Comparing Shopify vs WooCommerce is the first thing many of our customers do when they start looking for the best eCommerce tool for their business. Do you want to launch your online store? If yes, this post will suit you like a glove. Both Shopify and WooCommerce are tools specifically designed for online sales and offer similar options. However, there are key differences between them that you should be aware of before choosing which one to use.
Things have changed a lot since those years when, by force, you had to have a programmer when you wanted to create an online store. Today, there are already services that allow you to start an eCommerce without having too much idea of programming. Shopify and WooCommerce are two good examples, as they are in the TOP of the most famous online sales solutions, along with Magento and PrestaShop. In this post, we want to go into detail and explain the advantages and disadvantages of both tools.
Everything will depend on the needs of your online store and what you want to achieve. Our goal is that, when you finish the post, you have much clearer which is the most appropriate solution for your business. Shopify vs WooCommerce: the fight begins!
Shopify vs WooCommerce: Introduction
To compare Shopify vs WooCommerce and choose the best eCommerce tool, you are going to have to think hard about what is best for your business and you. We are going to go into details right now, but very briefly this is what there is:
What is Shopify?
Shopify is an online eCommerce platform. It allows you to create the store, accept payments, and manage inventory: all from the same system and without worrying about any technical aspect (hosting, security, availability, cache…). Shopify is fine if it is your first store, if you prefer a tool that allows you to start working very quickly and if you want the peace of mind of knowing that Shopify will guide you step by step through the entire setup process.
In return, the customization options are very limited, you have to pay a commission for each sale you make (in addition to the monthly fee) and your online store will be in the hands of third parties instead of yours.
What is WooCommerce?
WooCommerce is a free and open-source WordPress plugin for eCommerce. As such, it has all the advantages of WordPress power and with the disadvantage that you will have to learn to use the CMS and it will not be all as straightforward as with Shopify.
WooCommerce is perfect for those who want to have total freedom over their store, a custom design, offer a better user experience, control their SEO strategy and gain access to the contributions of the huge WordPress user community.
Shopify vs WooCommerce: Key Points
A long time ago we wrote a comparison to help you choose CMS for your online store. In that post, we already gave some clues about the pros and cons of Shopify and WooCommerce, as well as other applications and online options. What we want to summarize in this section, on the other hand, are those aspects that you must take into account when you are choosing an eCommerce tool and that we will develop one by one in specific sections. What factors cannot we forget in our comparison of Shopify vs WooCommerce?
- Type of eCommerce tool: Shopify manages all aspects of the stores created with its platform (from the domain, which you will contract through them, to the security of the server). On the contrary, with WooCommerce it is you who chooses where to host and you can manage your project with complete freedom.
- Price comparison: The eCommerce tool is the fundamental aspect in which you should not sting: it is an investment in your business and one of the most important. We explain the costs of Shopify vs WooCommerce to give you an idea of the budget you will need for each option.
- Learning curve: Ease of use, especially if you are a beginner, will be important for the success of the project. Most managers of an online store are not designers or programmers. Even knowledgeable users prefer a simple solution that doesn’t give them a lot of headaches. If we compare Shopify and WooCommerce, which is easier?
- Personalization and Design: The level of customization possible in Shopify vs WooCommerce is very different. The first is its platform, with attractive options but limited in number. The second is a plugin from the largest community of developers in the world, so the possibilities are almost endless and are renewed every day. We tell you more everything in detail.
- Product management: We analyze the possibilities that Shopify and WooCommerce offer you to present your products to your customers. The type of eCommerce you manage will also determine the functionalities you will need: how configurable should the product sheets be? Do you need the customer to choose a color, size, shape, weight, or other characteristics before adding the product to the cart?
- Payment methods: Make sure you choose a solution that allows you to accept the different forms of payment you need: PayPal, credit card, cash on delivery, or any other method that your users demand. If you are going to sell internationally, keep in mind that the payment methods that foreign customers prefer may be different.
- Integrations: You must be clear about which external tools you can integrate into your store to offer a broader and more personalized service. Third-party solutions and plugins mean greater adaptability, customization, and innovation.
