If you're setting up your own website to sell your handmade products, you might be considering between woocommerce and Shopify watch this video first because I'm going to be comparing the two and which one is better. Hi, my name is Mei Pak. And I help makers artists and designers make a living from selling their handmade products online. Now. I know you're really busy. And so I can make this super short unless you have a high degree of technical skill just go with Shopify. It might cost you a little bit more but it is worth it. You can move on to other things now if you like, but if you want to stick around I can give you a little bit more insight into that decision and some of these decisions that you have to make in your business can feel so Monumental like Language website platform to use and I've been there multiple times throughout the decade that I've been in business just a few weeks ago. I was figuring out how to leave my inventory management software, but I was paying $300 a month and who now wants to increase their prices on me and doing all that research to find a new solution is time-consuming and super frustrating so I get it and I'm here to help you one thing. I want to say before we get into the details is I know making a change on your website. Form can be really stressful and really overwhelming. It feels really big but I do want you to think about how your business is growing and whether you're positioning yourself for your business to grow so you may be on a platform like wakes or a very easy Plug and Play website platform and it's working okay for you and your noticing things that kind of aren't going right. It's so worth it to upgrade to something like woocommerce or Shopify now because by the time you start feeling those Growing Pains, it's just going to keep getting worse and worse. So I know all of the changes feel big now, but they're just going to keep getting bigger because I know your business is going to keep growing and the more your business grows. The more arduous the change is going to be so it's really worth digging into this issue now and making the changes that you need to make rip the Band-Aid off so that your positioning your business for success for the next 5 to 10 years. Okay. So let's dig in to woocommerce, which is the e-commerce plugin that's paired with WordPress. Us and Shopify as I said at the start quick answers, if you don't have technical skills just go with Shopify and that really is the overarching Arc of what I'm going to be talking about. So first I want to talk about the difference in the overall systems. So woocommerce and WordPress are constructed very differently than Shopify first and foremost. WordPress was designed to be a blogging or content management system CMS. That was the intention and the goal when were Has was first designed. It wasn't built to be a shopping platform like Shopify is so it's kind of like trying to put makeup on a pig which is not a great analogy. But at the same time also a good one because I think pigs are kind of cute but my point is you can't hide the fact that WordPress was not designed to be an e-commerce platform. There are a lot of things in WordPress and woocommerce that are workarounds and not Direct Solutions and it just gives you a not very polished user interface. As or experience so Shopify is a closed system. Where as WordPress and woocommerce is an open system both Shopify and woocommerce will require you to install additional plugins. If you truly want to make it your own because Shopify is a closed system and they're very picky about the standard of coding that their 3rd party plugins need to be it's really hard to break your Shopify site on the flip side with a WordPress and woocommerce combo because it's so open and And there's no policing or regulations on the safety or quality of code from third-party plug-in developers. It can be quite risky and easy to break your site. I'm not saying don't ever use woocommerce or WordPress, but it can be bad in the wrong hands, especially if you don't know what you're doing. If you have the degree of technical skill required to make woocommerce work then rock on go for it and I'll say I actually do have a computer background I used to do web design work and and I use WordPress for a client site back in the day and my husband's a programmer and we could do woocommerce like we're capable of doing it, but I choose not to I go with Shopify because everything is in one system and it all works. Well together with woocommerce. There's the constant need to update plugins. And at any point in time, there could be incompatibility issues that cause your site to break which happens a lot. So self-hosted sites like WordPress sites are also more prone to malware and virus attacks and you don't have to worry about any of that with Shopify that's happened to me before that made my site go down for weeks and it's infuriating because you're losing out on all of those sales and it's really hard to fix and I eventually had to pay hundreds of dollars to get the mall where removed that's a cost are going to have to prepare for if you go with WordPress, so when you're a business owner, you have to make decisions about where to spend your time and for me, I'm not going to be spending my My time on fixing website issues or going through the headaches and stress of maintaining my own self host website. I want to be running my business and doing my marketing and making my products and not futzing around with the code in my website and making sure plugins are playing nice with each other. Okay. So let me dig a little bit deeper into what I mean like technical skills. So when you go with woocommerce, you need to have a WordPress website. So we'll Commerce is a plug-in to your WordPress website. Just like any other WordPress plugin. There's so many kinds of plugins. You may have a plug-in that displays images a certain way or a spam filter Plugin or a contact form plug-in woocommerce is actually just another plug-in. So you would install woocommerce as a plug-in and everything can be designed. However, you want it which for some people is a big appeal because you want to get creative with it. Right? But this is a double-edged sword Because unless you were a trained and professional web designer it Likely, you'll design your site to be to off the charts that your conversion rates actually end up tanking because you're not following web design best practices and modern standards. Now, I've been talking about how Shopify is a bit of a closed system. So you're buying this one big box off of the Shelf product. And this also comes into play with your conversion rates, which is something you certainly want to think about when making your decision, so there's good news and bad news. The good news. Is that shop If I is designed to