Choose Which Platform is Better for Your Business Woocommerce VS Shopify

Why Do We Need to Build E-Commerce Websites?

Theage old argument, why do we need to build e-commerce websites when we can very well sell our products over at Amazon or eBay ?. Not so simple to answer. While each options have their pros and cons it ultimately boils down to what types of option suits whom. For example a big corporation selling it’s surplus stock over at amazon vs a small artisan selling their handmade products at amazon, both are selling but the artisan suffers a loss while selling and the corporate not only earns a profit but more than that. How did this happen you may ask. See the artisan first of all have to give the mandatory commission on sales to amazon and then ship the product to the customer and finally after about 30 days waiting period he gets paid by amazon, see the problem? The product has to be priced higher to cover the commission and shipping, then he will have to arrange working capital as he is paid after the return window closes on amazon then he will have to also do branding and labelling for his product, things he have to do if he wants to sell in amazon are a no brainer for a big corporate with thousands of employees. This is one of the primary reasons to have your own e-commerce website if you’re serious about selling your product or services online.

Two Most Popular E-Commerce Website Builders 

1. Shopify

2. Woo Commerce

One can never go wrong if they chose either of them.

Shopify is more suited to the business aspect of e-commerce rather than technical aspect as you see shopify has thousands of tools build right into the website for all types of profiles of business and can be launched with minutes, should the need arise. Here are some of the important points to consider for using Shopify to build your e-commerce business website:

• Shopify is pretty much transparent about how much money you will have to keep paying every month to run your store.

• Fancy some stylish personalized email marketing to your customers? Shopify has thousands of useful apps to help market and grow operations for your e-commerce website.

• Are you lost in the world of tech jargons html, hosting, security and more? Shopify offers A to Z, from hosting to security certificate right from the moment you sign up.

• If still for any number of reasons irrespective of where you are based, you need help shopify offers 24*7 Support via email, chat and calls.

• Still confused about shopify, you get a 14 day trial to try out all the features and no hard feelings if you just decide not to go with it.

• While you may get enticed to go with shopify let me stop you right there and list a few bad apples that shopify unfortunately have. Just like life not everything is 100% perfect. Here we go:

• While its good that you don’t have to do anything alright, but sometimes we just have that creative artist inside us that wants to customize our online store a bit, well you’re stuck with customization options limited to that being offered by shopify. Customizations are better with competing rival e-commerce website builders.

• Remember That little monthly payment you had to pay in order to set up your online business with shopify, is not so little after your business really begins to take off.

WooCommerce, the more tech laden product offering in the e-commerce website building space. It’s a self hosted software solution for e-commerce, meaning you get access to html console of your site for you to modify add and change existing lines of code, hence offering you total and full control of your own e-commerce website. Everything you took for granted in shopify like hosting, security domain and more have to be manually added over here. This is not necessarily a bad thing if you know your way around the internet coding chapter. You can shop around for locally hosted servers, get a bargain on your solutions and build your e-commerce business just the way you dreamt of. Some Useful facts if you’re considering WooCommerce:

• Do you already run a blog using WordPress? Then WooCommerce is just for you, for it offers very simple and user friendly process to configure using WordPress.

• Worried about the limited availability of themes and plug-ins on shopify? Well WooCommerce has infinite numbers of them, the developer community is quite active over at WooCommerce, since it’s a open source product hence daily new themes and plug-ins are being added over here.

• Since you get the entire site html console at your disposal, you have far more control over your website than shopify. It’s your site, do whatever you wished to do.

However, Complete Freedom of Control and Enormous Developer Community support can’t really make WooCommerce everyone’s cup of tea. Here are some points you will need to consider also:

• Freedom to control the site html sounds great, but only to those who actually know how to write and modify codes.

• WordPress is easy no doubt, but first you have to learn that, it’s not like A,B,C,D. It has quite a learning process.

• Being open source means good developers support but that also means you have to arrange your own site security certificate and hosting on a server, not to mention the maintenance of them too every year.

Overall, This two types of e-commerce website builders are for two very different people with a common goal, E-commerce business. 

Shopify will appeal to those who are just starting their online venture and have no previous knowledge about coding, hosting, SEO or anything, they have a good product and wants to sell online without much drama and a basic customization is enough for them.

WooCommerce will appeal to those types of people who prefer to do things themselves and they would rather take the road less taken than go with the herd. WooCommerce's open source nature allows them just that, they can make their own plug-ins, themes and codes and make sure they stand out from others for their website is original development and unique. They must already have some level of experience in coding or at least WordPress in order to start using WooCommerce.

For example in the payment option shopify will charge a fee if you use third party solution and not their own, while WooCommerce offers more than hundreds of payment gateway services ranging from Amazon pay to PayPal to Braintree and more, they are all free to use provided you already have an account with the payment gateway provider.

Ultimately no one is the best among each other, everyone has a good or bad side,  it just revolves around the fact that what things are needed by whom and what is one’s personal choices. You can’t go wrong with either of them, both are good in their respective domain, so you will have to choose what is it that just clicks with your dreams and business goals.