- SEO strategy: A good SEO strategy involves gaining visibility on Google, getting more traffic, and potentially more conversions. Therefore, if you are going to develop organic positioning techniques, it is best that you carefully inform yourself of the SEO capabilities of Shopify vs WooCommerce.
- Licensing and Troubleshooting: There is a fundamental difference between Shopify and WooCommerce. The first is a platform that leaves the development and improvement of your code in the hands of an external company. The second is a free software plugin for WordPress. When it comes to troubleshooting code, this is very important. We explain why.
- Support service: Shopify has a technical support team that will help you if you need it. To use WooCommerce, on the other hand, you will have to be more self-taught. The WordPress community is huge and there are tons of specialized forums and blogs to find help with.
- Specialized professionals: If you need a custom configuration, can you find a specialist to help you? The answer varies a lot when we do the comparison of Shopify vs WooCommerce.
Type of e-commerce tool
The stores Shopify is created on the platform Shopify’s owns the cloud. The company manages everything: domain name, SSL security certificate, and web hosting. As woocommerce hosting that we are, we are not impartial and we will not pretend otherwise. But no doubt choosing Shopify implies leaving your website in the hands of third parties and, if at any time you want to migrate to another service, you are going to have a serious problem. This is a troublesome task in which the use of third-party plugins is necessary and for which you may need to hire a specialist.
Instead, WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin (both free software) that you can implement in the hosting of your choice. Thus, you will have total control over your store and you or your programmer will be able to make all the changes you need in the tool, using the abundant documentation available. WooCommerce, at present, is the tool of choice for the management of more than 39% of online stores that exist.
Price comparison: WooCommerce vs Shopify
Calculate the costs. But all. You must take into account the budget necessary to start a 100% functional online store. It also doesn’t hurt to take note of whether you will need to pay more when you need additional modules, plugins, more bandwidth …
The pricing model is another of the big differences between Shopify and WooCommerce :
Shopify offers a Lite plan (to sell on Facebook, mostly) for $ 9 per month, as well as 3 full plans that cost $ 29, $ 79, and $ 299 per month, respectively. The main difference between these 3 plans is in the number of accounts for the staff that they allow (2, 5, and 15, respectively) and in the costs for each transaction that you will have to pay to Shopify (2%, 1%, and 0.5%, respectively). The Basic plan does not offer you performance reports, the possibility to create gift cards, recovery of abandoned carts, or calculation of shipping costs by external providers (in fact, this last option is only offered by the Advanced plan, the most expensive). Before hiring, we recommend that you make good use of the free 14-day trial they offer.
WooCommerce is, like WordPress, a free solution. However, this does not mean that you will not have associated costs. You will have to hire a hosting to host your WordPress installation, a domain name, and an SSL certificate. If you hire a WordPress hosting with Raiola Networks, you will see that the application is already installed, that your plan is specifically optimized for this CMS, and that the domain name and SSL certificate are free. If you contract a hosting with another provider, you must install WordPress yourself.
On the other hand, if you use WooCommerce you will surely have to invest in a premium theme and in some other payment plugin with which to add additional functionalities to your store since the tool is pelad. In WooCommerce, both templates and extensions can easily beat the prices of their counterparts in Shopify, but you’ll pay for them only once rather than month-to-month. On the other hand, not even our most advanced specialized WordPress hosting reaches the monthly price of the most basic Shopify plan.
Therefore, with few exceptions, when comparing prices between Shopify and WooCommerce we can say (without much fear of being wrong) that WooCommerce will be the cheapest eCommerce tool in the medium-long term.
Customization and design of the online store with WooCommerce and Shopify
In the Shopify store, you can choose the theme for your store that you like the most. They have attractive designs, although the number of templates available is limited (they currently have about 100). Also, most of the Shopify themes are paid, although you will find about 20 free options that are also very attractive, which will come in handy if your initial budget is very limited. You don’t need to know how to modify code to customize a Shopify theme: in general, you can do it simply using the customization options that are included (the premium templates will offer you more alternatives, of course) and you will get a professional look without making any changes.
As a drawback, having limited options you will find many stores that will use the same template, especially if you choose a free one: remember that creating a unique and recognizable brand image is very important for your eCommerce to be successful. Spend a little time customizing your template to the extent that Shopify allows you: they have a “drag and drop” editor with which you can change the color palette, styles, layout, etc.
