Shopify vs WooCommerce – To put it in simple words these two are the most popular of all the e-Commerce platforms present in the market. It completely depends on your needs as each one available here can be probably the only solution for you to build your eCommerce store or to with. And the news you would like to know right now is that you can accomplish it on your own without any outside help from a professional designer. We’ll be discussing it later.
There might be many questions or you might be wondering a ton of things like which one should I opt for? Which is going to fit in my specific needs better is it Shopify or WooCommerce of course we are here talking about developing an online shop. Which has more features? Which one is costlier? Flexibility .. features provided by both of them.
I know this is a lot to take in at a single time, but as I proceed further you might get answers to all of the questions mentioned above and all of them in-depth . You will unveil the one platform you want according to the needs and requirements of your e-Commerce store.
Shopify vs WooCommerce
1.)Design:-
Design is the whole soul of the eCommerce store. The site is not trusted by users until it functions well and has the right aesthetics as well.
Shopify’s Design
The quality of visual themes provided by Shopify is its best selling point. The templates available for you on Shopify are more than hundreds and more than twenty of them are available for free. All of them available on Shopify are mobile-responsive which is its best part and varying color options are available as well. The aesthetics of these templates are clean and fashionable and sleek which makes them well suited for modern thinking websites.
Templates provided by Shopify are designed by creative outsourced web designers. Since it is not a house creation they are ensured to be up to date and very engaging.
Though the pricing for some of the templates might go as high as two hundred dollars per template but after spending you will feel the template worthy of the price.
But don’t panic as I mentioned above there is a wide variety of free options available as well.
Since Shopify’s attractive designs catch many eyes and as result sometimes users who used Shopify to create their webpage complain of its similarity with other sites. So Shopify also provides you with easy methods of chopping and changing. This is the reason behind the encouragement of customization. You can change the style or color or both with ease, whereas on the other hand many professional designers can use the specialized ‘Liquid’ Language of this platform to make it creative and completely separate a brand’s look.
WooCommerce Design
With many different features of WooCommerce when we come to talk about its designs, then you have to invest some hours and will discover that the world is your oyster.
Developers of WooThemes created the WooCommerce plugin which is acquired by Automattic. It is not the platform for the delivery of particular design traits. It just offers you a way to sell products or services online. The designing part is dependent on the WordPress theme you have currently.
Therefore it can be said that WooCommerce is created to cooperate with varying themes in the market but the condition applied is they should follow standard recommendations and hours of practice. It implies that in maximum cases you can choose any WordPress theme according to your choice and integrate it with WooCommerce.
Provided with the above-mentioned themes you can also find some themes specially built for WooCommerce to create your service or product option list look eye-catchy. Woo’s default theme called Storefront which is available for free is the best design, to begin with.
It is a creative theme that was designed by keeping all the features of an efficient eCommerce store in mind and in a result helps you sell your product with ease.
There are child themes for Storefront also available for those who want to modify the look of their store further. Some of the themes are also available in a variety of ranges i.e from as low as 39$ per piece and can go only high up to 120$. But as it is said ‘Money well spent or worthy of the price tag.
If you want a wide range of WooCommerce themes, you can always switch to ThemeForest where WooCommerce compatible themes are available in hundreds of numbers.
When comparison has its basis on design, definitely WooCommerce stands way ahead of Shopify. It is clear from the above-stated fact that apart from WooCommerce themes, you can also use any of the WordPress themes to work with your platform, and definitely, you can find hundreds of thousands of them on the web.
2.)Comparison on a Money basis (Price)-
The two really have very different approaches toward pricing. And under this basis, Shopify wins as its pricing strategy is quite clear and straightforward.
WooCommerce is available for free or in one word said as open-source software. It is easily downloadable from WordPress.org for free at least but once you go for actually launching an eCommerce working store you should be ready with your wallets to spend some penny for it. (You’ll unveil the details in a while)
To put it in simple words, when you work with Shopify, you can relate it to a single out-of-the-box solution available with a one-time price tag. Once you open the box, you are good to go with the latest new eCommerce store since all your requirements are included in it.
