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In this comparison, the NEWMEDIA team stacks two of the most popular ecommerce platforms against one another – Shopify and WooCommerce. Each is a dedicated ecommerce platform, though each also comes with its own pros and cons, which is why we're going to compare them across 15 categories so you can see which is the best choice for your budding store.

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WooCommerce vs. Shopify - Which Ecommerce Platform Should You Choose for Your Online Store?

You’ll have to answer a ton of questions when you decide to start an ecommerce store. What product you should sell is the big one – obviously – but the one question that often goes underappreciated is which ecommerce platform should you choose.

It’s a huge question because your choice determines so much of what you can and can’t do with your online store going forward, particularly when it’s time to scale. Some sellers just opt for the first platform that catches their eye, only to find themselves needing to make a change once their store outgrows the platform. Others go in the opposite direction – they’re so paralyzed by the sheer number of choices available that they end up wasting time or, in some cases, never creating their store at all.

Let’s make sure neither happens to you.

In this comparison, the NEWMEDIA team stacks two of the most popular ecommerce platforms against one another – Shopify and WooCommerce. Each is a dedicated ecommerce platform, though each also comes with its own pros and cons, which is why we’re going to compare them across 15 categories so you can see which is the best choice for your budding store.

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What is a Shopify Store?

When you take any ecommerce platform that uses a WordPress site as its base out of the equation, Shopify rules the roost:

Screenshot of Shopify's theme selection page, with filters for price and industry, showing theme previews.

It has more than double the market share of its nearest competitors – Wix and Squarespace – and its popularity is evident to anybody once you learn that there are two million people (and counting) selling their products using a Shopify website.

So, what is it?

Shopify is a website-building platform that provides templates, tools, and a content management system (CMS) to anybody who wants to start selling products online. However, unlike the aforementioned Wix and Squarespace, it goes beyond giving you the basic building blocks of web design. It allows you to sell – each Shopify store is capable of taking Shopify payments because its CMS is custom-designed to make it easy for you to list, sell, and track the inventory levels for any products you offer.

What is a WooCommerce Store?

When you throw WordPress-based websites back into the mix, WooCommerce emerges as the main competitor to Shopify. And frankly, it’s winning the battle:

Bar chart showing e-commerce platform market share with WooCommerce leading at 38.74%, followed by Woo Themes, Squarespace, Shopify, and WixStores.

As Statista’s data shows us, 38.74% of ecommerce businesses choose to open a WooCommerce store ahead of a Shopify one, giving it almost four times the market share of its competitor. And the amazing thing is that WooCommerce isn’t an ecommerce website builder in the same vein as Shopify.

Rather than being a dedicated site builder, it’s one of the thousands of WordPress plugins available.

Using WooCommerce first involves downloading the WooCommerce plugin – which is free to all users – before planting it on top of a WordPress website. From there, you can customize your budding ecommerce site in almost any way you want thanks to the huge number of themes and plugins available for both WordPress and WooCommerce, making the platform one of the most powerful in terms of offering choices to its users.

Why Open an Ecommerce Store in the First Place?

Both WooCommerce and Shopify provide powerful ecommerce platforms. But before we get into the comparison, we need to answer a question:

Why even start an ecommerce website?

After all, you always have the option of creating a physical store – rendering the WooCommerce vs. Shopify debate moot – so let’s dig into a couple of reasons why ecommerce stores are such a good idea.

Ecommerce Has Grown Massively (And Will Continue to Grow)

If you have a successful online store, you’re in the position to take a nice slice out of a pie that just keeps on growing:

Bar chart illustrating retail e-commerce sales worldwide from 2014 to 2027, with sales increasing from 1,336 billion in 2014 to 8,034 billion in 2027.

Regardless of the ecommerce platform you end up choosing, the sector itself has experienced consistent revenue increases for a decade and will continue to grow into the future. Total ecommerce sales have risen from $1.336 trillion in 2014 to $6.330 trillion in 2024. And it’s only going to get better from there – total global sales will crack the $8 trillion mark in 2027.

All of this represents an opportunity for Shopify and WooCommerce users alike. You have a chance to make your fortune with an ecommerce business as long as you have a product – and a platform – that suits your model.

You Keep Overhead Low

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:

List graphic showing various costs of starting a retail store, including rent and utility, licensing, hiring staff, inventory, marketing, POS system, decor, and financing.

