange is a great design it will be minimum.
Luckily, there are free options available too.
The immediate attraction of designs can cause many webmasters to select the same themes. Some users who have designed a site themselves have later criticized for looking a little too similar to other websites. For that reason, customization is exhilarated.
Providentially, themes are easy to change. You can speedily adjust colors and styles, while more proficient developers can utilize the platform’s dedicated ‘Liquid’ language to make more substantial changes and make a brand outlook out.
How Woo Commerce Does Design
As with numerous other aspects of the Woo Commerce experience, when it comes to aesthetics, the world is your oyster. You just have to dwell on the hours.
It is a plugin created by the developers of Woo Themes.
As such, it doesn’t deliver any specific design characters on its own. What it does is make available you the means to sell products and services online. The design part, conversely, is left to your current or future WordPress theme. IT has been built to cooperate with most themes on the market, on the condition that they follow the standard endorsements and best practices. This means that, in most cases, you can select any WordPress theme that you like, and still make it work together with Woo Commerce.
However, you will also come across themes that have been built with Woo Commerce in mind from the commencement and are tailor-made to make all your product/service listings look great. If the design of the e-commerce store itself is particularly important to you, you should look for themes that are precisely made for Woo Commerce.
The place to start would be Woo’s default online store theme called Storefront (free). It’s a recent creation that puts the focus on all the important elements of an e-commerce store.
we can also get a range of child themes for Storefront in case we want to modify the look of our store further. Most of the child themes are available at $39 to $55 a piece (occasionally, though, there are themes with price tags as high as $119). If you’re a developer with e-commerce, they have a package for $399 where you get all of the themes in the library.
Apart from that, you can also look into marketplaces like Theme Forest which have hundreds of other Woo Commerce-compatible themes.
To be honest, it has a thoughtful advantage over Shopify when it comes to designs. Shopify has pleasing themes, but they’re limited to what you can find in the Shopify Theme Store. Woo Commerce on it, on another hand, is open source so tons of developers sell (or give away) incredible Woo Commerce themes for all sorts of industries and purposes.
Interval #2 Themes and flexibility
The themes are your virtual shop window. So you will be happy to hear that Shopify has an Itself-store, which comes with over 70 different themes. Some are expensive (ranging between$ 150- 300), but numerous themes are free.
Most of them come with customization options so you can change their look and feel without touching one line of law. Templates are mobile responsive, so they will look good on any device. A great thing is that you aren’t limited to the templates Shopify provides themselves as well. Further, then 1200 themes are available.
Invite Commerce does not have its theme store you can use third-party services to source them. On Theme timber, for case, there are a whopping, 200 Woo Commerce themes available, with prices ranging from$ 14 to$ 139. There are also free themes, but these do not come with any support.
Interval #3: Features
| Shopify | Woo commerce |
| · Is a subscription-based tool/service and a functional, out-of-the-box e-commerce solution. |
· Is a WordPress plugin available free you’ll need · Hosting and a working WordPress installation. |
| · You are at liberty to sell whatever you choose (physical, digital, products, services). |
· You are at liberty to sell whatever you choose (physical, · Digital, products, services). |
| · barred platform, which suggests you can only customize your store to the amount that Shopify permits. | · You can without obstruction customize your store because it is open source. There aren’t any limitations. |
| · it is responsible for your store/website data. | · Your data is entirely under your control. |
| · 50+ designs are available (10+ are free among them). | · |
| · Hosting involved. | · No Hosting included. |
| · Accepts payments through PayPal, Stripe, Bank deposits, Cash on delivery, and over 70 | · Accepts payments through PayPal, Stripe, Bank deposits, or Cash |
Interval #4: Price
To say this relatively bluntly, Shopify pricing is veritably clear and accurate. Invite Commerce isn’t. Invite Commerce may be a free open cradle software plugin. The plugin is free, but also you have got to pay the fresh costs that go on with making an online store.
WordPress is free as well, but you have got to consider effects like web hosting, the value of a theme, a sphere name, any fresh extensions, and an SSL instrument are included. Shopify is all about delivering you one, out-of-the-box result with just many pricing packages. You subscribe up, and also you get to use your candescent new-commerce store right down since everything would you like is included from the progeny-go.
pricing
- Shopify e-commerce store running on identical setup domain: $29 / month.
- Woo Commerce store on the same setup: $29 / month(a modest $20 hosting, domain, SSL).
As you will see, even though the Woo Commerce software is unrestricted, running an authentic e-commerce store costs the same as f, not more. But that’s not all. With Woo Commerce, you would possibly have to factor in the supplementary extensions for things like SEO, more payment gateways, and so on. Those extensions are frequently around the $49-79 mark (one-time payments).