make even rather beginner website owners successful. So for example Shopify has a very specific format with their checkout pages and it's been proven to work. Incredibly. Well good Shopify also makes it quite easy to send an abandoned cart email because Shopify is tracking all that information for you. All of this is in one system for Shopify, but for woocommerce, all of these things are going to be individual components that you need to add on. Annually, so for example, you would have to go through the legwork to set up abandoned cart emails. You'll probably end up with higher conversion rates, which means more sales with Shopify because the default options are set up for you to be successful already that said the bad news is you can't edit everything on a Shopify site. So, you know, you can't edit the content on the checkout page which is intended to be that way on purpose. You can edit everything on WordPress, which is a Down Side, you can accidentally delete half of your home page and not really know what the problem is or what it was you did. So this closed system that Shopify gives you is great for conversion rates, which is great for sales and it's a great Plug and Play system and it's perfect for you. If you're not interested in doing a lot of extra tweaking whereas the openness with woocommerce does give you more options, but it's also more dangerous in a sense. If you don't have those technical skills now, let's talk about customer support. So if you have a question about your website or something goes wrong. How easy can you get answers so Shopify as I said before is a company and you're purchasing a subscription to a Shopify site that includes hosting security bandwidth all the things you need to succeed. So they have live chat support and someone will help you if you're having a problem, which is amazing woocommerce on the other hand if something goes wrong, you're kind of on your own you may have a question on a particular app. App and you can file a ticket and you're waiting to hear back from the app app developer. There are a lot of app developers who don't give good customer service and you can't really expect to get an answer especially if the app you used was free. So the customer support I actually think is one of the biggest issues the biggest reasons to go with something like Shopify because you're supported the whole way through for both Shopify and woocommerce. There is a lot of modifying you can do so I talked about how Is very flexible and Shopify comes all in one. I don't want you to think that means oh you're stuck with whatever Shopify gives you and I also don't want you to think that oh, you can't do anything with woocommerce without a degree in coding both woocommerce and Shopify have themes and design templates that you can apply. Even if you're not a graphic designer, even if you're not a website coder and they look pretty dang good and you don't have to hire a web designer to custom code for you your own. Site, because that can cost thousands of dollars. So with a premade theme you have a lot of flexibility with the look of your website by just selecting from the options that are available. I won't say one platform looks better than the other but like I said with the level of standard when it comes to Shopify coding shopify's themes do tend to be more tried-and-true and have better conversion rates, which means more sales while I understand that we all want our websites to look nice and it's something we can be proud of At the end of the day the most important thing is conversion rates and my fear with WordPress is because they give you more flexibility that it's more likely than not that your conversion rates will drop if you tweak things too much. Now, let's talk about price shopify's basic plan. You'll probably start with is $29 a month woocommerce is free, but you will need to pay for your sites hosting which starts between five to ten dollars a month, but that price can go up if you want faster site. Speed or more hosting space for posting all of your product photos. For example, I like to tell people not to just go with the cheaper option because even though woocommerce sounds like the cheaper one to go with on paper. It does have a lot of hidden costs that at the end of the day makes it to be about the same price. If not more expensive than the cost of Shopify. I also want you to think about your time. So if you've priced your products falling my pricing formula video, I hope you already know that at your time has a value. So if you're spending a certain amount of time on your website that's time. You aren't spending creating product or marketing your business. So I want you to just super quick pull out your calculator take your hourly rate and calculate how many hours of work you would need to save to get to the $29 a month. So if you're charging your hourly fee at say ten dollars an hour, that means you're basically paying for three hours of your time to go with Shopify and I I can almost guarantee you that you will save three hours a month with Shopify and the more your business grows the more valuable your time becomes. So if you're clicking around between apps or you're working on getting customer support from an app developer, you can pretty easily burn 5 hours in a month. If not more just trying to Tinker around on your woocommerce site to get it to come together. And so I know the financial cost is a factor, but I also want you to think about the cost of your time and how your business Is going to scale up from here. So generally I'm a fan of Shopify over woocommerce the time I do recommend woocommerce is if you're already a programmer or a web designer and you know how to code and I know some people will say, okay. It's no big deal. I'll just go with woocommerce if I need help. I'll hire a developer. That's so much easier than it sounds so getting a WordPress developer certainly an option. You know, there are Freelancers just like you would hire a graphic designer or a marketing. Consultant or anyone else but they charge hourly fees that are worse. They're worth right. So they do charge hourly fees that aren't insignificant. If you want good help and you have to go through the process of finding that freelancer making sure they know what your business goals are making sure they're proficient. They're not going to break your site communicating with them and then you're turning yourself into your own project manager as well as now you have to manage your team. So I really do only recommend a woocommerce site. If you have the technical aptitude and sort of want to get into the trenches with it, if you don't want to worry about the technical aspects of running your store, then Shopify is much better for you. It has e-commerce tools that are ready to use and it frees up so much of your time.
