| Criteria | Woo-commerce | Shopify |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Platform | Is a self-hosted ecommerce platform | Is a platform as a service |
| 2. Control | Allows complete control over website | Allows limited control over website |
| 3. Worldwide Adoption | Woocommerce is the world's most popular eCommerce platform, it drives 28% of the top one million websites | Shopify powers 20% of top 1 million websites. |
| 4. Price | Open-Source & Free | Monthly Fee |
| 5. Scaling | Can be easily scaled to unlimited products without any incremental cost | Can be scaled to unlimited products but incremental costs apply. You will need to move to the advanced or enterprise plan. |
| 6. Hosting & security | As it is a self-hosted platform, can be fast and performance packed. Hosting & security can be selected to be the best. | Can be fast and performance packed. Hosting & security is part of the plan. Cannot be changed. |
| 7. Traffic (seo) Capability | SEO Friendly Platform with organic traffic generation ability | Not SEO friendly. Good for stores looking to rely on paid adverts only. To get the benefit of content marketing you will need to add WordPress as your content CMS |
| 8. Feature addition | Almost any feature can be added at an affordable cost | Additional features not in the base plan are fairly expensive |
| 9. 3rd Party Plugins Pricing | Features can be hand coded or can be added via plugins at annual / or one-time-lifetime pricing. | Themes and feature plugins are fairly expensive with monthly billing. |
| 10. Payment gateways | All major as well as niche payment gateways are available for free. You are only charged transaction fees by your payment gateway or your bank. | Shopify charges an extra 2% fees on each transaction made through third party payment gateways. This is on top of the transaction fees charged by the payment gateway. You can reduce the fee to 0.5% by paying $299 per month for Advanced Shopify plan. Shopify Payments has credit card fees, but no other transaction fees. Credit card rates start from 2.9% + 30¢ for the basic plan and get lower for other plans. |
| 11. Miscellaneous | Agencies earn no affiliate income | Shopify pays high commission rates to affiliates. For each referral who signs up for a paid plan, agencies receive a 100% commission on the first and second payments. The 200% commission applies to all plans, excluding Shopify Plus. This can lead to the platform being recommended even when not required. |
| 12. Recommendation | If you are looking for fine control, full customization, affordable solution go with woocommerce and find a great team like BrandLoom with UI/UX experience. | 1) If you are looking to manage the website yourself and have no experience with software management go with the frill-free Shopify base plan at $29. 2. If expense is not an issue for you (i.e. with investor funding) go with the shopify plus $2000 monthly plan and full theme customization by hiring a developer with UI/UX experience. |
In Digital Marketing eCommerce 1 Min Read
WooCommerce vs Shopify – Which is better for an Ecommerce Site
Author Anupama Singh
Co-Founder @ Brandloom Consulting Besides business and health, learning, teaching, and cooking are my other interests in life. I have a bachelors in engineering and an unbeatable streak of optimism, come what may!
