WooCommerce vs Shopify: Which is Better?

Making a creative yet functional online store is often one of the most significant tasks every product or service-based business should undertake. Various eCommerce platforms have made it easier for anyone to start an online store. So now, the question is, “Which eCommerce platform would be the best for creating an online store?”. There are several platforms on the internet that can be used to develop eCommerce websites. But two of the most popular ones are WooCommerce and Shopify, and either of them can help you create the best online store. 

Shopify and WooCommerce offer different sets of skills and serve different purposes, both these platforms are considered absolute giants in the eCommerce industry. Although they may both be excellent eCommerce development platforms, it’s time to see how they stand against each other. In this blog, you will understand WooCommerce and Shopify, their statistics, benefits, drawbacks, use cases, and many more.

What is WooCommerce?

WooCommerce is a free, open-source eCommerce platform that allows businesses and individuals to create an online store on their existing WordPress website. It’s a plugin for WordPress, which means you can easily integrate it into your existing website with a few clicks. With WooCommerce, you can sell products and services, manage inventory, process payments, and handle shipping. It’s a powerful and flexible eCommerce solution that’s widely used and supported by a large community of developers.

Key Features of WooCommerce

• Seamless Integration with WordPress: WooCommerce seamlessly integrates with WordPress, leveraging the content management system’s ease of use, allowing users to manage both their website and online store from a single platform.
• Extensive Product Management: WooCommerce provides comprehensive product management capabilities, enabling users to create and manage various product types, including simple, variable, virtual, and downloadable products. It supports product categories, attributes, and inventory management.
• Secure Payment Gateways: WooCommerce offers integration with numerous secure payment gateways, allowing customers to make purchases using popular payment methods such as credit cards, PayPal, and other third-party payment processors.
• Shipping and Tax Management: WooCommerce includes built-in shipping and tax management features, allowing store owners to configure shipping rates, methods, and tax calculations based on their specific requirements and geographical locations.
• Customizable Product Pages: WooCommerce provides customizable product pages, enabling store owners to showcase their products with detailed descriptions, images, galleries, and additional information to enhance the customer experience.
• Cart and Checkout Process: WooCommerce offers a user-friendly cart and checkout process, allowing customers to review their orders, apply coupons or discounts, and complete their purchases seamlessly.
• Order Management: WooCommerce includes a comprehensive order management system, enabling store owners to track and manage orders, process refunds, and generate reports and invoices.
• Extension Ecosystem: WooCommerce has a vast ecosystem of extensions and add-ons, allowing store owners to enhance functionality, integrate with third-party services, and customize their online stores to meet specific business requirements.
• Responsive Design: WooCommerce is designed to be mobile-friendly and responsive, ensuring that online stores render properly and provide an optimal user experience across various devices and screen sizes.
• Multi-language and Multi-currency Support: WooCommerce supports multiple languages and currencies, enabling store owners to cater to a global audience and provide a localized shopping experience.
• SEO-Friendly: WooCommerce is built with search engine optimization (SEO) in mind, allowing store owners to optimize their product pages, categories, and other content for better visibility in search engine results.
• Regular Updates and Community Support: As an open-source project, WooCommerce benefits from regular updates and a large, active community of developers and users, ensuring ongoing improvements, bug fixes, and support.

What is Shopify?

Shopify is a popular eCommerce website development platform used by millions of businesses worldwide to create and maintain their websites. Shopify lets you customize the eCommerce website’s functionalities and appearance. With the centralized dashboard offered by this platform, you can easily manage inventory levels, shipping charges, products, customer information, etc. Moreover, you can make use of some excellent tools and software like SEO analytics and optimization to reach more of your target audience. 

