How to Choose Ecommerce Store Partner

Ease of Use

Winner: Wix

With Wix, editing the front end of your online store is very easy, especially with its drag-and-drop editor.

In terms of managing your inventory, Shopify is easy to use, but for minute details it can be difficult to use.

Design Functionalities

Winner: Wix

Over +800 beautiful templates which are really simple to edit. And the templates for online stores are available too.

Templates that are designed solely to assist you in selling online.

Pricing and Value for Money

Winner: Wix

You will be able to own a fully functional online store for free with a visible Wix domain name plus your store name at the back. If you want your own domain name, the paid plans are very affordable too.

Offer a 3-day free trial.   And if you want to continue with the trial, there are paid plans starting from $5 per month to $2000 onwards per month for big enterprises.

Product and Inventory Feature

Winner: Shopify

Offers physical, digital, and service products, but overall has pretty simple tools for sales.

The best sales features, including excellent analytics tools and inventory management capabilities.

Payment Options

Winner: Shopify

PayPal and other standard payment methods are available on Wix.

Besides Shopify Payments, Shopify has over 100 payment options.

Shipping Options

Winner: Shopify

If you're using Wix, you'll need apps to help with global shipping.

With Shopify, you're supported at every step along the way, and you have excellent tools such as curbside pickup and international shipping available.

Tax Settings

Winner: Shopify

Wix's tax options will be acceptable to small businesses, but Shopify is more comprehensive.

There are several tax options available through Shopify, including a feature that automatically calculates taxes for all industries.

Marketing Features

Winner: Wix

Excellent marketing features, particularly with blogs

While it's great for social media integration and SEO, it's lacking Wix's overall power

App Stores

Winner: Shopify

It offers less e-commerce-specific integrations than Shopify despite its huge   app store

An excellent app store with endless e-commerce integrations to increase your sales

Security

It's a Tie

With Wix, you get free SSL, PCI DSS Level 1 compliance, and built-in security measures

The security level of Shopify's plans is identical to that of Wix's. The PCI   compliance requirement is especially important if you sell and accept online   credit and debit payments

Customer Support

Winner:   Wix

In addition to email, social media, and phone support, a constructive forum is also available

Live chat and phone support are available 24/7, but onsite editor support is not available

Still can't decide?

Consult our Doba Team. Learn how to connect a store from Doba here.

BUDGET

Winner: WooCommerce

Starting an online store is super easy with Shopify. A basic Shopify plan costs $29 per month, while a Shopify plan costs $79, and an Advanced Shopify plan costs $299.

SSL certificates and web hosting are included in each of these plans. It will come with a Shopify-branded subdomain. (e.g.   https://your-store.myshopify.com).

To use your own domain name, you'll need to purchase it separately. Pricing for a regular.com domain name generally starts at $14/year.

Shopify's basic plan comes with enough features to get started. You can add unlimited products, 2 user accounts, unlimited file storage, and more.

In order to take your Shopify store to the next level, you'll need third-party tools and add-ons, which are not included in this pricing. You'll soon find yourself paying much more than the basic plan as your business grows.

Payments are another factor that affects your costs. Shopify offers their own Shopify Payments solution, which costs 2.9% + 30 cents per transaction for the basic plan.

If you want to use third-party payment gateways or your own merchant account, then you will be charged a flat fee of   2.0% for all transactions. You can reduce this fee to 0.5% by using the   Shopify Advanced plan which costs $299 per month.

External payment gateways charge fairly steep fees for payment processing. As a new business, however, Shopify Payments is quite similar to popular platforms like Stripe and Braintree when it comes to fees.

WooCommerce is an eCommerce plugin for WordPress.org (also known as self-hosted WordPress). It is an open-source plugin that is available free of charge.

A WooCommerce store, however, requires a domain name, SSL certificate, and WordPress hosting account.

Typically, a domain name costs $14.99, an SSL Certificate costs $69.99, and web hosting costs around $7.99 / per month. When you're just starting out, this isn't cheap.