When choosing between Shopify and WooCommerce, keep in mind that the latter is part of WordPress, so it has countless themes to choose from. Only in the official WordPress repository, there are already 560 different templates for WooCommerce. If you click on “Characteristics filter”, you will be able to choose by sector, type of structure, etc.
On the other hand, there are also a huge number of WooCommerce plugins available to help you implement whatever functionality you need and boost the performance you take out of your store to unsuspected limits. From support for multilingual eCommerce, for improved image galleries, specifically for results reports, for offers and promotions, for inventory control, for invoicing, and many more functionalities! Finally, we must not forget that we will have the best known in terms of WordPress plugins for SEO, optimization of loading speed, generation of backups, antispam, etc.
Product management in Shopify vs WooCommerce
Maybe your product is not very configurable and the customer does not need to choose more than the amount they want to put in the cart. However, as soon as you need your online sales solution to allow the customer to choose a color or size, for example, things get difficult. Can you add different prices for each combination? And add different images? Have each combination in a different inventory?
The more combinations you want to be available, the more complete your eCommerce solution will have to be. If we compare Shopify vs WooCommerce :
Shopify allows you to offer 3 options per product. For example, in the case of a T-shirt you can create the options sex, color, and size; for a mobile phone, you can offer alternatives of color, screen inches, and internal memory. In total, you can create for your options up to 100 combinations per product (that is, you can have many sizes and colors available for the same shirt, for example). However, you will not be able to sell shirts by sex, color, size, and type of sleeve, for example. For that, you will have to choose another tool.
WooCommerce is much more configurable and allows you to sell your products the way you want. Not only can you add all the combinations you need, but you can display them most clearly and easily possible for the customer to understand: using custom attributes. If you have 5 shirts in different shades of blue, you can indicate “sky blue”, “navy blue”, “Klein blue”, “cobalt blue” and “indigo”, for example. You can also add an image as a preview of each combination so that the customer identifies the appearance of each product. Also, if you wish, you can give your clients the possibility to add several combinations to the cart at the same time (for example, to buy a shirt in several sizes without having to go back again and again).
Shopify vs WooCommerce payment methods
There is a multitude of payment platforms that you can use to accept payments online. Some may not interest you and others may not be attractive to your customers. Let’s see how Shopify vs WooCommerce behaves in terms of payment methods:
Shopify offers a good number of payment options. It has its tool, called Shopify Payments, and also well-known third-party gateways. Now, although it supports these other gateways, the truth is that if you decide to use them, Shopify will charge you a percentage per transaction that will go from 0.5% to 2% depending on the contracted plan and that will be added to the monthly fee that you must pay for use the platform. The only way to prevent Shopify from charging you that percentage per transaction is to use Shopify Payments and not a third-party gateway.
WooCommerce offers PayPal and Stripe by default, but it also supports all the best-known third-party gateways (and some quite unknown or that are not often used in Spain) through extensions. A while ago, we published a whole post about WooCommerce payment methods. Since you are the one who manages the integration, you will only have to pay the transaction fees established by your payment gateway or your bank. WooCommerce will not charge you anything for these payments and that is a point very in its favor.
Therefore, if you are going to use a third party payment gateway, you can save a lot of money if you work with WooCommerce instead of Shopify. If you have tiny e-commerce and don’t mind using Shopify Payments, which charges the same for card payments as PayPal and Stripe, then the commission’s aspect in Shopify vs WooCommerce won’t be as important.
Integrations and extensions for eCommerce
No matter how robust an eCommerce tool is, it is rare that you will not need to add third-party extensions to expand its functionality at any time. For example, you may be interested in using an email marketing tool, a lead generation solution, web analytics tools, etc. After comparing Shopify vs WooCommerce, we see that both eCommerce applications have a wide range of add-ons that will allow you to integrate a large number of third-party services.
In the case of Shopify, you have an app store at your disposal where you can get add-ons for your store. There are extensions to improve your online marketing, your sales, for social networks, for shipping management, for customer service. client, for billing, for reporting, etc. For example, to improve SEO they have the SEO Manager add-on, which identifies and allows solving various errors in positioning techniques. Some of the Shopify extensions are free, but for others, you will have to pay a monthly amount (such as SEO Manager itself, which is priced at $ 20 per month).
