When you want to open an online store, you need to look into some key features. These key factors will help you decide if Shopify will work for your business the best. Therefore, before choosing between Shopify vs WooCommerce, take a look at the key points below that will help you decide what might suit your business the most. They are:
- Ease of use – whether it’s easy to use even for a beginner.
- Budget – whether the platform is cost-effective for a fully functional eCommerce store.
- Scalability – if it will help your online store to scale up over the years.
- Payment method – if the platform supports multiple payment options like Stripe, PayPal, or other merchant processors.
- Integration – if your platforms will provide plenty of tools that you can integrate to grow your footstep.
In this article, we will take an in-depth look if WooCommerce or Shopify fulfill these basic requirements.
WooCommerce Vs Shopify: An Overview
Shopify is a powerful all-in-one eCommerce platform. It’s an easy and reliable platform to create online stores. It helps you to accept payments and manage your inventory all from a single platform. And you can do all these without worrying about technical aspects of managing a website like caching, web hosting or security, etc.
On the other hand, WooCommerce is an open-source eCommerce plugin built for WordPress. It allows you to use the most powerful content management system (CMS). With this, you can run an online store and customize every aspect of your store. WooCommerce is a platform that you can easily use to build custom extensions. As it’s an open-source platform, it’s ideal for cost-conscious users. However, you will still have to pay for hosting and security.
Whether to choose WooCommerce or Shopify, it depends entirely on your needs and skill level. Let’s take a look at how the pricing works for both platforms.
WooCommerce Vs Shopify: The True Cost
Shopify Pricing:
When it comes to pricing, Shopify offers pricing plans to make it easy to track your spending. Here’s the list of expense you will have under Shopify:
- Domain ($10 – $20/year)
- Hosting ($35 – $50/month)
- Extension fees ($0 – $100/month)
- Security ($0 – $200/year)
However, the good news is all the fees mentioned above are included in the Shopify plan.
WooCommerce Pricing:
In contrast, WooCommerce doesn’t cost a dime. As it’s an open-source platform, you can install it for free. As a result, WooCommerce is more flexible than Shopify. However, to unlock advanced features, like professional reports, you need to pay extra cost.
Shopify comes with a price ranging from $29 to $299 per month, while WooCommerce’s pricing ranges from $14 to $32 per month by Bluehost. Under the WooCommerce plan, it includes hosting, domain name, and security.
WooCommerce Vs Shopify: Pros And Cons
Let’s take a look at the pros and cons to decide which platform will best suit your business.
WooCommerce Pros:
- With WooCommerce, you can customize your offer and can have complete control over your spending.
- WordPress comes with a huge online community. As WooCommerce is specially built for WordPress, you can take advantage of this opportunity.
- WooCommerce offers endless plugins and themes as anyone can make and sell them online.
- WooCommerce has a simple configuration on WordPress.
- Last but not least, the WooCommerce plugin is free.
WooCommerce Cons:
- Even though WooCommerce comes with a simple configuration, you must still master a few methods to operate it.
- Although it’s a free platform, you will still have to pay a certain amount for advanced tools, plugins, and themes.
- With WooCommerce, you will still have to manage hosting, security, and maintenance for backups.
Shopify Pros:
- Shopify offers a fair pricing range. With this, you will always know how much you will be spending each month.
- Shopify also offers access to thousands of apps for their subscribers. This way they help their customers to extend their store.
- With Shopify, you can also have access to plenty of beautiful themes.
- From hosting to security, Shopify handles it all for you.
- And if you are looking for a platform for your dropshipping business, Shopify is the right place for you. All its features are simple and it only takes a few minutes to launch your store.
- It also offers the best support system.
Shopify Cons:
- As Shopify handles everything for you, it doesn’t let you have control over your site.
- You cannot customize your themes and features as you want like WooCommerce.
- Your monthly subscription price may only increase over time.
If we were to compare Shopify vs WooCommerce, you can see that both have their strengths and weaknesses. Therefore, explore the attributes of each platform to decide which one is the best for your store.
WooCommerce Vs Shopify: Which Is The Best eCommerce Platform?
When you build an online store, you need to add some basic features. These features can help you to run any type of online store and meet the needs of specific niches. Whether you add any highly advanced features or not, you will always have to include essential retail tools. The tools will help you to display products, manage orders, handle payment methods, and provide customer care.
To start any eCommerce store, Shopify and WooCommerce are both powerful platforms. That’s why the choice between these comes down to your personal preferences and skills. Firstly, your choice of eCommerce platform will also depend on your future plan for your business. Secondly, this will include how you want to grow your business and expand the scope of your site.
Shopify is easier to use than WooCommerce. As it doesn’t require you anything to install, you can start right away. Additionally, they offer specific pricing plans, and setting up payments is also easy. As Shopify handles all the technical side of website building and management, it’s the perfect choice for you. This way you can avoid all the hassle of maintenance issues.
Whereas WooCommerce doesn’t manage the technical issues for you but it’s cost-effective. It gives you the flexibility of customization and complete control over management.
That’s why WooCommerce is the best choice for you if you want an inexpensive but flexible platform for your eCommerce store. But for customers who want infinite scalability and hassle-free platforms, choose Shopify for your store.
Bottom Line:
We hope this article helped you to understand the key features of Woocommerce vs Shopify and can now easily decide what will work for your online store the best.
