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Shopify vs WooCommerce – Which is the Better Platform?

By James Tredwell on August 1, 2019

Everything is a competition now when we have such advanced and developing digital space we also have a high competition to which platform gives us the best experience and friendly usage. E-commerce sites are developing at high speed and are taking the top-up space in the industry. Shopify or Woocommerce choosing between both great sites can be confusing; any other site that is great for that matter, making a choice is difficult. There are many sites, which provide us the ultimate difference between Woocommerce vs. Shopify.

Shopify or Woocommerce both these sites provide us online shopping benefits. These both sites have their sets of pros and cons. There are plenty of questions that people come across, such as which have more features? Which is friendlier and easier to use? Which is cheaper and flexible? Cost comparison, feature comparison, and all other comparisons are a must to come to a conclusion of Shopify vs. Woocommerce.

Before starting the comparison, let us get to know what Shopify and Woocommerce is?

Shopify

Shopify is an e-commerce platform which provides to create and customize your online store where you can start, grow, and manage your business online. Shopify helps you manage products, sells them, inventories, payments, and shipping or delivery. It has selling on multiple online platforms and places, which includes mobile, social media, online marketplace web, and pop up shops. Shopify is a Canadian e-commerce company which has its headquarter located in Ontario.

Woocommerce

Woocommerce is an e-commerce plugin, an open-source for WordPress. Woocommerce is designed for WordPress merchants from small to large size online businesses. Woocommerce is launched on 27th September 2011, and as soon as its launch it spread like fire and rapidly faced growth and became popular as it was simple to install and customize and was a free base product.

Here are a few points on the bases of which we can come to a final conclusion whether to choose Shopify or Woocommerce.

Additional Helpful Resources:

  • User-friendly

Shopify gives you and hands-on experience from the start as soon as you create and account, they have a feature that guides them through the whole process and complete setup. They give features for you to play around with the store before putting it up online taking care of hosting for you. Shopify does not need you to be technically strong for starting with your setup.

Woocommerce compared to or with Shopify is easy too for set up. The only thing is a few steps required a bit more work beforehand. There are steps like installation, updating WordPress on the website, and after all, these beforehand steps taken care of then installing the plugin if you have not done it before it is going to be a little struggle.

The first point goes to Shopify.

  • Themes and Flexibility

Themes are essential for your site as they decide the look of your website. With Shopify shop offers their theme store and it gives you a home for 180 different themes. Some of the themes are premium themes that you need to buy at a minimum amount, but majorly their themes are free. Their themes and templates are mobile and desktop responsive, so they look great on any devices. The best thing about Shopify is this that it does not give limited themes and makes it flexible to edit within the templates too.

Woocommerce does not have its own theme Woocommerce store unlike Shopify. Woocommerce has a feature of third party service that you can use to source the themes. Woocommerce pricing for Themeforest one of the third party services that give amazing 600+ themes with prices from $29 to $64, there are free themes available, but they do not come with great support.

The point here goes to both as both have their pros and cons.

  • Payment options

Managing payment is the most critical and complicated process and the toughest part. Shopify shop gives you open two offers of payment as soon as you complete the setup of Shopify there is a PayPal Express checkout. Shopify gives you the best experience in credit card processing, but this service is available only in a few countries such as the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and a few other countries. This means if your business is located other than these countries, you have to use third party services such as Shopify payment getaway.

Woocommerce pricing offers you different kind of payment getaways such as support of credit card via Stripe, amazon payments or Braintree, and there are many other payment options too. All the services offer a great range of payment options give you the best options but do not beat Shopify when compared to or with Woocommerce.

This point goes to Shopify for sure.

  • Features

Let us go like in a proper Shopify vs. Woocommerce zone and discuss the features of both and see which e-commerce site gives us better feature or instead what have people choose as the top.

Shopify gives us amazing features like selling it online on e-commerce stores and also offline via Shopify while Woocommerce WordPress plugin offers only online selling on an e-commerce store. Shopify shop gives you 24/7 email, chat, and phone support, whereas the Woocommerce store gives you ticket support, forum support, and a lot of blogs online. The control of your store/business data is in the hands of Shopify, whereas in Woocommerce, all the control of your information is in your hand. Shopify is a closed platform you can modify your store only until Shopify allows you whereas Woocommerce is and open source platform you can modify your store freely and openly to an unlimited extent.

This point calls for a draw again as both have their unique and amazing features. But I would choose Shopify.

Conclusion

Well, both the e-commerce sites Shopify or Woocommerce both have their pros and cons and make them what they are. Giving a comparison on both the sites being its features, installation, or cost comparison, they have their points to provide the best experience to their users. According to the research, I would choose Shopify over Woocommerce for the pros it offers and the user-friendliness and best experience.

This article is contributed by Manan Ghadawala, founder of 21Twelve Interactive – eCommerce Development Company

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