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As a seller, you have a choice:

Sell online or open a physical store.

Going down the physical route comes with some advantages, with many believing that having an actual location for people to visit lends legitimacy to their business. But it also comes with the major downside of having to deal with a ton of costs:

That chart gives you a good run-down, with costs ranging from hiring public-facing staff – as well as inventory people to handle the back end – to paying for your building and buying point-of-service (POS) systems.

Many of those costs disappear with an online store.

That’s not to say there are no costs at all. You’ll need to find a hosting provider, for instance, and you’ll need somewhere to keep your inventory unless you go down the dropshipping business route. But overall, you’re going to spend far less on building a website than you would on opening a physical store. Plus, you’ll get up and running faster, too.

Let’s start with something you’ll likely look to do almost as soon as you have a base-level ecommerce store up and running:

Customizing that store so it works the way you need it to work.

For that, you’re going to need apps in Shopify or plugins for WooCommerce.

Shopify offers its Shopify Apps store, which is where you go when you need anything that improves the functionality of your Shopify CMS. Shopify’s App Store contains around 8,000 apps – some free and some paid – and you’ll need to have a Shopify account before you can access any of them. As for what these apps can do, you can get a small sample from the image above. Some apps let you build social feeds into your ecommerce website – Instagram, Facebook, and X are all covered. You can get apps for optimizing pages and helping with search engine optimization, as well as handling reviews on your site.

It’s all valuable stuff.

But it’s also limited by what Shopify wants to provide to its users. In other words, Shopify’s apps are closed-source, meaning you can’t tinker with them once you have them, and the number available will always be determined by Shopify.

That’s not the case with WooCommerce.

As an open-source platform – meaning it’s free and anybody can tinker with the code behind it – WooCommerce has a much more active apps and plugins market. You can get a WooCommerce extension for almost anything you can think of, with the community behind the platform working tirelessly to develop new plugins and WooCommerce extensions every month. All told, the WooCommerce Plugin directory has over 59,000 options available, most of which are free and, due to the open-source nature of the platform, can be tinkered with to adapt them to your needs.

The downside is that the WooCommerce market is less controlled than Shopify’s. So, where both Shopify and WooCommerce off plenty of apps/plug-ins, the latter’s lack of controls means what you find may not always be built especially well. So, it’s a dead heat. WooCommerce has more but Shopify is more controlled. Which you find better really comes down to you.

Score:

Shopify – 1

WooCommerce – 1

The customizability battle really comes down to open-source vs. closed-source software. As mentioned earlier, open-source software is usually free to download and can be tinkered with however you want when you’re building your website. With closed-source software – such as Shopify – you’ll have a degree of customization but you’re limited to what the software allows you to do.

The chart above makes it clear which option developers tend to prefer.

They lean toward open source for technology flexibility – 86% say open source is better – and believe that having an open-source platform ultimately lowers their development costs. On the customization level, open-source platforms also allow for the development of more (and varied) themes and plugins as you’ve already seen, given that WooCommerce has over 50,000 more plugins than Shopify.

But let’s bring things back to basics.

If the level of customizability you require involves being able to plant your branding onto your website, write your own content, and upload products, then WooCommerce and Shopify both handle all of that easily. The same goes for other ecommerce platforms, by the way – these are basic customization options you should get as standard when setting up your online store.

However, if you have a particular vision for what your ecommerce store will look and feel like, as well as how it’ll operate on the backend, then WooCommerce is the clear winner in this category. It simply gives you more options and, thanks to its open-source nature, it’s the best ecommerce platform for those who want to build something unique.

With Shopify, you’re stuck with what the platform provides, with customization limited to the themes and apps Shopify itself offers or approves.

Score:

Shopify – 3

WooCommerce – 2

Speaking of themes, they’ll likely play a large role in your decision.

Why?

Themes are essentially templates for your website, meaning you want to have as many options available as possible so you can get your website looking exactly how you want it. Both Shopify and WooCommerce have strong theme games, but if you’re looking for a winner, it’s very clearly WooCommerce.

The issues with Shopify themes are twofold.

First, it’s a long way behind WooCommerce in the numbers game. Shopify only offers about 160 themes for you to tinker with. And though all of those themes are customizable with your branding – as well as being mobile responsive so your store displays just as well on smartphones and tablets – that limited selection can lead to your store looking similar to many others. After all, 4.8 million stores use Shopify. That means thousands of other stores will be using the same theme you use, no matter which you choose, which can lead to a slightly sterile look.

Second comes the option to create your own themes.

Both WooCommerce and Shopify allow you to create your own themes, though the latter prefers that you use its “Dawn” standard theme template to do the job. You can build a theme outside of Shopify and port it in, but the process is a little unwieldy.

WooCommerce themes simply provide more options.

Though the official WooCommerce website only offers about 80 themes – which would seem to put it behind Shopify – the platform also opens up theme creation to anybody. That means there are hundreds of people and companies creating themes, giving you a choice of thousands that you can download from third-party websites. You can also create – and mount – your own themes easily and, thanks to WooCommerce being open source, can have practically any developer with WordPress experience make those custom themes for you.

Score:

Shopify – 3

WooCommerce – 3

If you’re not tracking your ecommerce business, you’ll have no idea what’s selling, what isn’t, and what you need to do to make things better. Enter analytics – the data and reports you need to make the crucial decisions for your business. It’s only natural that two popular ecommerce platforms would have solid analytics suites, and that’s absolutely the case here.

WooCommerce’s analytics cover the basics, such as order volumes, gross sales, and returns. You can also tweak them – using a collection of handy sliders – to determine which of these figures show on your reports. It’s all very straightforward, with the numbers updating in real time. You can even check the effects of certain transaction fees, such as sales tax and shipping costs, to get a good idea of how your overheads affect your revenue.