Key Features of Shopify

• Easy Setup and Administration: Shopify offers a user-friendly interface and step-by-step guidance, making it easy for businesses to set up and manage their online stores, even without extensive technical knowledge.
• Customizable Themes and Storefront Design: Shopify provides a wide range of professionally designed themes and templates that can be customized to match the branding and aesthetics of a business. Store owners can also create their own unique designs or hire Shopify experts for more advanced customizations.
• Product Management: Shopify allows businesses to easily manage their product inventory, including adding product descriptions, images, variants, and organizing products into collections and categories.
• Secure Hosting and Shopping Cart: Shopify takes care of hosting and provides a secure, reliable, and scalable platform for online stores. It also offers a built-in shopping cart system with various payment gateway integrations.
• Multi-Channel Selling: Businesses can sell their products across multiple channels, including online stores, social media platforms, marketplaces, and in-person events, all from a single Shopify account.
• Sales Channels and Integrations: Shopify offers built-in integrations with various sales channels, such as Amazon, Facebook, Instagram, and more, enabling businesses to expand their reach and selling opportunities.
• Marketing and SEO Tools: Shopify provides a range of marketing tools, including email marketing, abandoned cart recovery, discount codes, and SEO optimization features to help businesses attract and retain customers.
• Analytics and Reporting: Shopify offers comprehensive analytics and reporting tools, allowing businesses to track sales, traffic, and customer behavior, and make data-driven decisions to improve their online stores.
• Mobile Commerce: Shopify stores are optimized for mobile devices, ensuring a seamless shopping experience for customers on the go.
• Order Management and Shipping: Shopify streamlines order management and provides integrations with various shipping carriers, enabling businesses to efficiently manage and fulfill customer orders.

WooCommerce vs Shopify

Whether you choose WooCommerce or Shopify would ultimately depend on your requirements and what you expect from it. WooCommerce is considered a suitable platform for those looking for a highly customizable eCommerce store, while Shopify is preferred by those who want a user-friendly platform with a prime focus on eCommerce functionality.

Comprehensive Comparison Between WooCommerce & Shopify

Ease of Use

WooCommerce

WooCommerce is an easy-to-use platform that allows you to create a stunning eCommerce store with various plugins and themes. WooCommerce is a great choice for businesses that require advanced eCommerce functionality with more features. It required technical knowledge to set it up and maintain it.

WooCommerce is a popular platform for setting up advanced eCommerce stores due to its high level of customization and flexibility and it allows users to add a variety of plugins and extensions to their online store. Additionally, it offers more options for payment gateways, shipping methods, and tax options, making it a good choice for larger and more complex online stores. However, WooCommerce offers more control over your website compared to Shopify.

Shopify

Shopify has a user-friendly interface and requires no technical knowledge to set up and use. The platform offers numerous design templates, and a variety of plugins to add functionalities. Shopify has a drag-and-drop website builder, making it easy for users to create and customize their online store.

Additionally, Shopify provides 24/7 customer support, making it easy for users to get help when needed. Shopify is a great choice for those who want a simpler solution with limited customization options.

Verdict: WooCommerce is better than Shopify

Pricing

WooCommerce

The WooCommerce plugin is free to use, however subsequent purchased themes and plugins may entail fees; however, Marketplace like Envato sells premium plugins and themes at a one-time cost. The cost can range from a few dollars to hundreds of dollars per month depending on the level of customization, hosting, and other factors. By default, WooCommerce supports PayPal and Stripe payments.

Additionally, they offer a WooCommerce Payments solution powered by Stripe. Also, it supports all major payment gateways. There are numerous payment interfaces available, including Authorize.net, Amazon Pay, Square, and Alipay. WooCommerce is a more affordable option for those who have the technical knowledge to set up and maintain.

Shopify

Shopify provides plenty of payment options during checkout. Besides its own payment solution, Shopify Payments (powered by Stripe), it also supports all popular third-party payment gateways. Shopify is a paid platform with various pricing plans starting from $29 per month for the Basic Shopify plan, up to $299 per month for the Advanced Shopify plan.

Shopify provides a hosting service, making it a more convenient option for those who don’t want to handle the technical aspects of setting up an online store. Furthermore, Shopify charges transaction fees, which can add up, as well as subscription fees for apps and ready-made themes.

Verdict: WooCommerce is better than Shopify

Build Time 

WooCommerce 

WooCommerce can take longer to build because it requires setting up a WordPress website and configuring the WooCommerce plugin. This process can be time consuming and requires some technical knowledge, making it more suitable for experienced users, or you need to hire WooCommerce developers to build your eCommerce store using WooCommerce. On the other hand, once the setup is complete, WooCommerce offers more customization options and can be more flexible than Shopify.

