{"id":15014,"date":"2020-07-25T17:39:23","date_gmt":"2020-07-25T17:39:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.webmonkey.com\/?p=15014"},"modified":"2022-09-16T22:23:35","modified_gmt":"2022-09-16T22:23:35","slug":"woocommerce-vs-shopify","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.webmonkey.com\/woocommerce-vs-shopify\/","title":{"rendered":"WooCommerce vs. Shopify Ecommerce Website Builder Comparison : Which One Is Better?"},"content":{"rendered":"
Your business is unique, so you\u2019ll need to know which features of which e-commerce site will be best. Shopify<\/a> and WooCommerce<\/a> both command a massive chunk of the world\u2019s online stores and have excellent templates and features. Therefore, we\u2019ll look over a list of categories based on what we think is vital in an ecommerce site, and see how WooCommerce and Shopify compare.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Not to spoil anything, but both WooCommerce and Shopify are both highly qualified for starting an online store. Whichever one you choose depends on how much time you want to spend building your site, and how much of a learning curve you can take.<\/p>\n While all website builders boast of being easy to use, they don\u2019t always account for the various necessities to building a site.\u00a0 Everyone has different skill sets, as well as various time frames, so \u201ceasy\u201d might be a subjective term in this case.<\/p>\n Successfully using WooCommerce may depend on how much you know about HTML or CSS coding, which will make your site\u2019s layout much more specific and customizable.\u00a0<\/p>\n WooCommerce uses a coding templating software called Liquid<\/a>. If you can hire a coder to help make your site shine, WooCommerce may work just fine, but perhaps not for the merchant looking to save money or time in learning.<\/p>\n WooCommerce is an open-source site<\/a>, so you have complete ownership of your store. The website comes included with WordPress, so if you already have a WordPress site, you could simply add a WooCommerce plugin<\/a> to that site and set up your store from there.\u00a0<\/p>\n Either way, the site is free to install. WooCommerce can also integrate smoothly into any online service, so you can just as easily use WooCommerce on another website platform, like Wix or Squarespace.<\/p>\n Shopify is quick to set up since you can create everything from templates within the website.\u00a0 With such a rapid setup time, you can start making sales the day you build your site. You even have the choice of tweaking your website one more time before you officially publish it. On the other hand, all the coding and minute customization make a WooCommerce site more of a project.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n If you want to start making sales immediately, Shopify might be the better option without worrying too much about minute details. It\u2019s also better if you\u2019re just starting out and just want to begin creating an online presence. But if you\u2019re comfortable taking the time and energy to make every small aspect of the site your own, WooCommerce might be preferable.<\/p>\n With its many templates and plugins, Shopify's structure is like completing a puzzle with all the pieces ready. WooCommerce has templates and plugins, but the pieces are much smaller, and the picture much more detailed.\u00a0<\/p>\n You might need more experience to be comfortable with it.\u00a0 In short, Shopify has more structure and less reliance on coding, in which case, it may be the kinder, gentler choice, especially for beginners.<\/p>\n Both WooCommerce and Shopify try to give you complete control of how your site looks: from the layout, colors, and content. The look of your website will hopefully invite people to click and shop around, but it\u2019ll depend on your competence and patience with implementing a design.<\/p>\n Shopify has plenty of free and premium templates to choose from, all of which are capable of translating between desktop and mobile device viewing. The templates, therefore, are well-designed and meant to accentuate the critical features of any online store.\u00a0<\/p>\n Plus, there is a page dedicated solely to pre-existing shops<\/a>, where merchants can click, explore, and get ideas for setting up their store.\u00a0<\/p>\n Once again, because WooCommerce relies much more on technical know-how, how polished your site is will depend on how well you can code. It\u2019s worth noting that many top-tier designers create themes for WooCommerce, so you can choose from among a high caliber of themes. You\u2019ll just have to outsource them from ThemeForest<\/a>, which includes both free and premium WooCommerce themes.<\/p>\n It\u2019s also worth noting that although WooCommerce may require more coding than Shopify, you can also use code to polish your Shopify template. In fact, Liquid is available in both the WooCommerce and Shopify app stores. In the end, however, the final site depends on how you customize it.