WooCommerce vs Shopify: What’s Best for Your Online Store?

If you are planning to set up an online shop and have started doing your research, you may have heard of the two e-commerce platform giants: WooCommerce and Shopify. While you agree that you can use either one of them, you may still be wondering what’s the better choice for your online store.

In this blog post, we will discuss WooCommerce vs Shopify in terms of similarities and differences of features. And eventually, as you finish reading, you would be able to identify which platform will work best for your online store.

WooCommere vs Shopify as Online Store Platform

Shopify is an e-commerce platform that lets you create and customize an online store. It has complete features of a stand-alone shopping website that lets you set up an online storefront, manage products, deal with inventory, process payments, and control shipping and delivery of your goods and services.

WooCommerce, on the other hand, is an e-commerce plugin that easily integrates with a WordPress website. It also has complete online shopping features and capabilities, but what differentiates it from Shopify is that it’s a functional extension and you need to have a WordPress site set up before being able to use it.

WordPress is a full-featured content management system that you can use for your business or online shop. WooCommerce being a “plugin only” tool shouldn’t discourage you because WordPress as its host offers a lot of features and components that will make your online shop fully functional.

WooCommere vs Shopify on Storefront Design

Shopify is popular for offering visually-appealing and high-quality themes. Because it is specifically designed for e-commerce, all its 54 templates showcase an online store design and style. Each theme has variations, so you’re technically choosing from more than 100 separate designs.

WooCommerece storefront design, on the other hand, is dependent on your WordPress theme, since it’s only a plugin. But this shouldn’t be a problem because WordPress has thousands of paid and free themes and layouts you can choose from. Plus, they are totally customizable using CSS, so you can definitely find a design that perfectly matches the way you visualize for your online store.

In terms of compatibility, WooCommerce is built to cooperate with many WordPress themes on the market. This means that, in most cases, WooCommerce will be able to work with any WordPress theme you choose for your website.

WooCommerce vs Shopify on Customization

WooCommerce is an open-source platform, which means the code is available for anyone to use and customize. Therefore, the customization opportunities for a platform using WooCommerce are limitless. You can build your online store according to your brand, preferences, and personality. This is the reason why WooCommerce describes itself as “the world’s most customizable e-commerce platform”.

Shopify, on the other hand, is written using the programming language, Liquid. Therefore, if you want to make distinct changes on a Shopify store, you will need to learn and use the company’s own coding. This can be quite discouraging to non-technical users because they would need to hire coders or programmers in order to make serious changes to their online store.

WooCommerce vs Shopify on Search Engine Optimization

Once your online store is up and running, the next thing you would have to start thinking about is how to attract customers to your store. This s where SEO or search engine optimization comes in handy.

When it comes to SEO, however, WooCommerce and Shopify are on a close fight with each other. Both are robust e-commerce systems that are built to ensure that your products are showing up in front of your market.

WooCommerce, being part of your WordPress website, has a good advantage because WordPress on its own is SEO friendly. Simply using another plugin called WordPress SEO by Yoast, your WooCommerce online store can easily be optimized and fixed for SEO issues.

Shopify, on the other hand, is not far behind. It also comes with SEO integration tools and plugins to help you optimize your online store. SEO Doctor, for instance, is a free SEO app that can scan your store, identify SEO issues, and offer fixes for optimization problems that might be interfering with your sales performance.

What’s Best for Your Online Store?

Now that we’ve discussed some critical points above, the real question is which between WooCommerce and Shopify is best for your online store? It still depends on you as a user and store owner.

For us, however, we recommend that you go with WooCommerce because it’s flexible, customizable, and comes with great community support in case you get stuck with a feature or strategy. If you want to setup a WooCommerce store, don’t hesitate to reach out to our team of WP Guru.