WooCommerce hosting plans are now available at several hosting companies at affordable prices. For example, BlueHost.

Unlike other e-commerce platforms, WooCommerce doesn't charge a percentage fee on transactions.

It's important to keep in Keep in mind that   WooCommerce costs begin to add up as you purchase paid extensions. As your online store grows, so will your hosting costs.

There is, however, one clear advantage of using WooCommerce: you can often find free alternatives to premium themes and extensions. Additionally, you can keep your costs under control by only purchasing the tools and plugins you need.

WooCommerce is the winner when it comes to cost because it has so many free themes and add-ons available.

EASE OF USE

Winner: Shopify

The Shopify platform is fully hosted, so there's no need to install, manage, or update anything. Furthermore, backups, security, performance, and compatibility issues are not an issue.

When you join Shopify, you can choose from many free themes.

Then they also walk you through customization and help you add products.

Shopify comes with an intuitive drag-and-drop interface. It's easy to manage your inventory, sales,   and product pages inside Shopify.

This guided, polished, and highly optimized user experience, however, limits your control. The only tools you can use are those provided by Shopify or add-ons available in their marketplace.

The situation, however, is not as bad as it seems. Shopify's large selection of extensions and themes is sufficient to get started and grow your online store for the majority of users.

WooCommerce is not a hosted platform like Shopify. It means you'll be responsible for installing the WooCommerce plugin, managing updates, keeping backups, and securing your website. You can automate most of these tasks with a variety of free and paid plugins.

WooCommerce is super flexible when it comes to customizations. The platform is fully under your control. More than   59,000+ WordPress plugins enable you to add any functionality you can imagine to your website.

However, there is no built-in drag & drop design builder. SeedProd or Beaver   Builder are two WordPress page builders you can use, but they will cost you more.

The WooCommerce setup wizard is helpful, but it cannot match Shopify's ease of use and onboarding experience.

PAYMENT METHODS

Winner: Tie

During checkout, Shopify offers a variety of payment options. Aside from Shopify Payments (powered by Stripe), it also supports all popular third-party payment gateways.

A third-party payment gateway fee of 2% is charged by Shopify for each transaction. Additional transaction fees are charged by the payment gateway as well. You can reduce the fee to 0.5% by paying $299 per month for the Advanced Shopify plan.

The Shopify Payments service charges a fee for credit card transactions, but not for other types of transactions.

Credit card rates start from 2.9% + 30¢ for the basic plan and get lower for other plans.

PayPal and Stripe are the default payment methods offered by WooCommerce. They also have a   WooCommerce Payments solution, which is powered by Stripe.

All other popular payment providers are also supported. You can install payment integrations for Authorize.net, Amazon Pay, Square, Alipay, and many more.

WooCommerce even supports a number of regional and less popular payment gateways. It is possible for any payment company to create add-ons for WooCommerce and provide support for it since there is no barrier to entry.

In the case of a self-hosted platform,   you will only be charged transaction fees by the payment gateway or your bank. A major advantage of WooCommerce is that it does not charge a % fee on credit card payments unless you are using WooCommerce Payments.

You will save A LOT of money by using   WooCommerce if choosing your merchant account and using a third-party gateway is important to you.

There's no difference if you're a small store using Shopify Payments, which offers the same credit card rates as Stripe or Paypal.

INTEGRATIONS

Winner: WooCommerce

Shopify offers a powerful API and an App Store where third-party add-ons can be purchased. Their app store has hundreds of apps covering all the features you'll need.

Shopify’s app store contains both free and paid apps. Most free apps are created by third-party services, and they only integrate your store with their APIs. There is a   varying price for paid add-ons, and most apps provide monthly subscriptions.

Compared to WooCommerce / WordPress, Shopify offers fewer extensions and add-ons. The reason is that getting your app listed in their store can be challenging.

