What is Shopify?
Using the Shopify eCommerce platform, businesses may create an online store and sell the goods they want to offer to potential clients. Additionally, they have the option of selling directly to clients. Because of its functionality, stability, and integration, as well as its inexpensive startup costs, small firms should choose this alternative. Shopify is the greatest option for small businesses searching for a worthwhile start-up with a tight budget. However, this does not suggest that large and medium-sized firms do not use Shopify; they do and have had great success doing so.
Shopify's very first store opened its doors in 2004. Its name was Snow Devil. It was a website that sold snowboards. Today, Shopify Inc. is a prosperous company. It is surviving on subscription costs that are rising along with the temporary traffic. For their web presence, worldwide reach, and customer acquisition, nearly one million businesses across 175 countries use Shopify.
What does Shopify do?
When discussing what Shopify does, it can be summed up as a business that creates and customizes online stores and facilitates the sale of goods in numerous locations. It denotes the fact that a company can market its goods via social media platforms to a variety of customers, including those who utilize mobile devices, the web, in-person transactions, brick-and-mortar stores, pop-up shops, and numerous channels. Businesses don't always need to promote their products. They can, however, use affiliate marketing, which enables them to profit from successful referrals made from their accounts to Shopify's platforms. It implies that you can increase your income with each additional seller you sign up for on the Shopify platform.
Businesses can use Shopify without worrying excessively about the technical aspects of having to purchase hosting from companies like Amazon AWS, Linode, or others. Benefits of using Shopify include:
- Mobile friendly
- Security
- Flexibility
- Reliability
- Better customer service
- Quick and easy to set up
- Easy to integration
How does it work?
Only monthly subscription fees and transaction fees are required of businesses. Pay for all business-related applications, integrations, and additions separately. Shopify offers Shopify Basic and Shopify Plus as its two tiers. The former is for companies with modest company functionalities, whilst the Plus is for larger companies with higher sales. All of the plans come with the same functionality and need a monthly subscription, with a few minor exceptions. The amount of employees who have access to the back-end is the key factor here.
The following set of features includes gift cards, sophisticated reporting, and report customization. These factors are crucial for enterprises. Additionally, Shopify offers additional savings on print labels or links up with shipping firms like FedEx, UPS, DHL, and others. As a result, every online business needs to take payments of some kind. Other payment options are also available, including PayPal, Amazon Pay, and others.
What is WooCommerce?
WooCommerce lets to turn a WordPress site into an eCommerce store. It is compatible with the functions of WordPress. The main thing here to keep in mind is that WooCommerce and its plugins are written on WordPress. As a result, it is quite restricted to only functioning with WordPress accounts or websites. It requires a lot of plugins to be compatible with the other eCommerce features to work. It could result in problems like sluggish websites and rising maintenance and repair costs.
Nowadays, it might be very intimidating to start a business. It's mostly because of the prices, complexity, and navigational challenges. It is an online website builder for WordPress. It generates revenue by charging for beneficial platform expansions.
WooCommerce is an open-source eCommerce platform that is targeted especially at medium to low-budget businesses. It was launched in the year 2011. It was developed by WooThemes, a WordPress theme developer. It is easy to use and cost-efficiency CMS (Content Management System) platforms are the other benefit of it. According to a survey done in 2020, it was found that WooCommerce is used by almost 3.9 million websites.
What does WooCommerce do?
WooCommerce helps to turn a WordPress site into an eCommerce store. It is fully compatible with the functions of the WordPress site. Due to the open source plugin for WordPress, it provides leverage for very effective CMS and uses for operating an online store.
- Get full control over your data
- Unique store design via WordPress Themes
- Availability of features
- Security
- Easier SEO
- The fast loading speed of the backend and frontend
How does WooCommerce works?
For any business, which is looking to have absolute control over their shop, beginning with the items you own to sell and how the shop looks, WooCommerce is the best platform. Despite the quantity or category of items you want to sell, there are endless opportunities. It grows based on products you add back and forth. The more you earn customers, the more orders you get. The customers can even choose the mode of payment as per their convenience like cheque, COD, credit cards, and PayPal.
