Taking your business online is not a choice anymore. To help you in creating an eCommerce website several platforms are available which makes the task much easier and faster. Shopify and Woocommerce are the two most popular platforms for the job. These platforms are loaded with a wide range of features to enable you to skyrocket your website.
Both Shopify and Woocommerce are powerful tools for all sorts of businesses who wish to start their e-store. You can also avail of Market research, data scraping, data appending, data scrubbing, and many more to ensure success for your online venture. Bizprospex leads the industry and provides you the best of these services for assured lead generation.
While it is difficult to make a decision to start an online store, it is often more difficult to decide on the platform. Both Woocommerce and Shopify are immensely popular and enjoy great reviews and ratings from the users. However, each has its own pros and cons. The choice you make between the two can be crucial to your success. This write-up is aimed to make an accurate and thorough comparison of the two platforms and assist you to make the right choice.
Looking into the two platform
Before we dive into the comparison, it is important to take a closer look at these platforms. Knowing the basics will help you better understand what makes these two platforms stand out and rule the market share.
Shopify is known as an all-in-one platform for creating your online store. This e-commerce platform simplifies the creation of the virtual store, inventory management, and monetary exchanges. Shopify provides a one-stop solution with all these features and frees you from worries like hosting, security, etc. Furthermore, 90% of Shopify merchants have integrated their stores with two or more channels to diversify their sales opportunities.
Woocommerce, an open-source platform is created to work with WordPress. The popularity and capability of WordPress are well-known for website creation. Woocommerce is an excellent way to leverage the power of this exceptional content management system for building your website. It gives you the liberty to create a super-customized online store that represents your business most appropriately. Combining the influence of the platform with the data scrubbing services from bizprospex can remarkably boost your business.
Also Read: What makes WordPress the best CMS for SEO?
Understanding the difference
While researching about Shopify and Woocommerce to make a choice, you will get all sorts of opinions from different businesses. Whether you are looking at online reviews or are talking personally to the users of individual platforms, you will hear plenty of good things for both of them. Such information is often more perplexing and makes the decision-making more challenging.
From a practical perspective, you need to first understand your requirements before choosing the platform. Although both platforms are packed with tools to help you create an online store, the decision boils down to the most basic difference.
Shopify is a one-spot solution that makes creating virtual stores incredibly easy. You need not worry about the technical aspects such as web hosting, caching, and security. However, this ease of use comes with a restrictive ability to customize your store.
Woocommerce, on the other hand, is a self-hosted platform that allows you full-degree customization. It lends you complete control over all the aspects of your online store which is crucial to make your web store stand out and gain a competitive edge. You need to have acquaintance with some technical aspects to capitalize the full potential of the platform.
Shopify vs WooCommerce: The tradeoff
Now when we are well familiarized with the fundamentals of Shopify and Woocommerce, let us dig a bit deeper to understand the difference and similarities. There are several aspects that you need to pay attention to, to ensure you make a profitable choice. Your decision is often based on various parameters such as ease of use, design options, costing, technical support, and many more. Here is a head-on trade-off between the two platforms for different criteria.
Web store designs
In eCommerce, your website is the face of your business. A rightly designed website with proper aesthetics and practical features is crucial in elevate lead generation.
Shopify comes with 54 amazingly designed themes with 10 of them being free. These themes are outsourced so that they are current and engaging. However, your choice is limited to what is provided to you.
On the flip side, Woocommerce allows developers to design the theme of their choice. You can use any WordPress theme and experiment to add your imaginations. Developers create and provide countless themes for all industries. The world is your oyster when you are designing with Woocommerce.
Also Read: Why website design is necessary for any business?
Cost and payments
You need to ensure that your platform choice is affordable and profitable even in the long term as your business expands.
Shopify provides its basic version for around 30 dollars per month. You get web hosting, a domain name, and an SSL certificate. However, the cost will increase as your business grows and you include more add-ons and third-party tools. It also charges you a percentage for each payment transaction.
Woocommerce is an open-source that comes free as a plug-in for WordPress. You will need to buy the domain name, hosting services, and an SSL certificate that is not cheap. But, thanks to hosting companies like Bluehost that provide free hosting for Woocommerce stores. You can start your store in less than 10 dollars per month and get an added perk of free payment transactions.
Ease of use
Technical complications can be intimidating when you take your business online. For that reason, ease of use of the selected platform can make a significant difference.
Shopify is an all-in-one platform and takes care of all complex technical aspects for you. It handles hosting, security provides you with a domain name, and lets you focus on business.
Being open-source, Woocommerce lets you into the code. It requires you to have some technical knowledge to create your web store and draw its maximum benefits. While this transparency of the platform delegates full control and customization liberty, it is more technical to work with it as compared to Shopify.
Users’ support
Using technology becomes a cakewalk if proper and timely support is available. Shopify provides support to its users through 24/7 high-quality customer care executives and advisors. You can submit your queries through calls, emails, chats, etc. You can also access an extensive collection of common user questions and their answers. As Woocommerce is open-source, there is no restriction for getting support. You can seek help from WordPress forums, refer to blogs, or through your account on the woocommerce.com website. In users’ support, both platforms are at par.
SEO options
Businesses invest in email appending services, data verification services, data appending services, etc to boost the effectiveness of their online marketing strategies. However, SEO is also vital in building your brand name and extending your reach. These valuable attributes add to the credibility of your business and its marketing actions. It is crucial in profit generation and business growth.
Your website is also a potential tool to achieve SEO and rank high. Shopify provides some great SEO features and handles site copy and metadata easily. You need to have relevant quality content and Shopify will deliver strong engagement and enticing results.
With its foundation lying in WordPress, a renowned and reliable content creation platform, Woocommerce wins the SEO race. You can use several plug-ins dedicated to SEO and have full control over the content and meta information. With easy data adding and editing, you are more likely to rank higher.
Also Read: The Ultimate B2B SEO Guide
Dropshipping website
In the present day and age, dropshipping businesses have become immensely popular. It is a low overhead framework where eCom stores do not maintain stock. They buy ordered products from vendors and ship that directly to the customers.
Shopify allows you to create a front end that looks similar to a regular e-store. Users browse the products, add to cart, and make payments like a normal online store. However, you need to include several dropshipping marketplace applications. With membership, shipping, and other costs, this can be expensive.
Woocommerce is highly popular for dropshipping businesses as you only need to install some extensions that make the process a smooth sail. These extensions allow you to immediately import products and sell them from your website. You have to consider the membership charges, minimum orders, etc in mind as you install extensions.
Why should you think of Woocommerce for your e-commerce website?
With the above wall-to-wall analysis of the pros and cons of both the platforms, Woocommerce looks to have an edge over Shopify. Its 360-degree control, total customization freedom, exceptional SEO tools, and affordability pushes it ahead of its competitors. Some compelling reasons for using Woocommerce would include:
- You are working on a project that you are extremely passionate about and looking for full personalization.
- You are creating a large-scale online business that spans various regions.
- You are technically sound, prefer support from the expert developer community, and needs complete control on your website.
- You need a scalable platform with powerful analytics.
- You focus on content management and SEO as tools for brand building.
Once you have your web store online, you can utilize data scraping services, email appending services, data mining services, Skip tracing services, address search, reverse email appending, reverse phone appending, etc bizprospex. Such collaboration will deliver guaranteed results of marketing strategies and take your business several notches up.