WooCommerce is open source and built on top of WordPress. The plugin repository includes 59,000+ free plugins as well as some paid ones.

WooCommerce offers many more integrations and add-ons than Shopify because of its lower entry barrier. The majority of third-party tools and service providers offer plugins to integrate seamlessly with WooCommerce.

A WordPress developer can also create a custom integration or plugin for your site.

In general, WooCommerce is much easier to customize than Shopify.

SCALABILITY

Winner: Shopify

Shopify handles all the technical aspects of your store, so you don't have to worry about performance, security, or scalability. Shopify's plans can be upgraded as your business grows.

Your growing business can rely on its infrastructure without worrying about downtime, backups, updates, or security. Additionally,   Shopify Plus offers enterprise services.

In essence, this removes the painful part of business growth, but it also increases costs. There will be an increase in your expenses, so you'll need to plan accordingly.

However, not having to hire or manage a technical team in-house will offset your costs.

As a self-hosted platform, WooCommerce requires you to maintain updates, backups, and security on your site.

Once you start getting more traffic, your   WooCommerce hosting plan would run out of resources.

But since WordPress sites are completely under your control, you have plenty of options for managing growth.

Despite the increase in WooCommerce hosting costs, you will have greater control over the specific resources you upgrade, so you won't pay for resources you don't need.

Using a managed WordPress hosting provider, such as   SiteGround or WP Engine, can help you scale your WooCommerce store.

WooCommerce offers a great deal of control, but some small businesses simply want a hassle-free option.

DROPSHIPPING

Winner: WooCommece

As with any online store, the front end of a   dropshipping website will look the same. Users will be able to browse products, add them to their carts, and make payments, just like on any other eCommerce website.

A number of popular dropshipping marketplaces are also integrated with Shopify. like Doba, AliExpress, and more. With Shopify, you need to keep in mind that each marketplace charges membership fees, shipping fees, and other costs.

WooCommerce is a popular choice among dropshipping businesses. This is mainly due to WooCommerce's flexible dropshipping plugins, which simplify the process.

You can easily find extensions that let you import products, fulfill orders, and more. You can even allow other vendors to sell on your website through an eBay-like eCommerce marketplace.

SUPPORT

Winner: Shopify

As with any online store, the front end of a   dropshipping website will look the same. Users will be able to browse products, add them to their carts, and make payments, just like on any other eCommerce website.

A number of popular dropshipping marketplaces are also integrated with Shopify. like Doba, AliExpress, and more. With Shopify, you need to keep in mind that each marketplace charges membership fees, shipping fees, and other costs.

As a fully-hosted platform, Shopify is in control of the software and knows its platform best.

The Shopify customer support team is available 24/7 via live chat, phone, email, and Twitter. Shopify offers extensive documentation, tutorials, a knowledge base, and forums for users looking to fix things themselves.

Moreover, it maintains a directory of Shopify   Experts that you can hire if you need extra help.

It is important to note that Shopify does not support any apps or templates that are third-party.

WooCommerce is a popular choice among dropshipping businesses. This is mainly due to WooCommerce's flexible dropshipping plugins, which simplify the process.

You can easily find extensions that let you import products, fulfill orders, and more. You can even allow other vendors to sell on your website through an eBay-like eCommerce marketplace.

With WooCommerce being the world's most popular eCommerce platform, there are tons of support options available to you.

On the official website, you will find extensive documentation, tutorials, and guides that will assist you. The WooCommerce support team and other users and experts are also available in the support forums.

WooCommerce recently added 24/7 chat support for all premium extensions and themes.

Due to the fact that WooCommerce is a   self-hosted platform, your hosting company is responsible for providing server support.

Support questions regarding third-party WordPress themes and extensions must be addressed by the developers of those products.

Since WooCommerce is so popular, finding a developer to help you fix issues is easier and cheaper. Freelancing websites can help you find developers to fix WooCommerce issues.

Still not sure which one to choose?