Techssocial | Designing and developing a website can need an apparently limitless number of choices. For eg. what domain to buy, which hosting provider to pick, which website development services company to go for, which theme to select, and others. When we are discussing particularly an e-commerce website, since then you must make yet one more decisive choice: Shopify vs WooCommerce.
There are, obviously, an abundance of other alternatives easily accessible besides these two, but that is not for sure what we are here to talk about. Shopify and WooCommerce are two of the most admired and famous ones undoubtedly, and we are here to trench them against each other.
During this blog post, we will be taking an extended hard look at both popular platforms to find out which comes out at the top place. It is Shopify vs WooCommerce time!
Table of Contents
What Is Shopify?
Shopify is robust, consistent, and simple to use, presenting delightful templates and excellent customer support. It is a one-stop-shop eCommerce platform that makes your life very easy to develop an online business store, accept easy payments, and handle your stock all from a single platform without ever distressing about the technical features of running an online site such as web hosting, security, domain, caching, etc.
What Is WooCommerce?
WooCommerce is not actually an e-commerce platform. It is the e-Commerce plugin that completely transforms any WordPress website development into a powerful and fully functioning online store. As it is an open-source platform, and thus absolutely free to install, making it perfect for cost-alert users, but you will require to pay for other things like hosting and security. With WooCommerce, all you need to do is quickly install the WooCommerce plugin on your WordPress and your business store will be up and smoothly running.
What To Look When Choosing An Ecommerce Platform?
Several users have complexity selecting the best e-commerce platform because they do not know much about what to look for in one. Generally, go for either Shopify or WooCommerce because everybody else is using them but as a business store owner, you should develop a justification behind your deciding process, and we will assist you to do just that.
So before opting for an e-commerce platform, take into consideration the following elements:
Hosting Options
Since Shopify is a complete proprietary platform, your e-Commerce shop is hosted on Shopify’s servers. You take advantage of their infrastructure with limitless storage. And obviously, you could point a domain name that you have previously bought for your online shop.
With WooCommerce, you select the provider to host your e-Commerce shop and you get the preference of server specifications such as processor, server size, bandwidth, and storage. Most professionals recommend picking for an auto-scalable hosting provider so that your online shop persists operational despite the traffic thorns.
Add-ons/Extensions
The two well-renowned platforms provide you the features likely from a best-of-the-line e-Commerce platform such as stocks, presentation of products, discount codes, product creation, orders, management of payment modes, customers, coupons, CSV import of a catalog, delivery, others.
To further expand the native abilities, you can go for extensions and add-ons that plug into the platform without any problems. WooCommerce presents a host of extensions while Shopify puts at your clearance a quite huge App Store with approximately 500 applications.
In terms of content, the massive difference between Shopify and WooCommerce comes from the side pages. Shopify is primarily a shop front with only product pages. If you wish to create pages about your company news, brand, and blog site, WooCommerce is a nicer option.
Shipping Modes
Shopify and WooCommerce both permit you to set your shipping expenses according to several parameters such as local & global delivery, size & weight of products, others. If you wish to go beyond, you could also establish a real-time calculation of shipping expenses with various delivery options like UPS, FedEx, etc.
For WooCommerce, you will have to purchase a plugin and with Shopify, you require to go for however the Advanced Shopify plan to add up the functionality to your online shop.
User Approachability
If you are not a web developer by craft or not using website development services, then this is something that you must think about with a lot of importance.
WooCommerce provides a lot of ease as well as customization but for advance modifying you require a professional developer. This is exactly similar for Shopify as well because the drag and drop interface makes it easy-going for you to establish your online shop, but you will require to get your hands grubby if you wish to make advance modifications.
Dropshipping
WooCommerce is highly demanded among dropship shop owners because it permits you to install and incorporate add-ons and extensions without difficulty. Whereas Shopify comes with wonderful extensions and add-ons that will support you run your dropshipping store effortlessly.
Shopify Vs WooCommerce: The Final Words
The following are the important factors that assist you to decide between Shopify or WooCommerce for your e-commerce shop.
In summary, you must go for WooCommerce if:
- You previously use WordPress website development services, and you are absolutely in love with it and its simple-to-use plugins.
- You certainly require multilingual support.
- You would like to be able to tailor everything.
- You plan to incorporate an e-commerce shop within a bigger internet site with pages, blogs, etc.
- You have a restricted budget and require full support/sysadmin.
But if none of the bullet points above explain your online business plan, then you undoubtedly go with Shopify. Good luck!
Vivek Sharma is an SEO Expert with rich industrial experience and knowledge. Currently, he is working with the PNJ Sharptech that offers varieties of services such as web development services, web designing, and SEO services to the customers. He is famous for his excellent work and provides guaranteed results.