Before we get started, I have the hookup with both of these Shopify and Woocommerce companies and I have a better deal for you than you can find anywhere else. So, stay till the end where I’ll share that deal with you and I’m gonna be going over in-depth the pros and the cons for both of these platforms.
Let’s get started with the pros of Shopify, Shopify is a great platform and in my opinion, they have better templates. Now, this is arguable WooCommerce has some really good templates as well but I think the Shopify templates are just a little bit more professional. Shopify is also a little bit easier to use, Shopify has been built from the ground up for e-commerce to make it as simple as possible for people to put their products and sell them online. Part of what makes Shopify easier to use is they have 24/7 customer support which is a really big deal, with WooCommerce you’re a little bit more on your own because WooCommerce is a free plug-in to WordPress, there’s not a ton of support there. Shopify also has better add-ons and better apps than WooCommerce. WooCommerce does have a lot of apps it does have a lot of add-ons but I would definitely say that Shopify has better more professional add-ons and apps. It also seems like Shopify just integrates with more things, it seems any kind of email provider you want to integrate with Shopify can do that pretty much anything out there Shopify seems like it integrates with that. I think this is because Shopify is not free and because you have to pay for it, their team is a little bit more motivated to go out there and make the connections and make the integrations.
The last Pro for Shopify is, less can go wrong. I have WooCommerce websites and I have Shopify websites and it doesn’t ever seem like anything major goes wrong with my Shopify site. Part of that is because you can’t change the checkout page too much, with WooCommerce you can tinker with it a little bit more but there’s a bigger chance that something will break.
Now, WooCommerce has some big pros as well the biggest being WooCommerce is free, kind of, WooCommerce is a free plugin for WordPress. So, to have a WooCommerce site you need to have a WordPress site, and to have a WordPress site you’re going to need to pay a little bit for hosting. So, WooCommerce is still cheaper and it used to be that you could get really cheap hosting from companies like ‘I page’ but now with WooCommerce you need an SSL certificate and so I recommend personally going with ‘Siteground’. But still, paying for that hosting on ‘Siteground’ is a lot cheaper than it is to be paying for a Shopify site and this is probably the biggest Pro with WooCommerce. It’s a lot cheaper to have an e-commerce website with WooCommerce than it is with Shopify.
Now, you don’t need to go with ‘Siteground’ for hosting your WordPress website. There’s a lot of companies out there, ‘Bluehost’, ‘Hostgator’ a bunch of different ones. I personally recommend ‘Siteground’ but it’s up to you, pick whatever host works best for you. Another Pro with WooCommerce is that you can change just about everything on your website. With Shopify, there are certain things like the checkout page that they don’t let you change too much and this is because they don’t want you to break it but with WooCommerce they don’t care. There’s a lot of developers out there working on it to improve it and it also means that if you want to change it, you can change it. WooCommerce will never shut you down, the benefit of having your own WooCommerce website is you don’t have to go through a third party.
Now, I think it’s super rare for a Shopify site to get shut down but it does happen especially it seems like in developing countries or people selling kind of shady products, and the last Pro for WooCommerce is it’s built on WordPress and WordPress is great for blogging. So, if you’re gonna be doing a lot of blogging with your e-Commerce store, if content marketing is a big part of your company then WordPress is gonna make it really easy for you.
Now, let’s go to the cons of Shopify and one of the first big cons of Shopify is, it’s more expensive. Now funny enough, it’s actually cheaper to start because if you’re gonna be starting with the WooCommerce site a lot of the hosting companies make you pay for a full year all at once. So, it’s a little bit cheaper to start with Shopify but in the long run, WooCommerce is gonna be a lot less expensive. Now, I am always trying to negotiate for a better deal for you guys on Shopify.
Another con for Shopify, as I mentioned is they can shut down your site if you wanted to. So, if you’re in a high-risk country or you’re selling high-risk products, do not go with Shopify they can potentially shut you down. I’ve also found that the third-party apps are more expensive on Shopify than they are on WooCommerce. For instance, a third-party app you might want is, an app that recharges your customers every month you have to pay a third-party company for their integration for their app on Shopify so that you can do this, and like I said a lot of the apps seem to be more expensive with Shopify than they do with WooCommerce. But that being said they seem to work better on Shopify than they do with WooCommerce but I’ll talk about that in just a second.
The last con is the fees, now Shopify does charge a fee if you want to use a third-party payment gateway but you don’t need to do that. Shopify has its own built-in payments basically the way it works is every time you get a sale, Shopify takes a 2.9 percent fee and that fee goes to pay the credit cards it goes to pay everything. Now, a lot of people think that with WooCommerce there’s no fee like that and that’s not true, with WooCommerce you still have to pay a fee but you’re paying it too straight instead of WooCommerce and with Shopify, you’re paying it directly to Shopify technically. Now depending on which plan you have that percentage will go down but no matter what store you open, you’re going to have to pay a percentage fee every time someone makes a credit card transaction on your website, that’s just the way it works.
Now, let’s talk about the cons with WooCommerce and one of the first big cons is, you’re going to have technical problems. Pretty much everyone I’ve ever known uses WooCommerce, at some point their checkout doesn’t work for a few days and this recently happened to me. I updated some plugins and for some reason that’s unknown to me, my checkout stopped working for I think three or four days. I didn’t realize it wasn’t working but I wasn’t getting any sales and that’s scary. So, keep that in mind at some point with WooCommerce you may have technical problems. It also seems like, with WooCommerce there are just fewer integrations, there’s a lot of functions that I can get with Shopify that I just can’t find a lot of apps add-ons things like that I just can’t get with WooCommerce or they don’t work as well as I would like. It also seems like even the WooCommerce on the surface is cheaper, you have to buy a lot of the functions that are built into Shopify, built into that monthly fee, you have to buy the kind of piecemeal and you’re hoping that everything works well together but it doesn’t always do.
The last con with WooCommerce is, you’re gonna have to set up payments through either Stripe or PayPal. Either way, there’s gonna be a 2.09 percent fee on every transaction. Again, a lot of people think that there’s no transaction fee with WooCommerce and that there is a transaction fee with Shopify, that’s not true, no matter what any time you’re accepting a credit card or any kind of payment online, someone wants a piece of that action PayPal wants a transaction fee, stripe wants a transaction fee, Shopify wants a transaction fee.
So in my opinion, that’s a con for both platforms and it’s just part of doing business online. I have and currently use both of these platforms and to be honest it really just depends on the circumstances on why you’re starting an e-commerce website, exactly what you want to do. For my main company, my main passion product business I use Shopify because I want to make sure nothing goes wrong. I’m doing a decent amount of volume on sales and I just want to make sure that everything’s as smooth as possible and I’m willing to pay more to make sure that everything goes well. Ultimately, the decision is kind of like Android vs iPhone, it’s not that one is better or one is worse, it just depends on the person in the circumstances. If you’re willing to pay more for a website and e-commerce site that just works that has fewer issues and honestly is it a little bit more professional, then Shopify makes a lot of sense. On the other hand, if you’re on a tight budget, if you’re someone that’s relatively technical and you don’t mind going in tinkering around on your website to fix things, or if you’re looking to start multiple small websites then WooCommerce makes a lot of sense.
So, if you find this post useful and think about starting an e-commerce website, just fill-up the form below and give me a message.
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