Shopify

Shopify is designed to be user-friendly and requires no technical knowledge to set up. The platform offers numerous design templates and a drag-and-drop website builder, making it easy for users to create and customize their online store. Shopify allows you to launch your store faster compared to WooCommerce, but with limited customization options.

Verdict: Shopify is better than WooCommerce

Themes & Plugins 

WooCommerce 

In addition to making your site more visually appealing, themes can facilitate the installation of superior add-ons that further enhance your business. On the WooCommerce platform, you may choose from a wide variety of themes and templates, both free and paid. A few of the most commonly-used WooCommerce themes are as follows: Storefront, Astra, SeedProd, Neve, and OceanWP.

The official WooCommerce Theme Library is a great place to start if you need extra plugins or themes for your store. You can take help from experienced developers from the best WooCommerce development company who can assist you in enhancing the functionality and aesthetic appeal of your online store.

WooCommerce extensions allow you to expand your eCommerce website’s functionality and improve your customers’ shopping experience. You can find many free and premium (paid) plugins to enhance your online store in the official WordPress plugin directory. WooCommerce extensions like WooCommerce Points And Rewards and WooCommerce PDF Vouchers enhance the functionalities of the WooCommerce store.

Shopify

Shopify has 70+ paid themes, and 3,200 apps in the app store, with limited options available, compared to WooCommerce. Along with the ten free themes, there are paid themes (with prices starting from $140) with premium designs that will help your store fit your requirements.

Verdict: WooCommerce is better than Shopify

SEO 

WooCommerce

WooCommerce provides higher flexibility to optimize your eCommerce store to get a higher ranking in SERPs. If we talk about eCommerce SEO, WooCommerce comes in the first place due to the options available for optimizing eCommerce stores. Plugins like RankMath, Yoast, and All-in-One-SEO offer functionalities to optimize on-page SEO factors like titles, meta descriptions, schema insertion, product image optimization, and many more. WooCommerce’s user interface makes it simple to add and preserve basic product details and relevant SEO data. 

Shopify 

Shopify offers some excellent SEO and marketing tools that can help the eCommerce website reach higher on the SERPs to increase its visibility and get more traffic on it. Other than the SEO tools, you can avail of the analytics tools and extensions it offers to check your website’s performance and traffic sources. Compared to WooCommerce, Shopify offers limited options in terms of SEO. 

Verdict: WooCommerce is better than Shopify

Speed and Performance

WooCommerce 

You can enhance the speed and performance of your WooCommerce website through WordPress plugins like WP Rocket, Jetpack, WP-Optimize, etc. WooCommerce is a self-hosted solution, so high performance, and speed can be achieved by optimizing code and keeping good servers like WPEngine and Kinsta. As a result, it’s important to choose a fast and reliable hosting service and keep the number of plugins to a minimum. On the other hand, WooCommerce offers more control over the code and server configuration, making it easier to optimize the performance of your WooCommerce store.

Shopify 

Shopify ensures your eCommerce store’s superior speed and performance. In addition, Shopify provides in-built functionalities to increase the performance of eCommerce stores. This can result in faster page load times and a more stable website. However, Shopify has limited customization options and does not allow users to access the server configuration, making it harder to optimize performance.

Verdict: WooCommerce is better than Shopify

Updates & Security

WooCommerce

This platform is frequently updated to reflect the latest security standards. However, the WooCommerce plugin does not include aspects such as an SSL certificate or backup tools for creating backups. To secure your WooCommerce store, you have to install security plugins like Wordfence or Jetpack. To protect your website, you must take independent action such as acquiring an SSL certificate, setting up site security plugins, enabling two-factor authentication, ensuring PCI compliance, and other similar measures.

Shopify

Shopify is a fully hosted platform that takes care of the hosting and security of the store. When using Shopify, upgrades and security are handled automatically. The platform is regularly updated with new features and security patches, and Shopify takes care of all the technical aspects of running and securing the store. All communications between your website and customers have been encrypted thanks to the built-in SSL certificate.