<\/p>\n A creatively-designed website can also include plugins and extensions, which help increase your SEO and make shipping\/marketing easier. Both WooCommerce and Shopify allow for plugins, but WooCommerce, with its vast opportunities for customization, almost relies on them to make a website shine. Shopify has a slightly smaller plugin library, mainly because it does not require many of them to make a website good.\u00a0<\/p>\n Luckily, both sites have star ratings in their plugin libraries and stores. Before you choose a plugin, you can see how well it has performed for other merchants, and choose accordingly.<\/p>\n Shopify\u2019s structured format means that there is a less diverse range of templates from which to choose. WooCommerce, thanks to its vast library of templates, leaves more room for creativity, even if not all of them will be optimal for both desktop and mobile viewing. However, it\u2019s hard to fault WooCommerce for providing a vast range of possibilities, so it is worth trying just for that.<\/p>\n Features and tools all help to make an online store functional and unique.\u00a0 A blog is one such up-and-coming feature of many online stores. WooCommerce goes hand-in-hand with WordPress, which means a blog feature is immediately set and ready to use. Shopify has a blogging platform as well, though it may take longer to create.<\/p>\n WooCommerce has many extensions you can add to your site using the WooCommerce Marketplace<\/a>. Extensions maximize the functionality of your store, like adding marketing integrations and point of sale. You can also extend your store to multiple channels for about $79, including the following:<\/p>\n Shopify also has an App Store<\/a> where you can shop for plugins and extensions, and a majority of them are either free or at a low price. Continuing in Shopify\u2019s more structured setup format, there aren\u2019t nearly as many plugins\/extensions that are available for WooCommerce. Whichever site you choose in this category depends on how much playing around you want to do with them.<\/p>\n WooCommerce and Shopify accept most major credit cards, and have over 100 secure payment gateways in place, including PayPal, Venmo, Stripe, and Square. They also both come with plugins to help you with point of sale, among other revenue and marketing tools.<\/p>\n Speaking of point of sale, WooCommerce has an integrated payment dashboard that you can install and use for free, with no monthly fees. With WooCommerce Payments<\/a>, you can easily see all payments made and refunded in your site. It also allows customers to make payments to your store without actually leaving it. Shopify has a similar feature with Shopify Payments<\/a>.<\/p>\n Fast and secure shipping is one of the essential parts of an online store, and Shopify delivers this in spades. Shopify already has partnerships with primary postal services, such as UPS, USPS, and even Canada Post. Although both WooCommerce and Shopify allow for international shipping and free shipping, you might not want to outsource a mail carrier, like you would have to do for WooCommerce.<\/p>\n To draw more customers toward your products, you\u2019ll need the best possible presentation.\u00a0 To accentuate your products\u2019 best features, you might take the following aspects into account to best communicate with your buyers:<\/p>\n Both WooCommerce and Shopify offer these product features to merchants, but the presentation comes down to how much you choose to customize it.<\/p>\n A shop in either ecommerce site can also accommodate all kinds of products: physical items, like clothes or crafts and digital services, like educational classes or new software. Even better is that neither site charges you for large numbers of visitors or high traffic. There is also no limit to the variation\/type of products merchants can sell on either site, so one site or the other would suit this job well.<\/p>\n WooCommerce and Shopify have options for giving your store multilingual support. The only downside is that you\u2019ll have to pay a little more for it than other extensions.\u00a0<\/p>\n Shopify has a few reliable multilingual plugins in their App store, all of which offer multiple language and currency options at check-out. WooCommerce has the benefit of the WordPress Multilingual Plugin<\/a>, which comes with over 40 languages, and you can arrange different language contents within the same domain.<\/p>\n While both WooCommerce and Shopify have excellent features to ensure your store\u2019s success, Shopify has many of those functions already. In contrast, WooCommerce requires a little more customizing and money to put them in place.<\/p>\n In an ever-growing world of online shopping, it is vastly important to know how to grow your store\u2019s site. Both Shopify and WooCommerce have SEO tools on hand, not to mention lots of helpful guides for unanswered questions for almost every aspect of running a store.\u00a0<\/p>\n Both sites also have social media integration, so customers can click on various social media platform buttons to share your site.