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.

You Reach a Larger Audience

Let’s say you have a physical store in a shopping mall. What does your audience look like?

For the most part, it’s the locals who live near that store – let’s say within a 10-mile radius – who drop in on the mall regularly and walk past your store every day. That might be a strong audience, depending on where you operate, but it’ll always be limited by the locational factor:

You won’t have people traveling across state lines or from other countries to come and visit your store.

In other words, there are boundaries. Limitations. You can only appeal to a small segment of the audience that might be interested in your product because they have to physically travel to your location to buy.

All of those limitations disappear when you have an online store – you can appeal to customers on a national or even global scale. It’s all about the convenience factor:

Infographic showing what matters most to consumers when shopping, with highest quality items and lowest price being the top factors.

A staggering 97% of consumers have backed out of buying something because the very act of buying the thing was inconvenient to them. Translate that to the physical vs. ecommerce debate and you can easily argue that there are thousands of people out there who won’t buy from your physical store because getting there is far too much of a trek. But buying online and getting the product delivered? That’s something they can do from a laptop or phone while they’re lounging around in the house wearing pajamas

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Shopify vs. WooCommerce - The Comparison

So, we’ve covered the “what” and “why” of online stores and given you some brief insight into two popular ecommerce platform options – WooCommerce and Shopify. Now, it’s time to get into the nitty-gritty:

WooCommerce vs. Shopify – which one is the best choice for your budding ecommerce business?

Apps - The Shopify App Store vs. WooCommerce Plugins

Screenshot of Shopify App Store home page showing popular apps and options to log in or sign up for Shopify.

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

Ease of Use

Screenshot of the WordPress website dashboard, showing various admin options and features.

Next up is ease of use in terms of the day-to-day of uploading products, posting content, and doing all of the little things you need to keep your ecommerce website up and running. In essence, this is as much of a battle of WordPress vs. Shopify as it is WooCommerce vs. Shopify given that WooCommerce itself is a plug-in for WordPress.

So, the winner comes down to your familiarity with WordPress.

If you’ve used the WordPress CMS before, everything you see in WooCommerce’s CMS should be more than familiar to you. It’s simple to upload products and you have the same previewing and content editing options available to you. It’s all very user-friendly. However, those who lack experience with WordPress will find themselves dealing with a small learning curve as they get to grips with the CMS.

Shopify offers a touch more simplicity because the platform is designed solely around ecommerce. There’s no WordPress CMS to get to grips with before you start using the platform. That’s not to say there isn’t a learning curve at all – you’ll always have to deal with figuring out a new CMS regardless of your choice. However, Shopify feels a little more intuitive and geared toward running your online store without the extra bells and whistles that come with essentially having one CMS layered on top of another.

Score:

Shopify – 2

WooCommerce – 1

Ease of Launching Your Ecommerce Store

Screenshot of the Shopify dashboard showing the setup guide with options like finding products, adding branding, and setting up payments.

Ease of use once your ecommerce store is up and running is not the same thing as how easy it is to get the store running in the first place. There’s a distinction there – however slight it may be – but it’s important to focus on because one of these platforms takes more work than the other.

That platform is WooCommerce.

That work starts with downloading and installing the WooCommerce WordPress plugin itself. You need to have a WordPress website to do that. And though the plugin is easy to install – a wizard takes you through the step-by-step process – it’s still something you don’t have to do for Shopify. You also have to deal with setting up your own web hosting with WooCommerce as it’s a self-hosted platform rather than a fully hosted ecommerce platform.

Shopify is a little easier to set up.

The worry about ecommerce hosting goes out of the window because Shopify provides that for you (at a cost that we’ll dig into later) and the setup itself is as simple as creating an account and following a few steps. Shopify also gives you the option to set up a dropshipping business during its store launching process, which is an option you can only leverage with a WooCommerce site if you download the appropriate plug-in.

Ultimately, launching your ecommerce site all feels just a little bit smoother, allowing Shopify to race out into an early lead in this comparison.

Score:

Shopify – 3

WooCommerce – 1

Customizability

Bar chart comparing open source and proprietary software on various criteria like technology flexibility, developer satisfaction, cost, security, and support.

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

Themes

Screenshot showing available WooCommerce themes with categories and industry filters on the left, and theme previews on the right.

