Are you thinking of starting an online store? Not sure whether you should use Shopify or WooCommerce?
Shopify and WooCommerce are the two top eCommerce platforms in the world, each with its own pros and cons.
As a business owner, choosing the right eCommerce platform that fits your business needs is crucial for your success.
In this guide, we’ll show you a detailed comparison of Shopify vs WooCommerce. The goal is to break down their advantages and disadvantages to help you choose the best option for your eCommerce store.
Overview: Shopify vs WooCommerce
Before we start with our in-depth comparison of the two most popular eCommerce platforms on the web, it’s important that we cover the basics and highlight what makes these platform stand out.
What is Shopify?
Shopify is an all-in-one eCommerce solution that makes it easy for you to create an online store, accept payments, and manage your inventory, all from a single platform.
With Shopify, you don’t need to worry about the technical aspects of managing an eCommerce site such as web hosting, security, caching, etc.
What is WooCommerce?
WooCommerce is an open-source eCommerce plugin built for WordPress. It allows you to leverage the most powerful content management system (CMS) and use it to run an online store.
Because of the open-source nature of WooCommerce, you can customize every aspect of your store and easily add custom extensions.
The decision to choose between the two platforms depends entirely on your needs and skill level.
Cost: Shopify vs WooCommerce
Cost is often the most important consideration for eCommerce website owners. You need to evaluate the cost of getting started while also keeping in mind the variable costs for add-on services and software.
The True Cost of Using Shopify
Shopify makes it super easy to start your online store. Their basic plan starts at $29 per month, and you can upgrade to the Shopify plan for $79 or the Advanced Shopify plan for $299 per month.
Each of these plans includes SSL certificate and web hosting. It will come with a Shopify branded subdomain (e.g. https://your-store.myshopify.com).
If you want to use your own .com domain name, then you’ll need to purchase it separately. Pricing for a regular .com domain name generally starts at $14/year.
The basic Shopify plan comes with enough features to set up a new online store. You can add unlimited products, 2 user accounts, unlimited file storage, and more.
However, this pricing doesn’t include third-party tools and add-ons that you’ll need to take your Shopify store to the next level. As your business grows, these costs will start adding up, and you’ll soon be paying a lot more than the basic plan.
Payments are another factor that affects your costs. Shopify offers their own Shopify Payments solution which costs 2.9% + 30 cents per transaction for the basic plan.
If you want to use third-party payment gateways or your own merchant account, then you will be charged a flat fee of 2.0% for all transactions. You can reduce this fee to 0.5% by using the Shopify Advanced plan which costs $299 per month.
These payment processing fees are fairly steep when using external payment gateways. However, if you’re just starting out and want to use the Shopify Payments solution, then the fees are fairly comparable to popular platforms like Stripe and Braintree.
Shopify also offers plan a called Shopify lite which costs $9.00 / month. This plan lets you add buy buttons to any site or use Shopify for in-person sales in select regions.
For instance, you can create a WordPress website and add Shopify buy buttons there. However, if you are already making a WordPress website, then using WooCommerce would allow you to offer a much better experience.
The True Cost of Using WooCommerce
WooCommerce is an eCommerce plugin for WordPress.org (also known as self-hosted WordPress). It is open source and available as a free plugin.
However, you’ll need a domain name, SSL Certificate, and a WordPress hosting account to start a WooCommerce store.
Typically, a domain name costs $14.99, an SSL Certificate costs $69.99, and web hosting costs around $7.99 / month. This is not cheap, particularly when you are just starting out.
Thankfully, there are several hosting companies who are now offering specialized WooCommerce hosting plans which significantly reduces the cost.
Bluehost, an official WordPress and WooCommerce recommended hosting provider, has agreed to offer our users a free domain name, free SSL certificate, and a discount on web hosting.
This will help you start your online store for as low as $2.75 / month.
As you can see, the cost of starting a basic WooCommerce store is significantly lower than Shopify. WooCommerce also doesn’t charge you a percentage fee on transactions which is a very nice perk.
Keep in mind that WooCommerce costs start adding up as you purchase paid extensions. Your hosting costs will also increase as your online store grows.
However, one clear advantage of using WooCommerce is that you can often find free alternatives to premium themes and paid extensions. You can also keep your costs in control by only purchasing the tools and plugins as you need them.
With the number of free themes and free add-ons available for WooCommerce, it’s definitely the winner when it comes to cost.
Winner: WooCommerce
Ease of Use: Shopify vs WooCommerce
Most users starting an online store are not web designers or developers. Even users who are familiar with basic concepts need a platform that is easy to use and gets out of their way.
Let’s see how Shopify and WooCommerce stack up in terms of user-friendliness.
Shopify – Ease of Use
Shopify is a fully hosted platform which means you don’t need to install, manage, or update any software. You also don’t need to worry about security, performance, backups, and compatibility issues.
As soon as you sign up, you can choose a design from many of the free Shopify themes. After that, they walk you through customization and then help you add products.
Shopify comes with an intuitive drag and drop interface. Managing your product pages, sales, and inventory inside Shopify is a breeze.
One downside of this guided, polished, and highly optimized user experience is that it limits your control. You can only use the design and development tools provided by Shopify or add-ons available in their marketplace.
However, this is not as bad as it sounds. For most users, the large selection of extensions and themes available in Shopify is more than enough to get started and grow your online store.
WooCommerce – Ease of Use
WooCommerce is not a hosted platform like Shopify. This means you will need to install the WooCommerce plugin, manage updates, keep backups, and make sure that your website is secure. There are plenty of free and paid plugins that can automate most of these tasks for you.
WooCommerce is super flexible when it comes to customizations. You have full control of the whole platform. You can add any functionality imaginable to your website with the help of more than 58,000+ WordPress plugins.
