Are you looking to start your online store? Not sure whether whom to choose for use Shopify or WooCommerce? Shopify and WooCommerce are the two top eCommerce platforms around the world each with its pros and cons.
As a business owner, choosing the right eCommerce platform that fits you and your skills and business needs is crucial for your success.
What is Shopify?
Shopify is an all-in-one eCommerce platform that makes it easy and comfortable for you to build an online store, accept payments, and manage your inventory all from a single platform only without ever worrying or scary about the technical aspects of managing a website example a web hosting, security, caching, etc.
What is WooCommerce?
It is an open-source eCommerce plugin develop for WordPress. If you know how to use WordPress it will be super easy to use WooCommerce too. It lets you purchase the most powerful content management system (CMS) and use it to run an online store. Because of the open-source behaviour, you can customize every aspect or view of your store and easily create custom extensions.
The decision to choose between those two platforms depends completely on your needs and skill level.
Pros & Cons
Shopify Pros
Hosted software – Shopify incorporates hosting and security, and you don’t require to use any code to develop a brilliant online store.
24/7 support – Have your problem resolved around the clock to keep your clients and sales figures best and good
Various channel integration - Sell on other channels like Facebook, Amazon, eBay and Pinterest as a built-in feature.
Shopify Cons
Transaction payment - Shopify is the only platform to enforce its transaction fee unless you use its gateway, Shopify Payments.
Costly application – It’s easy and simple to achieve an expensive yearly bill for your application.
WooCommerce Pros
Limitless customization – As an open-source platform, you can use any code to customize your store to your favourite content as you planned it.
Scalable – WooCommerce and its fantastic flexibility let you achieve your e-commerce dreams
Excellent value for money – It’s free to install, and the extensions are mostly reasonably costed, helping you add greater functionality to your store at a low price.
WooCommerce Cons
Not beginner-friendly – Unless you have some extra coding knowledge, you’ll struggle and hustle to develop the online store you want on WooCommerce, unlike on Shopify.
Payments
Shopify eCommerce store works on a top-level domain: $29 / month.
WooCommerce stores on the same methods: $29 / month (a modest $20 hosting, domain, SSL).
Here you can see, even though the WooCommerce software is free, running an actual eCommerce store price the same as Shopify, if not more.
But that’s not all. With WooCommerce, you might also have to factor in the extra extensions for things like SEO, more payment gateways, etc. That extra ads are usually around the $49-79 mark (one-time payments).
Shopify boasts a much more conventional costing structure. It has a sliding scale of packages that offer customers a range of different features upfront – Lite ($9 per month,) and Basic Shopify ($29 per month,) Normal Shopify ($79 per month) and even you can Advanced Shopify ($299 per month).
WooCommerce vs Shopify: Which is the Best eCommerce Platform of 2021?
Shopify and WooCommerce are both powerful amazing platforms to begins your eCommerce store. It truly comes down to your skills and preferences according to your requirements.
URL plays a key role in your page’s SEO ranking. That’s what makes it important to be customized. When it comes to URL customization, Shopify has limitations compared to WooCommerce.
With Shopify, you don’t get complete freedom to change URLs for your pages. Instead, for a content page, it’s using a subfolder structure like /pages/ etc in the URL. You can make a small change in the liquid templates only.
WooCommerce makes it easier and simple for you to configure the URL structure for any of your pages so that you can organize your website’s content. Just go to the WooCommerce setting and go through some quick simple steps to modify the URL of a product page.
Shopify is a lot easier and simple to use and work with. It doesn’t require you to install anything separately, and you can get started quickly and easy. Setting up payments methods is easier, and they have easy to understand costing plans.
If you to the disadvantaged part of Shopify is that you don’t have complete control over everything. Your price can go simple high with transaction fees, add-ons, and integrations etc. Your upgrade options come with limited to select plans, and you cannot even manage costs on a pay-as-you-grow basis.
WooCommerce is open-source to work with and gives you complete control of your website. It costs a lot lower to begin an online store with WooCommerce especially with these WooCommerce hosting companies.
The disadvantage here is that you’ll have to maintain the software and it comes with a tiny learning curve. However, millions of beginners have already started using it, and they get over the learning phase quite quickly and easy way.
Conclusion
If you are looking for a cost-effective solution for your online store, and want to have complete control of your online store, then Woo Commerce is the best platform.
And If you want something that’s completely hassle-free with no skills to test that has infinite scalability, then Shopify is a great platform for you.