WooCommerce vs Shopify: Which is best for you?

When opening an online store, there are several important decisions to make. The very first one you’ll have to make is which platform to use. There are many options available to business owners in the modern era of e-commerce, with a Shopify store a popular choice.

However, there are other powerful e-commerce platforms that you can use for your website, including WooCommerce.

WooCommerce vs Shopify creates a big discussion online because both platforms offer great benefits and features. Shopify offers ease of use while the WooCommerce plugin provides deep customisation.

Which is better for you, though?

What is a WooCommerce store?

WooCommerce is a free plugin that allows you to create an online store for a WordPress site. By downloading this WordPress plugin, anybody can transform their website into an online store.

The fact that it’s free makes the WooCommerce plugin an enormously popular choice for individuals and companies looking to add an e-commerce section to their websites.

According to Statista, WooCommerce is far and away the most popular e-commerce platform used worldwide with an impressive market share of 38.74%.

Its nearest competitor is Squarespace Online Stores with 14.67% of the share. Shopify, in comparison, has a market share of 10.32%.

This majority is helped by the fact that WordPress dominates its competitors in the website-building industry, with 42.7% of the market share.

What is a Shopify store?

Shopify is a popular e-commerce platform that offers excellent web hosting services.

The idea behind Shopify is to create an easy-to-use platform for businesses of all sizes — small and large — to create an online store with minimal effort.

Shopify offers a range of design tools and provides insights into payment processing, inventory management and much more.

You’re also able to connect an Amazon seller account to a Shopify store, which offers even more convenience for users.

Due to being a ‘hosted’ e-commerce platform, all a user needs to do is register an account to get started. No additional web hosting or software is required, which differs from a WordPress website.

WooCommerce vs Shopify: Pricing

WooCommerce

WooCommerce is a free WordPress plugin. This means no matter the size of the WordPress website, you can download it without incurring any costs on day one.

However, to get to this point, you’ll have already had to purchase web hosting for your website.

From here, you can use a free theme that the plugin provides or pay for a premium, high-quality design. This can cost in the region of $60 to $90 per theme.

After some building and playing with WooCommerce, you may also want to add a premium WooCommerce extension, which will incur a cost, too.

Once you have everything set up, WooCommerce does not cost anything else unless you want to change the theme or add more extensions.

Shopify

A Shopify basic package costs £25 per month. This is ideal for small businesses and individuals as it includes two staff accounts and up to 1000 inventory locations.

This is the most popular pricing option on Shopify online stores.

For more staff accounts and professional reporting, a small business can pay £65 per month. For much larger businesses with a custom report builder and 15 staff accounts, it costs £344 per month.

Unlike WooCommerce, Shopify takes transaction fees for every sale you make. All Shopify payments incur commissions that vary between 1.5% and 2% across the different pricing plans. The larger the plan, the less commission Shopify takes.

Shopify also offers an alternative pricing plan, with the ‘Starter’ priced at £5 per month. This is suitable for individuals selling products through social media.

Shopify Plus provides high-level hosting and performance for high-volume businesses, like Gymshark and Polaroid. This starts at £2000 per month.

WooCommerce vs Shopify: Ease of use

WooCommerce

WooCommerce is an ideal addition to WordPress sites as it can grow with you. The ability to add a wider range of extensions and increase the power of your web hosting provider means you can scale up the website to what you need it to be.

It must be stated, though, that WooCommerce can take some getting used to. It’s not as simple as signing up and a beautiful, functioning online store is ready to go. Unlike Shopify, it does take a little bit of work.

Shopify

The big selling point of Shopify is its ease of use.

As an online store, it does everything you need it to do, right from day one. Once you’ve signed up and filled in all of the key information for your website to display, it’s ready to use.

Plus, the Shopify app store offers fantastic functionality. It gives you the ability to enhance various aspects of your online store, with a variety of Shopify themes to choose from.

Essentially, Shopify gets you up and running quickly, with minimal effort. It provides good web hosting and speeds and has an easy-to-contact support team that can assist you with any problems.

WooCommerce vs Shopify: Design

WooCommerce

Designing a WooCommerce store is quite the learning curve if you’re new. However, there is a solid option of free themes and designs so you can easily choose one of them if you prefer.

Also, as previously mentioned, there are premium WooCommerce themes in the store that you can purchase to enhance the look and feel of your store.

If you’re experienced or brave enough to give it a try, you can completely customise the look of your e-commerce store with WooCommerce on WordPress. From the colours and the font to the layout and cart icon, you can customise everything on the page.

If you’re not interested in fully designing your online store, you can simply select or purchase a theme that suits your business.

Shopify

Like WooCommerce, Shopify offers a variety of interesting and functional themes.

After signing up to Shopify, you’re given a handful of vibrant themes to choose from for free. If you prefer something more advanced, Shopify does offer premium themes.

Like WooCommerce themes, the premium ones on Shopify will incur a cost. However, if you’re willing to pay, you can make your online store stand out from others in your industry.

Plus, even the basic Shopify theme makes it very easy to make the theme your own, with customisation of headers, colours and more.

WooCommerce vs Shopify: Support

WooCommerce

The support a WooCommerce store offers differs from Shopify.

You can delve into its many self-help guides and articles but, in terms of human support to talk through an issue, you won’t get it from WooCommerce.

Instead, you should opt for a web hosting provider that offers 24/7 support. This way, if anything urgent happens to your online store, like going offline unexpectedly, you can speak to them for information and guidance.

Shopify

Unlike WooCommerce, Shopify provides a superb level of support for everyday issues.

The Shopify Help Center is ideal for anybody requiring a solution to a problem, or looking to learn something new about their website and the platform.

