Whether you are just entering the world of online retail or selling on Amazon, Flipkart, eBay, Shopclues for years, and now you are planning to launch your e-commerce website to reach a wide range of customers. Building an e-commerce portal is now easy if you are from a non-technical background. Here are two famous tools, Shopify and WooCommerce, which help you develop your project. They offer you many features like free themes, tacking, API, and plugins, making it easy to do a task. But you are confused about whether Shopify vs WooCommerce is best for your business, or which one to choose. It is challenging to make, but knowing the facts and differences between them gets more manageable.
An overview of WooCommerce Vs Shopify
Both are among the top most popular e-commerce platforms out there, and both are used across the globe to build professional and successful e-commerce websites.
WooCommerce is an open-sourced E-commerce platform that operates on WordPress. It means that it is entirely customizable as per the needs, which allows you or your developer to build and run a tailored online store for your customers.
On the other hand,
Shopify is an all-in-one platform, which means that you can use it to create an online store, accept your payments, control your inventory and manage orders from a single dashboard. After selecting a pre-built theme, start customising, and away you go.
Let’s compare those two broadly to let you know the exact difference between them and make it easy to choose one from them.
1)Statistics
As we have already mentioned, the worldwide use of both the platforms, but it is not until you see the accurate figures that you realise just how popular they both are.
Shopify hosts around 10000000 businesses across the globe. From 2016 to 2018, its stores generate around $183 billion in revenue in economic activity. And also, many Big brands are using it, including Kylie, Rebecca Minkoff, etc.
WooCommerce carries more than 200000 active stores worldwide. Moreover, it is used by 22% of the top one million E-commerce websites and has a market share of 94% E-commerce. Some famous brands using this to create their shopping sites include Singer, All Blacks, Weber, etc.
2) Features
Since Shopify is an all-in-one platform, it comes with abandoned cart recovery, discount codes and around 100 payment options already included in it. Also, it allows you free SSL (Secure Sockets Layer), which secures your website from hacking and malware attacks. This feature makes it slightly more relevant to buy a Shopify store.
Moreover, WooCommerce functions more like a build your E-commerce platform, which allows you to choose and add the extensions you require, many of which offer advanced functionality over Shopify’s basic features. You can select features as your business requirements. But In this, you need to buy SSL for your website, which costs per year.
Features conclusion: Which is better depends on your requirements. If you are looking for a quick and easy set up of an all-in-one product, Shopify wins. Moreover, if you want the flexibility to tailor the platform to your precise needs, WooCommerce comes out on top.
3) Seller tools
Both platforms do much more than help you to build your e-commerce website. They both allow you to market your business, delight your customers, manage orders with the help of a wide range of their seller tools.
Shopify offers many tools that can help you manage your store dashboard like invoice generator, finance calculator, image resizing etc. But these tools can be paid or subscription-based, increasing your cost of operating the store like a notification tool.
WooCommerce has a worldwide developer community that gives a plus point to WooCommerce. Thousands of plugins are available for free on WooCommerce, which helps you manage your website dashboards with AIO SEO and Yoast SEO. Website SEO, Constant Contact for Email Listing, Live Chat for CRM management, HubSpot for Automation, and many more functions.
4) Ease of use
There is no doubt about it that Shopify is a more accessible platform. It requires the limited technical ability to generate outstanding results quickly. Moreover, it runs automatic product updates so that you do not need to worry about doing it yourself in the future.
WooCommerce requires a little more technical competency, which can be confusing and time-consuming if you are a first-time store builder. Moreover, suppose you have the time and patience to get grips with it. In that case, you can build a highly customised and effective e-commerce website tailored to your precise needs, especially if you are already familiar with WordPress.
5) Customizability
Shopify has more than 50 paid and free themes to choose from and quickly tailor. This is great for first-time store builders and those with the help of limited technical abilities. But moreover, customization is limited to the theme. And If you require a unique store or location customization, you will need to upgrade to Shopify Plus – a sister platform aimed at enterprise brands.
WooCommerce is the opposite: a platform with open-source nature means that it is entirely customizable, and you have more than 800 themes to work within it. The platform is built by keeping developers in mind so that if you are working with a developer, it is excellent for creating a wholly unique store.
6) Payment methods
The significant difference between Shopify VS WooCommerce is the associated payment method costs. Both provide more than 100 payment gateways, including Apple Pay, credit and debit cards, PayPal, Square, and Stripe. These come either built-in or available via integration.
Primary Shopify users are charged at around 2% per transaction for providers other than Shopify payments. It also allows you for the COD (Cash on Delivery) option on the dashboard portal, but this feature works only in India.
While WooCommerce did not have a feature like this, they allow you to use a lot of payment APIs for payment collection like Razorpay, Paytm, PayU. Alternatively, you can also use your bank API.
Summary
As you can see, there are many factors to consider when deciding between Shopify vs WooCommerce. It definitely can be overwhelming if you are starting, mainly because not everything with running your online store is a one-size-fits-all answer.
Conclusion
It is easier to manage your website if you are a WordPress technical expert. Because WordPress is a combination of codes and plugins.
Or, if you want a quick result and have no money issues and want to focus on your customers and products, you do not want to entangle your hand in technical efforts. Go for Shopify, which gives you delivery and payment both without more technicality. It is easier to manage your website if you are a WordPress technical expert. Because WordPress is a combination of codes and plugins
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