For customers, it computes delivery costs and tax regulations. Other default options include free shipping, in-person pickup, flat prices, and more. Extensions for order fulfillment and integration for each nation may vary.
The basis of the difference between Shopify and WooCommerce:
Ease of use
It's a lot easier to use Shopify than WooCommerce. The less technical aspect of Shopify allows users for the best user experience.
Build time
Shopify is faster in build time. The setup time is a lot faster if you are building an eCommerce for the first time.
Design and Themes
The design and themes in Shopify are better. The templates used in Shopify look very elegant.
Sales features
Shopify allows for better sales features than WooCommerce. The reason is that WooCommerce doesn’t offer recovery for abandoned carts.
Plugins and integration
The apps and plugins of WooCommerce are quite unbeatable. Since it is open source, the majority of its functionality comes from plugins.
Marketing tools
Shopify is better in marketing tools than WooCommerce. On the other hand, WooCommerce relies on plugins for this matter.
Payment options and transaction fees
WooCommerce offers more flexible payment methods and lower transaction costs.
SEO
The SEO of WooCommerce is better. A wide range of SEO plugins can be found in WooCommerce.
Security
Shopify takes care of your website security. It has choices for PCI-DSS complaints and SSL certifications.
Customer Support
WooCommerce has better customer service. The Bluehost makes sure of 24/7 customer support.
Pricing
WooCommerce has better pricing options. It's free for users and the extensions are also quite reasonable in comparison to Shopify.
The pricing policy of Shopify and WooCommerce:
Shopify
Any business planning to start an online store with a minimal fee can opt for Shopify. One does not have to pay the transaction fees if they use the Shopify payments. But there is an extra 2%, 1%, or 0.5% for the Basic Shopify, Shopify, and Advanced Shopify plans respectively.
The 14-day free trial with no credit card is quite an attractive scheme for Shopify. The setup fee is not charged on any of the plans.
There is also a discounted plan for Shopify users. It offers a 10% discount for annual plans and a 20% discount for biennial plans if paid in advance.
For those who plan to use their credit card number rather than the Shopify credit card number, they are liable to pay the same rate as the online rate.
WooCommerce
WooCommerce is an eCommerce platform where people can log in for a minimal charge. They can enter a world of online selling without any price restrictions. The most crucial thing to notice is that WooCommerce does not charge for the profits you earn. The greater strength of WooCommerce is extensibility. A business can build almost everything with WooCommerce. with enough time and resources, it can tailor the best online store for the businesses.
Any business planning to start an online store can opt for WooCommerce. It provides a risk-free 14 days money-back guarantee or starts with a free site. There is two type of plans for the users- WordPress VIP and Build By WordPress. The former plan helps with everything you need to build and run customer experiences.
There are a lot of differences between WordPress.Organ and WordPress.com.
Wordpress.com
To make it simpler, let's understand it this way- WordPress.com is a service that aids in creating a website by using WordPress Software with already available hosting. A host is a company that has access to servers with special software connecting to the internet. Those hosts are privileged to rent space on servers and people can build their websites on it.
WordPress.Org (Self-Hosted WordPress site)
WordPress.org is software in itself that can build a website on its own. Hence, it is not a host. As a self-hosted WordPress site, one can use the WordPress CMS for building a site and have the site hosted on a hosting server.
One can not go to WordPress.org and build a website. You can easily download the software via WordPress.org. Then, Install it on your local computer. Next, install it on one web host.
Mostly asked questions on Shopify and WooCommerce:
Which is the popular eCommerce Shopify or WooCommerce?
WordPress seems more popular when it comes to building a website and WooCommerce is a more popular eCommerce platform.
Which has better SEO, Shopify or WooCommerce?
Shopify is quite simple and easy to use for starters. However, WooCommerce provides more specific SEO options due to its inbuilt plugin on WordPress. If the business is larger then it's better to use WooCommerce than Shopify.