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

Order and Inventory Management

Screenshot of a Shopify inventory management page showing a list of hot sauce products with their available stock levels.

With the WooCommerce ecommerce solution coming out on top for customizability, the scores are level again. Now, we get to the important business of managing your orders and inventory.

Both offer the basic features you’d expect from an ecommerce platform. You can import products via a CSV spreadsheet – quickly creating an online catalog for your users to browse – and both platforms feature basic inventory tracking features so you can determine when a product needs to be taken offline until you get new stock.

Moving beyond the basics, each has handy additional features that could make it a good choice for your store. For instance, Shopify has its Transfers option, which allows you to track inventory coming in from suppliers. Unlike Shopify, WooCommerce doesn’t offer that functionality as standard, though you can build it into your website using an appropriate plugin.

Shopify also makes it easy to start a dropshipping business – aided by its integrations into platforms like Odoro – which is another thing for which you’ll need a plugin if you choose WooCommerce. Plus, Shopify can track abandoned checkouts, vital for email marketing campaigns that target potential buyers.

The problem is that those using the Basic Shopify plan are locked out of many of these features. You have to sign up to the Advanced Shopify plan to get them.

WooCommerce, on the other hand, offers all of these features for free as long as you’re willing to invest time into learning about (and installing) different plugins to make your site an order and inventory tracking behemoth.

Ultimately, we’re giving the win to Shopify here because it offers so many useful features without the need for tinkering. But that comes with the caveat that you can actually get more ecommerce features implanted into a WooCommerce site if you’re willing to put in the time.

Score:

Shopify – 4

WooCommerce – 3

Analytics

Screenshot of WooCommerce analytics showing revenue, sales, returns, and other key metrics over a date range.

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

Payment Gateway Options

Taking payments from your customers is part and parcel of running an ecommerce store, so it’s important to understand the payment gateways each platform offers on two levels:

  • How much it costs you to receive payments
  • What options for payment you can provide to your users

On the cost front, both platforms run a percentage-plus-fixed fee model for online transactions, though WooCommerce provides more options in terms of the payment plugin you use. The official WooCommerce website recommends a plugin named WooPayments, which takes a 2.9% slice of each transaction in addition to a set $0.30 fee.

Shopify isn’t much different, though the fees you pay vary depending on your plan. If you’re using the platform’s free plan, you pay the same as you would through WooPayments – 2.9% plus a $0.30 transaction fee. Upgrading to a paid plan reduces the per-transaction percentage to 2.5% or 2.4% – depending on the plan – but that lower transaction cost is balanced out by you having to pay a monthly subscription to access it.

So, there’s little to choose between the two when it comes to the cost of selling a product.

But what about payment options?

Both allow the basics, such as credit card, debit card, and PayPal payments. Meta, Amazon, and Apple Pay are all accounted for, too, with the key difference being the one you’ve seen in several other areas already – WooCommerce requires you to download plugins to offer different payment options to your visitors.

That’s a double-edged sword.

Though you don’t get any payment options as standard through WooCommerce, you can get more than are available in Shopify by downloading the right plugins. But the difference, though one exists, is negligible. For instance, both have apps and plugins available that enable cryptocurrency payments on top of fiat currency payments.

So, which comes out on top?

For us, WooCommerce squeaks by because you have to pay monthly fees to access its lower per-transaction costs. Add in a touch more flexibility and it’s the clear winner. However, the reality is that most online merchants won’t need to use the wealth of payment options each platform provides – cards and PayPal are usually enough for most.

Score:

Shopify – 5

WooCommerce – 5

Digital Marketing Features

Pie chart from Ahrefs showing that 96.55% of pages receive no traffic from Google, with a breakdown of traffic levels for the remaining pages.

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

Scalability

Infographic highlighting the roadblocks to scaling up small businesses, including increasing profits and hiring new employees.

Growth is on the mind of almost every business owner, with the above set of stats showing us that 88% of business owners want to increase revenue – at the very least – over the next year. But scaling brings with it roadblocks. Almost half – 48% – say they struggle when hiring new employees, while 50% say that increasing profits while managing costs is a major barrier.

That last one brings us to your choice of ecommerce platform.

Making the wrong choice from a scalability perspective could lead to you getting stuck with a site that can’t grow when your customer base grows, resulting in that increasing profits issue.

