Picking an eCommerce platform is critically important. In our experience, the platform you choose can literally make or break your eCommerce business. We know countless of people who have paid developers well over $250,000/year to make changes that many eCommerce platforms innately have built-in as features!
The best thing you can do is research and understand the costs and benefits to each platform. While we're obviously biased (can you tell we love Shopify? 😊), we've worked with many different platforms in the past and keep up to date on the industry so we have a good understanding of each one of these platforms.
Keep in mind, these platforms are literally upgrading every day. One feature missing on Squarespace yesterday might be there today and another on Wix might be discontinued next week. Not picking on either of these platforms, just an example.
We've compared other eCommerce platforms to Shopify here:
Woocommerce is often a common choice for business owners looking to start an eCommerce store. The main reason for this is because of WordPress's popularity. While there are advantages to Woocommerce it doesn't give the level of user experience many people come to expect from Shopify.
We went through the remaining parts of the platform and below is our 1-10 rating of Shopify vs Woocommerce.
| Criteria (1-10) | Shopify | Woocommerce |
|---|---|---|
| Theme editor | 8 | 5 |
| Theme choice | 8 | 8 |
| Product presentation and features | 7 | 7 |
| Payment options | 9 | 9 |
| Blog options | 8 | 8 |
| Shipping Cost Settings and Carrier integration | 10 | 10 |
| International capabilities | 8 | 8 |
| Analytics | 8 | 5 |
| SEO capabilities | 5 | 7 |
| Pagespeed | 6 | 9 |
| Help support | 8 | 5 |
| Apps | 9 | 9 |
| Discounts | 7 | 7 |
| Storage | 7 | 5 |
| Pricing | 6 | 9 |
| Free Trials | 14-day | Free |
Setting up a Wordpress site can be much more complicated than setting up an online store through any of the other platforms we've reviewed (Wix, Squarespace, etc) so we didn't include the setup section.
Below is our criteria information broken down.
Wordpress has a theme editor but largely is very limited in changes.
Wordpress has tons of theme choices, more than any other platforms.
Because of Wordpress level of customization, you can make the product presentation anything you want, however, the ease of implementation will be a bit harder than Shopify.
Both platforms offer good payment processing capabilities.
Wordpress was built as a blogging platform so it has great options.
While there will be less shipping native integrations, Wordpress will allow you to connect with almost any shipping platform you need.
Both have strong international capabilities.
Woocommerce itself has very poor analytics, however, there are lots of plugins and third-party integrations that solve for this issue.
Wordpress is generally considered to be one of the best platforms for SEO capabilities.
While pagespeed might fall under SEO, the core pagespeed you get at first when you whip up a site is an important factor.
Shopify has a stronger customer support compared to Woocommerce.
Shopify has a ton of apps in the App Store, however, Wordpress likely has even more plugins.
Discounts by both platforms match up.
You have to host your own site for Wordpress so you'll need to host your own site through a separate service.
Woocommerce itself is free while Shopify has a monthly cost.
Shopify has a 14-day free trial while Woocommerce is free.