However, there is no built-in drag & drop design builder. You can use one of the WordPress page builders like SeedProd or Beaver Builder, but it adds to your cost.
The biggest downside of the flexibility is that it comes with a learning curve and requires more hands-on management of your website. You also have to signup for a merchant account or similar service like Stripe / PayPal.
While the WooCommerce guided setup wizard is helpful, it does not come close to the onboarding experience and ease of use of Shopify.
Winner: Shopify
Payment Methods: Shopify vs WooCommerce
There are many payment gateways that you can use to accept payments online. Some payment methods may not be suitable for you, and others may not be available to your customers.
This is why it’s important that the platform you choose offers multiple payment options. Let’s take a look at how Shopify and WooCommerce compare when it comes to payment integrations.
Payment Options in Shopify
Shopify offers plenty of payment options that customers can use during checkout. It has its own payments solution called Shopify Payments (powered by Stripe) as well as all popular third-party payment gateways.
The problem is that Shopify charges an extra 2% fees on each transaction made through third party payment gateways. This is on top of the transaction fees charged by the payment gateway. You can reduce the fee to 0.5% by paying $299 per month for Advanced Shopify plan.
Shopify Payments has credit card fees, but no other transaction fees. Credit card rates start from 2.9% + 30¢ for the basic plan and get lower for other plans.
Payment Options in WooCommerce
WooCommerce offers PayPal and Stripe payments by default. They also have a WooCommerce Payments solution which is powered by Stripe.
It also supports all other popular payment service providers. You can install payment integrations for Authorize.net, Amazon Pay, Square, Alipay, and many more.
For payment gateways, WooCommerce even has support for many regional and less popular payment services. Since there is no barrier to entry, any payments company can create add-ons for WooCommerce and provide support for it.
As a self-hosted platform, you are only charged transaction fees by your payment gateway or your bank. Unless you are using WooCommerce Payments, WooCommerce never charges you a % fee on credit card payments, which is a major plus.
If choosing your own merchant account and using a third-party gateway is important for you, then you will save A LOT of money by using WooCommerce.
If you’re a small store and willing to use Shopify Payments, which has the same credit card rates as Stripe / Paypal, then it makes no difference.
Winner: Tie
Integrations and Add-ons: Shopify vs WooCommerce
No matter how robust an e-commerce platform is, you’ll always need third-party tools and services to grow your store. For example, email marketing software, lead generation tools, analytics tools, outreach services, etc.
Both Shopify and WooCommerce have a extensions directory, and they integrate with many third-party services.
Shopify Add-ons and Integrations
Shopify comes with a powerful API and an App Store where you can buy third-party add-ons for your Shopify store. They have hundreds of apps in the store covering every feature you’ll want to add to your store.
For lead generation, they have integrations with software like OptinMonster which helps you grow your email list and reduce cart abandonment. There are also Shopify apps for search engine optimization, product reviews, discounts, countdowns, and more.
Shopify’s app store contains both free and paid apps. Free apps are usually created by third-party services that have their own pricing, and the app only integrates your store to their APIs. Pricing for paid add-ons varies and most apps offer monthly subscriptions.
In terms of numbers, there are fewer add-ons and extensions for Shopify than for WooCommerce / WordPress. That’s because it can be difficult to get an app listed in their store.
Having personally gone through the process of submitting a plugin for WordPress and submitting an app to the Shopify store, we can say that the process is extremely harder on Shopify vs WooCommerce.
WooCommerce Add-ons and Integrations
WooCommerce is open source and built on top of WordPress. This gives you access to more than 58,000+ free WordPress plugins and many more paid plugins.
You can use these add-ons to add payment gateways, lead generation, eCommerce SEO, performance optimization, social media integration, and almost any feature you can think of.
Due to the lower barrier of entry, there are a lot more integrations and add-ons available for WooCommerce than Shopify. Almost all third-party tools and service providers have their own plugins to seamlessly integrate with your WooCommerce store.
Having personally gone through the process of submitting a plugin for WordPress and submitting an app to the Shopify store, we can say that the process is extremely harder on Shopify vs WooCommerce.
You can also hire a WordPress developer to create an integration or plugin just for your own website.
Overall, it’s important to keep in mind that WooCommerce is a lot easier to customize than Shopify.
Winner: WooCommerce
Shopify vs WooCommerce Dropshipping
Dropshipping is an online business where an eCommerce store doesn’t keep the products in stock. Instead, it fulfills order by purchasing products from vendors and then shipping them directly to the customers.
Due to its low overhead, dropshipping has become popular around the world. Many of our users asked us to compare WooCommerce vs Shopify for dropshipping and which one of them is better for a dropshipping business.
Dropshipping with Shopify
When building a dropshipping business, the front-end of your website will look just like any online store. Your users will be able to browse products, add them to cart, and make payments, just like they would do on any other eCommerce store.
Depending on the vendors you choose, you will then have to place user’s order for shipping.
Shopify also has integration apps for several popular dropshipping marketplaces like AliExpress, Oberlo, Printify, and more. However, each of these product marketplaces has their own membership fees, shipping, and other charges that you need to keep in mind when building your dropshipping website with Shopify.
Dropshipping with WooCommerce
WooCommerce is a popular choice among dropshipping businesses. Mainly because of the flexible dropshipping plugins for WooCommerce that make the whole process quite easy to set up.
You can easily find extensions that allow you to instantly import products, fulfill orders from your website, and more. You can even create an eBay-like eCommerce marketplace allowing other vendors to sell on your website.
Keep in mind that your supplier and vendor may have minimum order requirements, membership fees, and other charges. You need to keep those in mind when adding products to your WooCommerce dropshipping store.
Winner: Tie