It’s in this area that WooCommerce starts to shine. As long as you have adequate web hosting, your WooCommerce store can scale to practically any size with no real barriers. That’s not the case with Shopify. Yes, you can scale. But you have to do so within the restrictions that Shopify places on your site. Hitting certain sales or product numbers will force you to upgrade your payment plan – more on that later – with particularly large stores being forced into moving onto a customized Plus plan.

So, you can scale with both.

But WooCommerce makes it far easier and more cost-effective.

Score:

Shopify – 6

WooCommerce – 7

Security Options

Bar and line graph showing the total volume of malware attacks in the United States by month in 2022, with a trend line representing the spread percentage.

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

Web Hosting

With web hosting, we see the same battle we’ve seen throughout this WooCommerce vs. Shopify comparison – ease versus control.

As a fully hosted ecommerce solution, Shopify handles all of your hosting worries for you. You’re able to purchase your domain name when creating your store, with the platform handling the mounting of your site to that domain and taking care of hosting responsibilities on your behalf. The trade-off is that you’ll have to upgrade your Shopify package – and thus pay more for your hosting –when you grow your website or its customer base.

Those challenges exist with WooCommerce, but you have more control. For one, you can pick your own hosting provider, allowing you to shop around for bargains rather than sticking with the “one product for everyone” approach Shopify follows. However, that control comes with the added responsibility of sourcing your own domain name and maintaining your site once it’s on its hosting platform.

So, this category comes down to what you want.

For a quick and easy route to getting your online store up and running, Shopify is the clear choice. But if you want control over your hosting – such as the option to switch providers to keep costs low – then WooCommerce is the best choice.

We’re calling this one a draw.

Score:

Shopify – 8

WooCommerce – 8

Mobile Versions

Graphic comparing user behavior, showing 67% are more likely to buy on a mobile-friendly site, while 61% will leave if the site is not mobile-friendly.

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

Customer Support

Customer Support

This is one of the easier categories for which to determine a winner as Shopify blows WooCommerce out of the water when it comes to offering one-on-one support.

With WooCommerce, you’re generally left to your own devices when figuring out how to solve issues affecting your online store. That’s the downside of an open-source platform – very few come with dedicated support. There is an extensive knowledge base you can dig through to find a solution to your issue. But even that isn’t guaranteed, especially when you start getting into the weeds with plugins. Each plugin you use offers its own level of support – from knowledge bases to the ability to communicate with the plugin creator – which can make fixing problems finicky.

Shopify offers both chat and phone support 24/7 to all of its paid users, though the latter is only available at the very expensive Plus tier. Still, chat support is better than not having the ability to talk to anybody when you run into a problem.

Score:

Shopify – 9

WooCommerce – 8

Cost to Set Up an Online Store

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

Chart showing market share trends for popular platforms like Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, and others, excluding WordPress.org.

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

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Review from Clutch.co

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Shopify or WooCommerce - Which Should You Choose?

After all of that, we’ve ended up with Shopify and WooCommerce coming out completely level in terms of scoring. So, does that mean you don’t need to think about which platform you choose?

Not necessarily.

Though the scores are even, there’s a clear divide that determines which platform is best for you. WooCommerce offers control and higher customizability, making it a better choice for anybody who wants to dig into the weeds of building an ecommerce store that’s wholly representative of their brand and can be tweaked at any time. WooCommerce also comes with a similar advantage to WordPress – any competent developer can work on your site, so you’re not tied to a single company.

Shopify, on the other hand, offers ease of use and a “done for you” package that means you don’t have to worry about hosting and security. While you pay a monthly fee for those benefits, that also leaves you free to focus on your store rather than dealing with all of the technical stuff that goes into keeping that store online.

Trust NEWMEDIA to Help With All of Your Needs with Ecommerce Platforms

Regardless of your choice in the Shopify vs. WooCommerce battle, you need a developer by your side to help you build your ecommerce store into everything that it has the potential to be.

That’s where NEWMEDIA comes in.

Over the last quarter of a century, we’ve scaled brands – large and small – to generate a combined total of more than $3.6 billion in revenue. Yes, billion! Expertise.com ranks us as one of the world’s best digital marketing agencies in 2023, while SelectedFirms calls us a leading ecommerce development company.

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