What is Shopify?

Shopify is an e-commerce platform that lets you sell anything, to anyone, anywhere. With Shopify, you have your own online store, and you can also choose from dozens of themes and apps that help you customize. Whether you’re selling physical products or services, they’ve got everything you need to make it happen.

So, what does Shopify do?

They offer a wide range of products, from the beginner-friendly Shopify Lite plan to their Advanced Shopify plan for advanced users. But no matter which plan you choose, Shopify offers the same core features to every merchant:

• Online storefronts (including mobile-friendly ones)
• Shopping cart checkout
• Customizable payment processing options
• Shipping management tools

What is WooCommerce?

WooCommerce is a free and open-source eCommerce plugin for WordPress. It was built to help anyone build an online store, including those with no coding experience. 

WooCommerce allows users to sell physical and digital products through a WordPress website or blog. Sellers can create their own storefront to sell products directly from their website while also taking advantage of other features such as product inventory management, order fulfillment, and accounting tools.

Besides its open-source platform, WooCommerce also offers paid extensions and plugins that add additional functionality or optimize the shopping experience for shoppers on your site.

     1. Ease of Use

Shopify is a drag-and-drop ecommerce platform that makes it easy for you to create an online store. With Shopify, you can choose from hundreds of pre-made templates for your site and customize them with just a few clicks.

Shopify’s point-and-click interface makes it simple for even inexperienced users to get started quickly by adding products, pages, and features at their own pace. You can focus on what matters most—selling your products or services.

     2. Build Time

So, you want to launch your own e-commerce store. You have the idea and the passion, but maybe not the technical chops. This is where Shopify earns its stripes as the go-to platform for new businesses with limited experience.

While it’s true that WooCommerce is easier to use than many other platforms on which you can build an online store, it still requires some technical knowledge for even basic tasks like creating product pages or uploading images. 

Shopify does all this for you out of the box, so there’s no need to learn how to code.

     3. Design and Themes

Shopify has a vast library of themes and extensions and apps. You can choose from hundreds of different options to create your store, with plenty more available if you need something specific. If you’re not sure what kind of theme you want, many free ones will work great for most businesses and websites.

WooCommerce has a very small library compared to Shopify, so you don’t have as many options for choosing a suitable theme or extension for your business. This also makes it harder for you to find exactly what you need when it comes down to setting up your website.

     4. Sales Features

When you sell products online, your customers must be able to purchase the things they want with no problems. Shopify offers powerful features that help you sell more and make more money, while WooCommerce doesn’t. These features include: 

• Shopify has a built-in sales funnel: If you’re new to selling online or have little experience with sales funnels, this is one of the best things about using Shopify. It comes with a free trial and allows for customization so your customers can easily make purchases.

Shopify has a built-in checkout: Another big advantage of Shopify is its integrated checkout process, which makes it easy for anyone who wants to buy something from your store (including mobile users). They don’t need to go through multiple steps just because each step involves different sections within the shopping cart.

     5. Plugins and Integrations

Shopify has more plugins and integrations than WooCommerce. Shopify offers over 1,500 apps in its marketplace, which is more than any other e-commerce platform. 

You can add various plugins and integrations to your store if you are uncomfortable building them yourself. If you are looking for a solution that will allow you to integrate with Facebook Ads, Shopify has built-in Facebook pixel tracking, which can connect your store with Facebook Ads.

On the other hand, WooCommerce only offers limited integration options compared to Shopify.

     6. Marketing Tool

Shopify has a more robust marketing suite than WooCommerce.

WooCommerce doesn’t offer any paid marketing tools at all. Still, there are a few decent free options in their store and more advanced third-party plugins that can help with ecommerce SEO, email marketing, and social media automation. 

Shopify comes with everything you need for your initial launch and beyond. They include: 

• A/B split testing for pages and products.
• A/B testing for emails 
• Campaign management tools let you send personalized messages to customers based on their previous purchases or behavior on the site.

     7. Payment Options and Transaction Fees

Another difference between Shopify and WooCommerce is that Shopify accepts all major credit cards. You can also use the payment gateway provided by Shopify to process your transactions, which makes it easier for you to accept payments.

WooCommerce does not accept all major credit cards. Instead, it has a transaction fee of 2.9%. If you want to avoid this fee, you need to use PayPal or another payment gateway service like Stripe—but this will cost more in terms of time.

     8. SEO

Shopify is better than WooCommerce at SEO. With Shopify, you get a built-in SEO tool. It’s designed to help you make your store more search engine friendly and improve your search engine rankings. 

You can use this tool to optimize essential page elements like product titles, meta descriptions, URLs, and images so that they’re easy for Google to crawl and understand. Shopify provides a keyword research tool that will allow you to find the best keywords (and their related phrases) for each category on your site. 

This doesn’t mean that WooCommerce doesn’t have any SEO tools at all, though—it has some, but they’re not nearly as robust as what you can find within Shopify Plus accounts.

     9. Security

Shopify has a dedicated security team and a dedicated App Store. The App Store is where all the apps that work with Shopify are stored and lets you know if your store will be compatible with them before you buy them. 

It also means that if there are any security issues with an app, Shopify can quickly remove it from their store to protect their users from these vulnerabilities.

WooCommerce has its own security team, but it doesn’t have a dedicated app store like Shopify; instead, all of its apps are available for download on WordPress itself (which hosts both WooCommerce and WordPress). 

While this means that there are more options available to customize your site (and therefore more potential for things to go wrong), it also means extra work on your end when going through each individual plugin’s terms and conditions or readme files before deciding whether they fit into what you want to be done with your website.

     10. Customer Support

If you’re looking for a platform that provides 24/7 support, Shopify is your best bet. It offers live chat, email support, a knowledge base, and phone support to help new entrepreneurs get going. They even have videos and blog articles on how to set up your store.

If you need help with the design or development of the site itself, Shopify has an extensive community forum where users can ask questions about coding or building custom themes. They also have several tools in place for developers, so you can easily find resources for anything from their ecommerce platform to social media management systems like Hootsuite or Buffer without leaving the ecosystem altogether.

     11. Pricing

Shopify has a higher monthly fee than WooCommerce and a higher transaction fee. A standard Shopify plan costs $29 per month and includes the basic features needed to build your store.

If you want to pay for more advanced features, like one-click upsells and abandoned cart recovery emails, you’ll need to upgrade to the Shopify Plus or Advanced Shopify plan, which cost $79 and $299 monthly, respectively.