All comes right down to it although Woo Commerce is precisely the cheaper solution, it will require much more work to set it up, and you will need to be more suspicious not to go over your budget, as every further extension comes with a price tag to dollars Shopify boasts a much more predictable structure. It has a sliding scale of packages that offer users a range of that features upfront – Lite ($9 per month,) Basic Shopify ($29 per month,) Shopify ($79 per month), and Advanced Shopify ($299 per month).
Woo Commerce vs Shopify Interval #5 helps in to sell
1 How Shopify Helps You Sell
Although you’ll presumably have to need to install apps to make the utmost of the platform, Shopify offers significantly further free options. From the very launch, Shopify gives you
- Limitless products
- Unlimited file storage
- Programmed fake investigation
- Surrounded
- Manual order construction
- Concession codes
- Blog module
- Free SSL certificate
- Mobile commerce optimization
- Editable HTML and CSS
- Credit card payments
- Numerous languages
- Adjustable shipping rates and taxes
- Customer profiles
- Drop shipping capabilities
- SEO-ready site structure
- Detailed product reviews
- Facebook selling segment
- Social media integration (and a spicy new integration with Instagram)
- Physical and digital products within the store
- Unrestricted traffic to your store
- Daily backups
- Site stats and merchandise reports
- Advanced reports (on Shopify and Shopify Advanced plans)
- Fully introduced a mobile app
- Product importing via CSV files
- Different product discrepancies
- Print orders
- Account management
- Gift cards (on Shopify and Shopify Advanced plans)
- Dissolute cart recovery (on Shopify and Shopify Advanced plans)
How Woo Commerce Helps You Sell
Invite Commerce gates into that further by submitting lots of intriguing and instigative additions. Whether you would like to smoothly edit aesthetics, vend on Facebook, ramp up dispatch marketing ways, understand stoner relatively honestly do anything differently, you will be proper.
Here’s what you’ll find inside Woo Commerce:
- You can sell physical products, and digital products (including using software and apps), plus it’s also good for affiliate marketing
- Payments via PayPal and Stripe built-in (plus a range of other entrances available for an extra fee)
- Adjustable shipping rates and taxes
- Unrestricted number of products and product categories
- Stock levels control
- Mobile-friendly structure
- You have wide-ranging regulators over your data
- Works together with your contemporary WordPress theme
- Accurately many plugins (extensions) are available
- A free Facebook ad and Facebook stores extension lead
Interval #5: Comfort of use
You may have gotten together by now that with the two platforms’ differing methodologies, there’s something of a trade-off between the functionality of the items you can and how easy it is actually to do them.
It’s a vitally important comparison, so it’s worth puncturing down in additional detail.
As we’ve explained, Shopify is manufactured to be a modest solution. It’s very considerable intended so that people with limited technical or e-commerce experience can build, customize and launch abundantly operational web store. The user journey is simple: you sort an account, buy (or link) a website name such as www.yournewstore.com, then start manufacturing the store itself.
Shopify offers a lot of themes to get you started, and you can customize the layout by using their drag and drop functionality. You will need to create products and services and fill in your existing inventory. If you’re visiting to be drop shipping – selling products you never substantially handle – you can use the incorporation to do it for you.
Momentously, Shopify guides you through the whole process, and if it does get tricky, you will learn about Shopify’s exceptional customer support. it doesn’t hold your hand in quite an identical way, but in truth, it’s also temperately easy to get up and successively. The main point is that you’ll need a domain and a hosted WordPress installation or hosting set in which you’ve installed WordPress. Some hosting wage-earners even have one-click wizards to assist you to install WordPress and Woo Commerce.
Once you’ve got a site up and running, starting a shop is as simple as installing the Woo Commerce plugin. From there, it is consistently easy compared to Shopify, with wizards to help you through the introductory setup and similarly straightforward configuration options. Both platforms have a comparable fundamental level of functionality. They create it easy to set up basic online stores selling goods or service postings and are designed to handle everyday logistical and economic needs such as payments, shipping, and catalog administration.
Interval #6: SEO
No matter how brilliant your shop or the things you sell, success means encouraging it as aggressively as possible. That means you’ll need to use the email, social, and other marketing tackles reachable for both , but it also means augmenting your store’s content and structure for the best search.
Both Shopify and Woo Commerce produce stores that are designed with sound SEO principles in mind which help to get more traffic. Shopify can be improved further through apps such as SEO BOSTER but in due course, there’s a limit to the changes you can make to your site – for example, you don’t have wide-ranging self-determination when it comes to changing your URL structure.