You can get the same info from Shopify’s analytics, with a dash of website usage tracking thrown in. You’ll see the number of visitors your site receives – as well as where those visitors come from – and be able to generate reports that show you how effective your marketing efforts are, as well as how many sales you’re making.

WooCommerce doesn’t offer that data as standard.

But you can get it easily enough by creating a Google Analytics account and linking it to your WooCommerce Store, with plugins available so you can pull the data that Google Analytics offers directly into your WooCommerce dashboard. Of course, Shopify fires back by also allowing you to integrate Google Analytics into the data it provides, placing the two into something of a dead heat.

Score:

Shopify – 5

WooCommerce – 4

If you want to know how vital digital marketing is for the success of your online store, you need only look at the chart above. Ahrefs’ data shows us that the vast majority of websites – 96.55% – get zero organic traffic from search engines, showing us that there’s a clear issue with online marketing that most need to confront.

WooCommerce and Shopify both have features to help ensure you don’t fall into the 96.55%.

On the WooCommerce front, you can create online coupons and access the aforementioned analytics to get a sense of how well your website is doing. Everything else comes in the form of plugins – you make your site as digital-ready as you need it to be. For instance, the Yoast SEO plugin allows you to add metadata to your pages, as well as offer some insight into content readability and quality. Other plugins are recommended via the Marketing Overview section in your WordPress dashboard, which points you in the direction of extensions for everything from email marketing to building links.

Shopify offers much the same, both in terms of basic marketing features and its apps.

You can apply discounts and create coupons as you can in WooCommerce, with the Shopify App Store also featuring plenty of apps to handle things like email marketing. It also generates XML sitemaps for each of your product pages – ideal for Google and its quest to properly catalog your website in its rankings.

Blogging isn’t an issue either – WordPress is one of the most powerful blogging tools around and Shopify offers a built-in blog for store owners.

It’s another dead heat here, with WooCommerce’s open-source nature not doing quite enough to provide a considerable digital marketing advantage.

Score:

Shopify – 6

WooCommerce – 6

As an ecommerce store owner, you have a duty to your customers to keep their data – both personal and payment-related – safe from hackers. One breach could be enough to tank your business as customer confidence in your ability to keep their information safe declines. And if you check out the stats in the above chart, you’ll see just how big the cybersecurity problem is.

Even at their lowest, malware attacks in the United States hit about 100 million per month in 2022, with March of that year hitting a high point of nearly 250 million.

So, your ecommerce platform needs to offer security options.

Both Shopify and WooCommerce do, but there’s a catch – security comes as standard with Shopify whereas you need to download plugins to make your WooCommerce site secure.

In other words, you’re fully responsible for managing every aspect of site security with WooCommerce,  from SSL certificate implementation to keeping the platform updated. Shopify handles that all for you thanks to being a closed-source platform.

For sheer ease of use, that means we have to give this category to Shopify. You can simply set and forget, allowing Shopify to handle security concerns on your behalf and leaving you with more time to focus on selling your products.

Score:

Shopify – 7

WooCommerce – 7

As Search Engine Watch points out, having a mobile-friendly website makes people more likely to buy your products – 67% more likely, in fact, and that’s notwithstanding the 61% of people who say they’ll leave your site, likely never to return, if they can’t find what they want quickly.

So, mobile compatibility is a major factor in your choice.

Shopify does a great job here as all of the pre-made templates it makes available are responsive, meaning they display as well on mobile devices as they do on desktops. It also offers mobile apps for iOS and Android through which you can manage your store, meaning you get a mobile double threat – it’s great for consumers and shop owners.

But WooCommerce comes firing back with the same features.

The WooCommerce app allows you to manage your store when you’re out and about, and it’s also available for Android and iOS. As for its themes, some are responsive and some aren’t – it’s up to you to make the right choice there. Still, you should find that themes are labeled clearly enough that you don’t accidentally commit to a desktop-only theme when you want something that displays on mobile.

It’s another dead heat here.

Score:

Shopify – 8

WooCommerce – 8

Finally, we come to the category that’s likely going to have the largest impact on your choice of ecommerce platforms – pricing. This is a tough one to measure, not the least of which is because Shopify and WooCommerce take very different approaches to how you pay.

Shopify Pricing

Shopify offers four tiers for you to choose from, each carrying a monthly fee. The standard packages range from $39 to $399 per month, with paying for a higher tier allowing you to spend less on transaction fees and unlocking some additional discounts on shipping. You’ll also get more ecommerce features as you move through the tiers – Advanced offers custom reporting, for instance.

Then, there’s the Plus tier.

Think of this as Shopify’s enterprise offering. It starts at $2,300 per month, and you’re locked into a three-year term once you sign up. That term protects you from price increases later on down the line, but it also means you’re committed to dropping thousands of dollars on keeping your store running.

WooCommerce Pricing

WooCommerce is free.

Enough said, right? That should make it the clear winner in the pricing battle.

But free comes with a catch. Though the base version of WooCommerce is free to download, tweak, and implement, costs come in various other ways. For example, many of the plugins you might need to get your online store working the way you want carry fees, with some even charging a monthly subscription. You’ll also pay for your own hosting, which is a monthly cost that only increases as you scale.

Still, you have more control.

With Shopify, you may find yourself paying for features you don’t really need just because there is something you need within its higher tiers. You won’t face that problem with WooCommerce – everything you pay for will be something you’ll actually use to improve your store.

For that reason, we’re giving the last category to WooCommerce.

Score:

Shopify – 9

WooCommerce – 9