Shopify’s requisite Level 1 PCI-compliant server means you can safely collect credit card, debit card, and other payment-related information. Shopify offers regular server maintenance and upgrades that help ensure your website is always secure and accessible. In order to make your website safer, Shopify handles SSL certificates and PCI compliances automatically.

Verdict: Shopify is better than WooCommerce

Customer Support

WooCommerce 

One of the biggest drawbacks of using WooCommerce for your online marketplace is the minimal customer support in case of issues at any stage of development. In WooCommerce, you have to get support from communities, and open-source forums, or hire WooCommerce developers to get solutions to your problems.

Shopify 

Shopify provides 24/7 support via live chat, phone, email, and Twitter. Compared with WooCommerce, Shopify provides the best customer support.  In addition, you can always rely on Shopify’s helpful staff, the Shopify Forum, and their extensive collection of frequently asked questions. You can hire Shopify experts if you require more assistance with your eCommerce store.

Verdict: Shopify is better than WooCommerce

Payment Options & Transaction Fees

WooCommerce 

WooCommerce includes more payment options as it is an open-source platform. Some payment options may require additional fees or setup costs and transaction fees may vary based on the payment gateway chosen. WooCommerce doesn’t charge any % fees for payments if you use any third-party payment gateways. You only have to pay for payment gateways and bank charges.

Shopify 

Shopify charges an extra 2% fee on each transaction made through third-party payment gateways. If you choose a more advanced plan in Shopify, then these fees can be reduced. Shopify also offers its own Shopify Payments option which doesn’t charge a single penny as a transaction fee.

Verdict: WooCommerce is better than Shopify

Sales Features

WooCommerce 

If you want to use sales features in WooCommerce, you have to purchase extensions that cost extra to set up. Using extensions like WooCommerce PDF Vouchers, store owners can easily provide users with downloadable gift cards or vouchers to redeem on their next purchases. That boosts sales with an incentive of offers and discounts.

Shopify 

Shopify comes with built-in features like abandoned cart recovery, discount codes, the ability to sell an unlimited number of products, and more than 100 ways to pay. Shopify is easier to use because it comes with built-in and ready-to-use features. In-built sales features like abandoned cart recovery are important for any size of store owners.

Verdict: Shopify is better than WooCommerce

Blogging

WooCommerce 

WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin, and WordPress is the world’s most popular blogging platform. Along with being a popular CMS, WordPress is also a highly competent blogging platform. So it can help create relevant and helpful content for your eCommerce website.

With WooCommerce, it would be easier for you to add detailed product information and other use cases of your products which helps you to educate your targeted customers.

Shopify 

Shopify has in-built blogging apps in the official Shopify store which can help to deliver a more enlightening experience to your customers. Shopify is mostly a storefront with only product pages.

Verdict: WooCommerce is better than Shopify

Brands Using

WooCommerce

Shopify

Usage Statistics and Market Share

Both WooCommerce and Shopify are among the most popular website development platforms. So let’s check out the usage statistics to see where they stand:

WooCommerce

• The official plugin for WooCommerce has been downloaded 161,908,802 times and counting from WordPress.org.
• WooCommerce is used on more than 6,719,294 live websites.
• At least 30,000 times a day, people get the WooCommerce plugin from WordPress.org.
• According to w3Tech, WooCommerce is used by 12.7% of all the websites whose content management system we know. This is 8.6% of all websites.
• About 12.96% of all eCommerce sites on the web use WooCommerce.

Shopify

• Over 4.4 million businesses use Shopify for online marketplaces. 
• Shopify is expected to see over $590B in sales in 2022.
• When it comes to the global market, Shopify stands at around 10%.
• The Shopify App Store contains over 3,200 apps.
• Workie, Roxxe, and Porto are three of the most popular Shopify themes.

As mentioned earlier, both these platforms are quite popular. So look at these statistics before making your choice for developing your eCommerce website. 

The Ultimate Showdown: WooCommerce vs Shopify

Creating a new eCommerce website can be a complex task to do. So it’s important you lay the groundwork and choose the platform wisely. Ultimately, the choice between the two will depend on the specific needs and goals of the business.

So if you are looking for a new eCommerce website or to upgrade an old one, hire eCommerce developers today!