What eCommerce platform is best? Shopify or Woocommerce

What eCommerce platform is best for your business?

Starting a business is hard enough but it gets more complex when deciding what platform is best to build your ecommerce store. Often you have to decide between Shopify or Woocommerce and on the surge Shopify seems to be a winner but there are some things you might want to consider when picking either Shopify or Woocommerce.

Shopify advantage

Shopify is easy to start and free to get started. This from the get go seems to put Shopify as a clear winner. It’s easy to setup as they help you every step of the way. This is powerful tool in your belt to get up and started quickly. Shopify typically starts at $29.95 per month and charge an additional transaction fee for some of their services. They have a pretty wide selection of features and integrations which is helpful when building a drop shipping solution or integrate with Omni-channels like amazon or instagram.

Shopify disadvantage

All seems good as long as you’re on good terms with Shopify. Because it’s a closed platform if you disagree with their terms of service or have issues there is no way to move your site to a different provide. This means if you break up with them, the store belongs to them and you’re stuck rebuilding your entire site and importing your customer data to the next site you choose. This essentially locks you in for life with them which for us would be a show stopper. Typically clients find the need to move from Shopify as they grow and their marketing needs get more complex and require custom solutions to get the most from their sales.

Your data belongs to them too, which means they have access to your sales history, transactions and customers. What they do with that is a secret and no one really understands how or if they use this data.

Because this tool is a Do It Yourself tool that makes creating a pretty site easy you’ll tend to skip out on important SEO factors like Metadata for images and other important SEO factors. They have tools to optimize your site but they’re not front and center and you have to find them to use them.

It’s focused on being an ecommerce platform so blogging isn’t ideal on the platform and if you’re serious about SEO rankings blogging needs to be the most important tool in your business belt.

Woocommerce advantage

Woocommerce is free and open for anyone to use. This means you either have to have knowledge (programming skills) on setting it up or find a developer to set it up for you. Because it’s free and open you pretty much can make it do anything you want given that you have the ability.

It’s portable so if you have to part ways with your developer or web host you can take your data with you and your website. You control your data and no one else.

Woocommerce is built upon wordpress which means if organic growth is important you’ll be set because wordpress is the most popular content management system on the planet. You can integrate your blog and store in one platform which makes growing your organic traffic a breeze.

Woocommerce disadvantage

Because it’s a platform that requires programming knowledge to customize it you’ll be stuck finding a skilled developer to help you accomplish your goals to build your website.

It can be hard to scale your website unless you have a skilled company hosting and helping you with the growth of your traffic.

Conclusion

Shopify is great when you’re first starting out but when it comes to long term growth Woocommerce combined with WordPress gives you an open highway with very limitations and ultimate security of your data belonging to you. Most established clients that start with Shopify end up moving to Woocommerce to accommodate their growth, sometimes it’s worth it to start with the right solution vs rebuilding in the future.

We’re experts in building ecommerce websites using Woocommerce if you need help with your online business leave a comment or connect with us.