Difference between Shopify and Woo Commerce for your online store

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Chances are these days, if you have an online store that is not the big end of town and highly customised, you will be using either the self hosted largely template environment of Shopify or the WordPress E Commerce solution; WooCommerce. Both first class and highly efficient and cost effective online stores, but how do you know which one is right for you? Lets have a look in a little more details the pros and cons for each.

Shopify

Pros

  • Quality support – as a licenced product with monthly subscriptions, this affords them a great 24/7 support service.
  • Multi channel integration – Ability to integrate with other POS’s and social media platforms or even other larger sites such as Amazon and Ebay.
  • Self hosted environment –  saving you time and third party or anther supplier to arrange your hosting. Their hosting platform, whilst expensive is very reliable.

Cons

  • Expensive monthly hosting charges and plans for upgraded features – want more pay more.
  • Lack of design choice and requirements to understand code to customise – yes it is largely template driven and whilst customisable to a certain extent, you do need to know HTML and other programming languages to truly be able to style the way you want.
  • Hardware – to be able to fully integrate, exclusive hardware such as printers and scanners, can be required, all adding to the set up investment, however these pieces of hardware are in-line or cheaper compared with other POS hardware.

Summary

A fantastic mid level online store, not quite a Neto or Magento, with added features such as POS and hardware, this is a complete online and integrated physical store solution for the small to mid end of town.

 

WooCommerce

Pros

  • Easier to customise – as a plugin feature of the WordPress platfrom customisation for developers and the like has much more scope and flexibility, not to mentioned quicker and easier than Shopify and is probably the biggest plus between the two.
  • Powerful SEO – Ability to be able to optimise better and with a higher level of detail, script and backend features required for best SEO practices.

Cons

  • No real support – Your best support will be the web developer or agency who built the site for you, or try your luck in forums – YUK!
  • Limitation to some cool features – These days there is not much you can add or bolt on, but it comes at a cost to purchase, to licence and to implement, not to mention maintain and can become pricey.

Summary

In our opinion, best suited for businesses that have a physical store or services business who want to sell products on the side or for small start ups selling less that 200 products. Myadd’s team of developers are proficient in both platforms and can assist you with your next project.