If you want to start selling online then you must need a platform where you can build your online store.
There are lot of platform available where you can setup your online store such as Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, Squarespace, and many more. In this article we covered 2 of the most popular platform used by the majority of eCommerce businesses that are Shopify and WooCommerce.
Shopify and WooCommerce both having their own pros and cons. In this article we have covered the key differentiators of both eCommerce platforms which will help you to make decision for right platform for your online store, if you want to know more about functionality for either one, reach out and we can assist.
Key Differentiators
Hosting
Shopify offers self hosting services and it’s included in their monthly subscription plan i.e $29, $79 or $299.
WooCommerce you required a hosting server for your website, most common hosting provider are Godaddy, Bluehost, Digital Ocean, NameCheap, Hostgator etc.
Website SSL Certification
Shopify offers SSL certificate with their hosted online store so there is no need to buy a separate hosting server.
WooCommerce not offering the free SSL certificate, so you need to pay to get a SSL certificate for your website.
Processing Fees for Credit Cards
In Shopify you must to use Shopify Payments to process credit card transactions otherwise you will pay an extra 0.5% to 2.0% to use your own 3rd party payments gateway. If you will use Shopify Plus plan, then there is no payment gateway fees you need to pay.
Need integration of payment gateway to enable the online payment option in WooCommerce. We’re are advising to choose Stripe payment gateway for the WooCommerce payment processor because Stripe has best rates and a strong API (easy to customize payment process).
Although, Shopify and WooCommerce almost a same credit card processing fees.
Multi-Currency Payments
Shopify lacks in providing the effective solution here. Shopify only shows one currency on single store checkout page and no option to edit your checkout page. The simplest way is to setup multiple Shopify clone stores in the countries, where you want to sell by upgrading Shopify Plus subscription, it also enables you to edit your checkout page with the respective country currency.
Using WooCommerce you have unlimited customizations and setting up multiple currency websites options. It will require a custom coding to setup everything but there are no limitations.
Multilingual
If you want to set up your Shopify store with multiple languages options, then there are two ways: choose an multilingual app or setup multiple stores with multiple languages as similar to multi -currency store setup. Langify is a most common multilingual Shopify app that enables your website to do automatic language detection through customer IP address as well allow for language switching.
WooCommerce can offers to setup multiple languages in single website without setting up the multiple stores. Either you could install Google Translate or content translation for every page of website. Google Translations offers a drop-down option to switch languages and while this is the most simplest implementation, however Google Translate is not consistence and lack of accurate when comes to translations of website content. The more significant way is to have your content translated by a professional translators and build your website so there are options for users to select languages as per their preference.
PCI DSS Compliance
Shopify platform is certified as Level 1 PCI Data Security Standards (PCI DSS) compliant. Using Shopify your online store is automatically PCI DSS compliant and their certification covers your online store.
Using Stripe for WooCommerce you will need to make sure you are compliant with the PCI DSS. The simplest method to do that is to setup Stripe checkout as it meets the requirements and security constraints of the Self-Assessment Questionnaire, by performing all transmission of sensitive cardholder data.
Design Layout Customization
There are numbers of themes in Shopify, both free and paid. You just need to select the theme and hire an experience agency or developer to create a custom design and develop a store that matches your business needs.
WordPress also offers free and paid themes to select from. WooCommerce will require more customization of the free or paid theme to setting up than Shopify and you will must required an experienced agency or developer to help with that.
WooCommerce offers more customization options in term of design layout as compared to Shopify platform.
Website Blog
Shopify has inbuilt blogging engine functionality that can enabled and allow you to start crafting posts about your business. Shopify text editor isn’t as robust as what WordPress has offers.
WordPress is consider as a best blogging platform and easy to use. There are number of plugins and customizations available in WordPress to get setting up and blogging with your WooCommerce online store.
Importing/Uploading Products
Shopify allows you to bulk upload products through a CSV file. You will need to include the following information: Handle (unique name of the product), Title, Body (description of the product), type, tags, options, price, images, variants and much more.
Using WooCommerce you can upload products via CSV or XML file or even CSV via AJAX. There are a number of plugins that you can use to help you upload your products. In WooCommerce during the import of CSV you can also create custom fields depending on what attributes about your products want to store.
Discount/Coupons Codes
On Shopify you can create discount codes for a dollar amount either percentage off or for free shipping. You can create multiple discount/coupon codes and maintain them via your Shopify dashboard. However a customer can not use more than one discount code at a time on Shopify for example want to offer free shipping and 20% off as 2 different discount codes a customer can’t use both of those during checkout at the same time.
WooCommerce has a dashboard for managing and adding discount codes. You can create cart discounts, for example if the customer purchases more than 2 of 1 item they get a discount of 10% on the entire purchase. You can set up product discounts for fixed amounts ($30 off) and you can create percentage discounts. In addition you can create free shipping coupons and you can limit how many times a coupon is used in total or per customer.
Shipping
You will need to finalize which carriers you want to use to ship your product, UPS, Fedex, common carriers, etc. Once you finalized that, then you need to think about how you are going to manage your shipments (printing packing slips, tracking inventory, etc). Many of our customers are satisfied with ShipStation and use them to manage shipments across all their channels: Amazon, eBay, Walmart, Jet, their website, etc.
Using Shopify you can easily integrate ShipStation or you can manually track your shipments offline. But, the major issue is to set your shipping rates. You can set your shipping rates by state, but if you want to get more accurate and set your rates by zip code you will need to install an app and upgrade your Shopify account to the $79/month or$299/monthly for the carrier calculated shipping feature.
Using WooCommerce you can fully customize your shipping settings via 3rd party plugins or you can customize your shipping rates, fees, charges etc through custom coding. You can get the shipping rates from UPS, USPS, print shipping labels and much more with WooCommerce.
Cart & Checkout Page
Shopify and WooCommerce both have ability to customize the shopping cart page, customize buttons, colors, layout, etc. with WooCommerce you can customize the checkout page fully, but on Shopify you are limitation from updating the checkout page.