The options available for WooCommerce are even more numerous: lead generation, SEO, payment gateways, web performance optimization… Everything you can think of! There are many more alternatives than for Shopify and, also, if you want something personalized you can entrust the work to a developer specialized in WordPress. Therefore, in the Shopify vs WooCommerce combat, the WordPress plugin is by far the most flexible eCommerce solution.
SEO strategy for your online store
This is where there is no comparison between Shopify vs WooCommerce.
Shopify allows you to perform basic SEO techniques, such as writing the presentation text for your home page, adding unique and personalized descriptions for each of your products, and modifying the metadata of your pages. On the other hand, the code is reputed to be quite clean and the pages load at an adequate speed, which also benefits the positioning of your store in search engines. However, your eCommerce will not be able to have its blog, which is probably a clear disadvantage compared to many of your competitors.
On the other side of the scale is WooCommerce. WordPress is, without a doubt, the content management platform par excellence and has gained a lot of advantage over any other system when it comes to SEO positioning. Many Shopify users choose to create a WordPress blog outside of their store. If your eCommerce is created directly with WooCommerce, you can consolidate your content creation strategy from minute 1.
Licensing and troubleshooting in eCommerce
Although we have already mentioned the topic because it glances at some of the other aspects, it is such a crucial difference between Shopify and WooCommerce that we think it deserves its section.
WooCommerce – like WordPress – is free software under the GPL. This means that anyone is guaranteed the right of free access to the source code, free of charge, and without anyone putting any impediment to it.
This, although it may not seem like it, is very important even if you don’t know anything about programming. Why? Because the fact that its code can be distributed and modified allows millions of programmers around the world to contribute their improvements to the WooCommerce source code – as they already do on Github! – helping not only to improve the software but also to fix security bugs.
These contributions are especially important if we consider that WordPress is the most present tool on the web today. With so much volume of users, WooCommerce attracts a lot of developers who, in turn, bring all these improvements to the plugin for you to enjoy.
Shopify, on the other hand, is not free. Its development is fully controlled by a third-party company and therefore improvements or bug fixes may be delayed depending on the capacity and work queue of your development team. In the case of free software, even if WooCommerce decided to delay improvements, they could come through another channel, since free software can be modified and improved without limitations.
Support service for your Shopify and WooCommerce online store
On the technical support side, there is no discussion possible. Shopify is a paid service and, as such, it has a 24-hour support staff associated with it that can help you with whatever you need, either to teach you how to use all the options or to solve any problem with its operation.
The support WooCommerce, however, comes from the WordPress community. As a general rule, the answers to most of the problems of this solution for online sales are on the web, in WordPress.org forums, or the issue tracker on your Github.
To put it bluntly: if you’re just starting, WooCommerce help may fall short unless you have someone capable of giving you more comprehensive support. For those who are very lost, the Shopify eCommerce platform will be the most suitable option. At least to begin with.
Professionals specialized in eCommerce
If you know that your business will need a completely customized branding, as well as some business rules that are “very yours”, you may need to customize the behavior of the application. For this, you will need the services of programmers or designers. And this is where we find another big difference between Shopify and WooCommerce.
After all, Shopify offers the ability to create themes and plugins if you have the necessary technical staff. However, the problem is that this is a niche skill, very specialized. As a consequence, you will have to require the services of professionals whose salaries are surely higher than those of any WordPress or WooCommerce specialist.
If this is your case, and before choosing the winner of the Shopify vs WooCommerce fight, we recommend that you check in your professional environment if you have someone who can meet these needs. Otherwise, you could find yourself in the position of having to pay much more than normal to achieve the same as in WooCommerce. You may also have to dispense with the configuration you need due to not being able to find valid professionals to implement it.
WooCommerce and WordPress, on the other hand, have a lot of specialized staff thanks to their success. Therefore, not only will you have people capable of implementing your ideas in the store, but you will also be able to choose between several freelancers and professional companies that will budget for services of this type. On the other hand, if you are going to choose between Shopify and WooCommerce and you opt for the former, you could be forced to “settle” for the specialized staff you can find, since there is not so much offer.
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