If you understand things easier by watching a video, you’ll be pleased to know that Shopify has its own YouTube channel with guides, as well as regular webinars.

There is also the Shopify Learn portal with courses from over 90 Shopify experts.

WooCommerce vs Shopify: SEO

WooCommerce

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is a hugely important aspect of your online store. Being visible on search engines is the difference between making sales and falling into the background.

Straight away, WooCommerce is built for SEO. You can create meta descriptions and titles, and customise your URLs, which all go a long way to helping your ranking position on search engines.

There are also various WordPress plugins you can use to enhance your SEO performance, such as Yoast, All in One and SEOPress.

These particular WordPress plugins (and more) give you more guidance regarding the SEO of your WooCommerce store. All of the plugins mentioned offer a free and premium version, so if you want to delve deep into advanced SEO, you can with WooCommerce.

Shopify

On the Shopify app store, you can download an SEO Booster plugin that scans your Shopify store and generates a detailed report on its performance.

From here, you can implement the plugin’s recommendations which will hopefully ensure a higher ranking on search engines.

As far as the basic tools of SEO go, with Shopify, you can edit title tags, meta descriptions and URLs for blogs, products and collections.

You can also edit the alt text for images, which is another important step to improve the search engine optimisation of your online store.

Both WooCommerce and Shopify offer plugins that allow you to see where you’re going wrong with your SEO, and how to enhance it.

WooCommerce vs Shopify: Payments and UX

WooCommerce

Whatever payment gateway you’d like to use, a WooCommerce store offers a lot of integration.

Currently, there are 80 payment gateways to choose from that sync up to WooCommerce. This offers you a lot of choices when first setting up your Woocommerce store.

In terms of offering a positive user experience (UX) for customers, schema markup and structured data or important.

When showcasing a product, you want to provide potential customers with every key piece of information in a snapshot to grab their attention. You can do this with structured data, which is simple to implement on a WooCommerce store thanks to WordPress plugins like WooCommerce SEO.

WooCommerce plugins are useful for a wide range of tasks and this particular one helps to automate all of the structured data you need to display for each of your products. As a result, you’re not only improving the functionality of your website but also the experience for your customers.

Shopify

Both Shopify and WooCommerce offer an easy payment gateway.

Shopify Payment is linked to the website owner’s bank account, making it easy to process payments without having to sign up to a third-party service provider, like WooCommerce users have to.

The Shopify app store is your friend, too, for implementing structured data onto products.

The Smart SEO app is one of many useful Shopify apps that enhance the performance and experience of your site. It automates the whole process of adding structured data to your products, including reviews, price and more, so you don’t have to.

WooCommerce vs Shopify: Security

WooCommerce

As an online store that collects important customer information like credit card details and addresses, both WooCommerce and Shopify must offer exceptional security.

WooCommerce offers you the opportunity to choose the right level of security for your WordPress website. The basic package the plugin provides does not produce security, so you must find it within an additional WooCommerce plugin.

Many WooCommerce plugins will scan your website to find potential security risks and will alert you to any threats.

You can also add a solid level of security by partnering with a web hosting provider that takes security seriously.

Shopify

Due to being a hosted platform, Shopify is responsible for protecting your store. This is why it comes with many built-in security features, including an SSL certificate.

This helps to protect your store against hackers, ensuring all customer information is secure.

An SSL certificate also tells visitors to your website that it’s safe for them to visit, browse and purchase from your store.

WooCommerce vs Shopify: Inventory management

WooCommerce

WooCommerce offers a flexible and customisable approach to inventory management. The platform gives you complete control over your stock and makes it easy to upload and edit products with the WordPress editor.

You have the freedom to track products, stock alerts, produce reports and much more, with WooCommerce’s inventory management.

To save time, you can bulk upload your entire catalogue via CSV files. Also, there is no limit on product variations with WooCommerce. So, no matter what you sell, you can include every single variation available in your inventory.

Shopify

Like WooCommerce, Shopify allows you to easily and effectively control inventory via reports, stock level alerts and more. You can also bulk upload your entire listing with CSV files, just like WooCommerce.

However, there is one big difference between WooCommerce and Shopify’s inventory management.

Shopify only allows 100 variations and three total options per product, compared to WooCommerce’s limitless offering. If you need to increase your limit, you can do this via the Shopify app store.

WooCommerce vs Shopify: Overview

After reading our complete guide, we hope you have a better idea of which platform you’d prefer to use for your e-commerce website.

If you’re inexperienced with website building and need to quickly set up a store, Shopify is ideal. Thanks to its built-in Shopify payment gateway, it provides an easy-to-use option that does a lot of the work for you.

It requires very little technical knowledge to set up and run a Shopify e-commerce store, while the hosting, performance and support offer even more excellent features.

It does have its downsides, though, such as the cost compared to WooCommerce’s basic offering. However, you are paying for a reliable service that does all of the hard yards for you.

WooCommerce, on the other hand, allows you to craft the website of your choosing.

It has a learning curve, but if you can master WooCommerce, you’ll create the website of your dreams. Even if you don’t have much technical knowledge, with the wide range of designs from the WooCommerce theme store, you can find the ideal style for your business.

The WooCommerce payments gateway options allow you to choose from a wide variety of service providers, but these can incur transaction fees, like Shopify, so look around and find the right one for you.

It’s clear to see that WooCommerce and Shopify offer users a wide range of excellent features and choosing the right one for you depends on what you want from your e-commerce platform.

Contact Paramount Digital

If you would like some support with your e-commerce website, you can find a team of experts at Paramount Digital.

We’re an SEO agency that has experience in both WordPress and Shopify, so get in touch today to find out how we can help you.

Give us an email at marketing@paramountdigital.co.uk or call us at 01744 747474.