You can also assist by the platform’s unrivaled SEO tools, using incorporations like google site kit or the dazzling and straightforward Yoast plugin. In short, in the Woo Commerce vs Shopify SEO chance meeting, Shopify is worthy, but Woo Commerce is unfluctuating better.
Interval #7: Payments and cost
It’s an unquestionable fact that payment processing is the center of e-commerce busy commerce races of the type of products or services you deal with, the end goal is always changing visitors and simplifying their following transactions. Ungratefully, both Woo Commerce and Shopify offer a wide assortment of tools to help you with that. These two are not the same though. But, which of the two offers recovering payment giving out options? And where do you believe to less on your transactions? Shopify or Woo Commerce?
Shopify Payment Processing
Shopify might be countless things when it comes to payments. But, regardless of the numerous payment processing options it offers, there’s one that unswervingly towers above the rest.
And so Shopify Payments became a thing. Shopify Payments is at the moment the default payment processor on the platform. You’ll notice it comes important on your Shopify dashboard. But, make no mistake. Shopify doesn’t double up as a payment mainframe.
Shopify Payments is only a payment tender that’s powered by Stripe. So, even though the service might feel and scent like Shopify at the top, its transactions are in essence processed by Stripe in the incidental. That necessarily makes Shopify Payments a malleable processing solution, capable of supervising a wide range of cards.
In other words, you should be able to take pretty much all the major credit and debit card payments without any worries. You don’t have to worry about setting up complementary security systems that, in layman terms, means Shopify Payments is a real badass when it comes to defensive your customers’ card details, and averting CNP fraud. With Shopify Payments supporting you up, your phone handovers on the go register that can accept card payments anywhere. And here’s the problem.
Shopify Payments is only available to dealers based in the UK, the US, Spain, Singapore, New Zealand, Japan, Ireland, Hong Kong, Canada, and Australia. While it’s great that customers can make payments from wherever let’s face it- Shopify Payments is nowhere nearby to becoming a global payment solution. It eliminates very many countries from its commercial list.
And while you’re at it, you’ll notice the idea of using a third-party payment gateway instead of Shopify. Payments don’t sit well with Shopify. It even reprimands you by charging an extra rate of 2%, 1%, or 0.5% above your payment entryway’s fees for each transaction. But then again, going by its online transaction fees of 2.9% + 30¢ for Basic Shopify users, you’d probably be tempted to seek a low-priced solution. In-person credit card processing rates for Elementary Shopify are 2.7%, followed by 2.5% for Shopify subscribers, then 2.4% for Advanced Shopify.
How do Woo Commerce and Shopify heap up in the security game?
Invite Commerce does not precisely have any security procedures included with the plugin. Since it runs on WordPress, the utmost security cascades into your own hands. For case, you would have to get your SSL tool and that the hosting company has secure attendants. You’d also want to organize security plugins, two-factor validation, and some other effects to cover your point. You should, still, make a durable word.
Woo Commerce vs Shopify PROS AND CONS
As we compare Woo Commerce vs Shopify, it becomes vibrant that both have strong points and are pointless. Let’s explore which can be competent for each platform.
Shopify Pros and Cons
Shopify Pros 👍
- You know accurately how much you’ll be paying every month and the pricing is fair.
- There’s access to thousands of apps to encompass your store.
- The themes are overflowing and beautiful.
- Flexibility is more enhance
- Customer service
- Shopify grips everything for you from hosting to security.
- It takes just a few minutes to promote your store.
- Drop shipping is rather simple with Shopify.
- Mobile-friendly store
- The maintenance is the best in the business.
Shopify Cons 👎
- You don’t have as copious control over your site with Shopify.
- Customization is amended with other platforms.
- You’re permanent with a monthly payment that’s only going to get higher.
Woo Commerce Pros and Cons
Woo Commerce Pros 👍
- Woo Commerce offers common customization and control.
- WordPress has a massive community online.
- The themes and plugins are perpetual, since just about anyone can make and sell them online.
- Woo Commerce is simple to create on WordPress.
- The Woo Commerce plugin is free of cost.
Cons 👎
- WordPress does have a bit of an erudition curve.
- You may find that Woo Commerce ends up being more high-class due to plugins, themes, and hosting.
- You’re stuck administering everything from hosting to security, and maintenance to backups.
Woo Commerce vs Shopify: Conclusion
Contrasts such as this are never cut and dry. When I talk with clients, my recommendations always oscillate depending on their specific situations. Here are my recommendations based on the type of user that you are / what you assume from your e-commerce platform:
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