Summing up the above-mentioned details we can conclude it into :
- eCommerce store by Shopify implementing a top-level domain:29.75$ per month.
- eCommerce store by WooCommerce implementing on same setup:$29 per month.
WooCommerce claims to be available free of cost and although its software is available free of cost if you want to run your e-commerce store it costs approximately the same as Shopify.
The expenditures on WooCommerce do not end up just here as you have to also spend some from your wallet on SEO, Payment gateways, and many more features. These extensions may be all one-time payments but are usually around $49-$79
The final line of all the above discussion is that WooCommerce is comparatively cheaper but with every extended feature, you have to exchange dollars . You have to be careful while setting up that you don’t go over your budget line.
There are also transaction fees to explain this further, whenever anything from your site sells i.e for processing payment or delivering money to your account they charge you money. Usually, it is around 3-4% per transaction and it changes quite often but confirm the details before signing up a deal with either of these platforms.
3.) Comparison of the basis of Features:-
Although both platforms have a completely different point of view towards pricing when it comes to features, they are both approximately similar.
Shopify-
Shopify presents you with lots of free options, from the very beginning it allows you to have :
- Products are unlimited
- Storage of files is unlimited
- Fraud analysis is automatic
- Blog modules
- Discount codes
- SSL certificate is absolutely free
- HTML and CSS are purely editable
- Payments through credit card
- Varying language options
- Profiles of customers
- Social media combination
- Both physical as well as digital products in store
- Traffic is unlimited
- Backup regular
- Site stat and report of product
- Print orders
- Shipping options
As compared to WooCOmmerce which features shipping options, CSV uploads, or FB selling that will set you back up to five hundred to six hundred dollars to even get started Shopify provides all these completely free of cost.
Shopify:-
It is a complete out-of-the-box solution and subscription-based. It can be used both online and offline as well. It also provides you with 24*7 chat and email support.
Your store can be modified to an extent allowed by Shopify i.e it is a closed platform and it also controls your web data. The designs made available to you are in hundreds in number out of which more than twenty are available totally free of cost. They make you available with a free domain with every plan. File storage is also unlimited It also has native support for various languages.
WooCommerce:-
It is a plugin by WordPress which is absolutely free. All it needs to get started is a server and WordPress working installation to run. It only works online and has ticket as well as forum support. Different from Shopify, it is open-source which in simple words implies you can freely modify your store without any boundations. Unlike Shopify, the subdomain is not included within it and also the storage of files is limited. It also accepts various different languages via third-party plugins.
As it is evident from the above-mentioned comparison that none of the important features are missing from either of the platforms. While choosing one platform all you need to concentrate on, is your personal need or your need for an open or closed platform.
Personally while evaluating both platforms on the basis of their features I somewhere felt that Shopify was a little ahead of WooCommerce as Shopify is a laser-focused solution and easy to handle as well. But on the other hand, WooCommerce is extremely feature-rich. We can conclude that winners on the basis of features can not be decided as they both have their equal positives and negatives as well. It all depends on your and your site’s personal need.
4.) Usability (ease)-
So according to the above points, we didn’t have our winners so maybe this is a point where we can compare them. The point states the ease with which a working eCommerce store can be set up by using any of them.
Shopify-
Well in my personal opinion, when it comes to the ease with which you can set up Shopify’s strength lies within this. Since it is a subscription-based tool, which if simply put in words implies that you just have to visit Shopify.com and sign up. Go through their process of setup and you are all good to go
It is very user-friendly and guides you all the way by helping you set up via asking what the type of your store is and relatively suggesting you a type of design well suited for your store.
You don’t require any professional skills to develop your site. The process is itself very straightforward. All the important features of it can be accessed later, just after you have your store running.
Shopify is an intuitive solution and there is no unexpected interruption. which means you can simply set up your store just by signing in.
