Shopify and WooCommerce are two most popular eCommerce platforms which are used all over the world. In this article, we will show you strengths as well as disadvantages of each one to help you find the best for your business.

There are 6 factors we want you to care about to compare Shopify vs WooCommerce before making the last decision. Let’s take a look!

Table of Contents:

• Design

• Price

• Features

• Ease of Use

• Customer Support

• SEO options

• Conclusion

DESIGN

The first to care is about design of each eCommerce platform you use.

a/Shopify

Shopify has a friendly-user design which fulfills many amazing and helpful points for its users. Let’s see some of Shopify advantages which you may need someday.

• High quality of visual themes: Shopify owns more than 54 different themes which are all visual at good quality. All themes have unique variations and are easy to be changed. It means you can take advantage of more than 100 designs.
• Mobile responsibility: This helps users use Shopify everywhere, at anytime of the day.
• Colourful: Shopify supplies many lively colors for you to choose.

Some disadvantages of Shopify:

• Not created in-house
• Premium ones are expensive, at $180

b/WooCommerce

WooCommerce was first introduced by a team of WooThemes company. Time passed by, it has been improved a lot to help cooperate with most themes on the market.

Let’s check out some advantages WooCommerce brings to you:

• Easy to work with almost any WordPress themes.
• A long list of different topics for products: WooCommerce gives you a lot of available topics for special products so you just need to choose the right one and use.
• Supplying Storefront -a free but helpful online store theme for online shops. ( or just pay little money to get allowance for adjusting the look.

PRICE

Price is also an important factor that any customers need to care about. Both SHopify and WooCommerce are good, but what is better with reasonable price? Let’s check out right now!

The first thing to know about price of Shopify is that, all the prices are very clear and easy for you to set a marketing plan.

If Shopify has straightforward price strategy, WooCommerce give free plugin for its users. Ya, it is good, but what is the matter? Please think twice about the fee for hosting, themes, domain names and more. Right now, please look at the table below to know better about these two eCommerce platforms and get the best for you.

Comparing price of Shopify and WooCommerce

These two eCommerce also gives customers many update versions to use for different purposes. But the above table just show you at the beginning price for the both of them.

Conclusion from this comparative table:

• WooCommerce, in the end, takes you as much as, or more, Shopify does.
• Maybe WooCommerce takes much because of additional extensions of SEO.
• You need more time to work with WooCommerce than with Shopify.
• Shopify has amazing and effective price packages for customers to choose (Lite, Basic Shopify, Shopify, Advanced Shopify)

Note: Please check carefully about the fee for transaction of these both eCommerce platform to make sure what you can take advantage of them in the future. It is often around 2 to 3 percent for each time.

FEATURES

In this factor, Shopify and WooCommerce have many things in the same. These both supply basic and essential features to build your website.

Shopify

What can you get when using Shopify? Let’s check these features below:

• Unlimited products, file storage, and traffic to your store

• Discount codes
• Blog module
• Social media integration
• Mobile commerce optimization
• Physical and digital products in the store
• Free SSL certificate
• Credit card payments
• Many languages
• Mobile commerce optimization
• Ability for adjusting shipping rates and taxes
• Many languages
• Capability for Drop shipping
• Customer profiles
• Manual order creation
• SEO-ready structure
• Advanced reports
• Great featured mobile app
• Individual reviews
• Facebook selling module
• Site stats and product reports
• Social media integration
• Automatic fraud analysis
• Embedded Oberlo integration
• Daily backups
• Individual reviews
• Facebook selling module
• Gift cards
• Abandoned cart recovery
• Site stats and product reports
• Print orders
• Great featured mobile app
• Product importing via CSV files
• Social media integration
• Physical and digital products in the store
• Many product variations
• Abandoned cart recovery

WooCommerce

Let’s take some seconds reading WooCommerce’s features below to see which one is helpful for your business:

• Physical and digital products
• Payment Gateway: Paypal and Stripe
• Easy to adjust shipping rates and taxes
• Unlimited products’ number and categories
• User-friendly
• Stock levels control
• Full ability to control whole data
• Adaptable with the current WordPress theme.
• Free plugins
• Free extension for Facebook.

To help you understand more about these two well-known platforms, we have set up a full table for different criterias to compare Shopify and WooCommerce.

Feature of Shopify and WooCommerce

It is quite difficult to say what is better. It depends much on many factors to choose a suitable eCommerce platform. We may say that Shopify is quite easy to use and it helps your shop more and more user-friendly and functional. WooCommerce, known as an add-on to WordPress, is a very feature-rich and owns enough essential features to set up an online shop.

EASE OF USE

Let’s move to the next criteria in our list of factors to compare Shopify and WooCommerce today. Let’s see the ease of use of each one and pick up the best.

Shopify

Shopify is a subscription-based online tool. These are some advantages of Shopify which make it one of the most popular eCommerce platform in the world.

• It is easy to use the platform even you are not a specialist in technology field.

• It evens gives you tips to start with and set everything up. You can even know news for new shops or products.

• One more great thing is that you do not need to design anything, all are available.

• You can easily control your online business.

WooCommerce, on the other hand, is easy to use but it is not the same for setting up the store. In fact, it is a WordPress plugin but can be used well as Shopify and other platforms.

Requirement for using WooCommerce:

• Get a domain name
• Owning a hosting account
• Need installing WordPress

Now, you can see that, these steps take a lot of time and of course, money too. But WooCommerce itself, has many great features and can help much as a normal eCommerce. It also allows users to set up a new shop and sell products right after having an online store.

Both are good. But if you want to have a store set up just in some minutes, using Shopify is good. On the other hand, for long time, both Shopify and WooCommerce are quite the same.

SUPPORT

Shopify helps its customers through email, chat or phone call. All customers can be help 24/7 by an enthusiastic and nice team. But at the beginning, you should read extensive knowledge base to know some basic problems to solve.

WooCommerce, as ad-on to WordPress, can help its clients through WordPress forums. You can also get an account to be helped right on WooCommerce site (WooCommerce.com). Online blogs are good for people using WooCommerce, too.

SEO

Strong SEO is what a shop need at the first step to sell things online. Both of these below own wonderful features to help you get better SEO in the future.

Shopify

Shopify owns good design and features and can help you get strong SEO with full information of meta description and so on. It give users good and clean codes together with linking structure which helps the website get a better rank. All shops on Shopify can work well and fast, this is also a good criteria comparing with WooCommerce. Just find out more about Lost Cyclist to know more about Shopify strength.

WooCommerce

Being considered one of the best and trustworthy platform to develop SEO, WooCommerce is really a good competitor in the run of SEO in the market. With Yoast SEO, clients can easily set up even the tiny thing to make the website at the best optimization. You can control all the website yourself. Because WooCommerce is an add-on to WordPress, it of course gives you a lot of SEO options to develop your sale number. You just need to choose a good and powerful hosting to make sure that the website runs fast.

CONCLUSION

After sharing with you 6 factors to compare Shopify and WooCommerce, now the decision is up to you. Let’s take one more look, the last one, to think again before coming to the last minute.

Go With Shopify If:

• You need a hands-off approach.
• You do not want to spend time setting up all things yourself.
• Your online shop needs to be highly optimized.
• You want to be helped support by a team 24/7
• You do not want to spend time for any technical problems of the eCommerce platform.

Go With WooCommerce If:

• You want to get full control of your shop.
• You want to get allowance to thousands of plugins
• You can spend time setting up.
• You have limited budget to start with.