<\/p>\n Having the right content and keywords throughout your site can help put it at the top of a Google search. Shopify and WooCommerce both do this well, but quite differently. It should be no surprise that WooCommerce relies heavily on coding and plugins to help provide optimal SEO.\u00a0<\/p>\n The good news is that, because WooCommerce comes with WordPress, which already has an array of SEO tools, that site should be easy to handle.<\/p>\n With SEO, though, It\u2019s not enough to engage with customers just through email campaigns. Google will better pick up on your site and better understand your store\u2019s content if you have the following data:<\/p>\n Neither Shopify nor WooCommerce has these pieces of data already in place, so you\u2019ll have to either download apps or code the website to create that data.<\/p>\n Both sites have enough guides and great plugins to help make SEO easier. But one standout feature from Shopify is the SEO Booster plugin<\/a> (found in the Shopify App Store). Kind of like an eCommerce Grammarly, it scans your website and then offers possible fixes for big and small things that need fixing.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n However, that doesn\u2019t compare to just how many plugins and extensions WooCommerce offers. Many of them are free (many sources recommend using Yoast SEO<\/a> from the WooCommerce Marketplace), and there are enough choices to fit your personal SEO goals.<\/p>\n Although Shopify does have dependable SEO help, WooCommerce\u2019s plethora of plugins and extensions might provide you the best choices for maximizing your site\u2019s search power.<\/p>\n Email marketing is essential for engaging with customers because it helps you keep in touch with them regularly. Both WooCommerce and Shopify promote downloading Mailchimp extensions. With any email campaign, you can send the following items:<\/p>\n Both sites also acknowledge that multi-channel marketing can be huge in promoting your store. For instance, Shopify encourages you to use different platforms for advertising by giving merchants Google Ads<\/a> credits. When a merchant spends $25 on advertising, $100 can go toward further marketing on Google Ads.<\/p>\n WooCommerce also encourages the use of Google Analytics<\/a> to help keep track of your marketing efforts. There are also extensions for Facebook, where you might have pre-existing customers, or Google Shopping, where you can list your products to boost sales.<\/p>\n Both sites promote using the same third-party channels for promoting your business, but Shopify doesn\u2019t charge you as much to use them as WooCommerce.<\/p>\n Sometimes, customers forget about their carts as they shop, but that doesn\u2019t mean that they lose their items when they exit the store. In this way, WooCommerce helps merchants keep track of abandoned carts.\u00a0<\/p>\n The site will let the merchant know if there\u2019s been an item left behind at check-out. Then you can follow up with that customer about finishing the purchase. However, this feature does not come standard with WooCommerce, as it does for Shopify.<\/p>\n There\u2019s also the question of which site is more scalable. How scalable your website is will depend on your business plans, but you must have some idea of growth, no matter how small. With WooCommerce, because you have almost complete control over how you customize your site, you can scale it as much as possible.\u00a0<\/p>\n Shopify is similarly scalable but has much more structure, with all the plans and plugins you can choose.<\/p>\n Once again, while both sites offer the same scalable potential and help customers preserve their shopping carts, Shopify has the standard features all set to go already.<\/p>\n Right off the bat, Shopify has excellent 24\/7 tech support in whichever way you\u2019re most comfortable, whether over the phone, live chat, or email. It also has open forums and a help center with commonly asked questions that you can use even if you haven\u2019t started a trial yet.\u00a0<\/p>\n A request for a rating follows each response, and these ratings are made public, so the site\u2019s tech support helpfulness is quite transparent.<\/p>\n In terms of software updates, Shopify automatically performs these to help you focus on building your site. Because Shopify is also a hosted platform, it has the security in place to protect your domain name and your hosting. You don\u2019t have to do a lot of manual technical work to maintain your site\u2019s software.<\/p>\nEase of Use<\/h2>\n
Coding Know-How\u00a0<\/h3>\n
Integration Into Other Sites<\/h3>\n
Quick Set-Up<\/h3>\n
The Verdict<\/h3>\n
Design Flexibility<\/h2>\n
Templates\/Customization<\/h3>\n
High Caliber of Themes<\/h3>\n
High-Quality Extensions<\/h3>\n
The Verdict<\/h3>\n
Features\/Tools<\/h2>\n
Extensions\/Plugins<\/h3>\n
\n
Customer Payments<\/h3>\n
Shipping Options<\/h3>\n
Product Presentation<\/h3>\n
\n
Multilingual Access<\/h3>\n
The Verdict<\/h3>\n
Marketing\/Store Growth<\/h2>\n
SEO (Search Engine Optimization)<\/h3>\n
Site Data<\/h3>\n
\n
Multi-Channel Marketing\/Email Campaigns<\/h3>\n
\n
Preserving Sales<\/h3>\n
Scalable-ness<\/h3>\n
The Verdict<\/h3>\n
Help\/Support<\/h2>\n
Software Updates<\/h3>\n
Expert Help<\/h3>\n