Shopify vs WooCommerce - Which is better?

what is up you awesome people it's paul from e-commerce gold back with another e-commerce comparison for you and in this video i'm looking at the two most popular options for building e-commerce websites and they are shopify and woocommerce and for this comparison video i'm going to be looking at six different sections to really give a good comparison between these two platforms and they are the pricing the features that are available the theme selection that is there and also the customization options the support options that are available for you as the user the performance that these platforms offer and finally how easy these are to use before giving a conclusion at the end as to which one i think is the best if there is a best at the two platforms so before i get into the video and the comparisons i just want to give a quick overview as to what the main difference between these two platforms are because even though they both offer the opportunity to build ecommerce websites they come at this from different angles and this is because shopify is a fully hosted e-commerce platform and what this means is for a set monthly price you get everything thrown in so you get your hosting you get support options you get a website builder and lots of features all included for this single monthly price but the slight negative for this is you don't actually own your site outright you're just basically renting it off shopify yes you're going to be on your own domain but it's not your own site completely you can't up it and move it to another provider woocommerce is slightly different because it's an open source e-commerce platform while it's actually an open source e-commerce plug-in because it's an e-commerce plugin for the wordpress cms which is the most popular website builder in the world and what it allows you to do is add ecommerce functionality to a wordpress website by using this plug-in and what this means is that you i have more control over the website but it does come at a few disadvantages which i'm going to go about a bit later on in this video so that is the two options basically with shopify you pay a set monthly fee and you're basically renting space on shopify servers and using their platform with woocommerce you completely own the website each your website you can move it from hosting provider to host and provider it's your site you have complete control over it which you don't have as much so with shopify but with the difference out the way let's jump into the video and let's go on to section number one so the first section as i say is pricing and when it comes to pricing it's quite difficult to actually compare these two side by side because they're coming in from completely different angles and as i said in the main difference between them shopify is fully hosted and what this means is you get everything included and you get it for 29 a month that's their basic package they do have a smaller package which is the shopify light option but this doesn't include the website builder so if you want to build a complete e-commerce website you're going to have to go for shopify basic which costs 29 a month and for this you get unlimited products you get unlimited bandwidth there's no turnover limit on any other packages but you do have a two percent transaction fee now this transaction fee is only applicable if you're using third-party payment gateways so things such as paypal or worldpay sage pay things like that and this is added on top of the transaction fee you pay with using that payment gateway so with paypal for example the basic fee is 2.9 for using paypal but if you use the paypal payment gateway with the shopify you'll be charged an extra 2 on top of that 2.9 which goes directly to shopify this is negated if you use shopify payments uh which basically is stripe but it's been integrated into shopify and you don't pay this additional two percent transaction fee you just pay basic uh 2.9 transaction fee for using the shopify payments gateway i hope that makes sense i hope i explained it properly whereas woocommerce is free to use well it's not completely free yes the plugin itself is free to use because automatic the guys who actually own the plugin have never charged for it and as far as i know they have no plans to charge for it but even though that is free to use and the wordpress cms is free to use you're going to have to incur some costs in terms of hosting because you need something to build the website on now the hosting is much cheaper than shopify is 29 a month and you can get decent wordpress hosting for like five dollars a month ish so while the woocommerce plugin is free it's not completely free to build a woocommerce website i hope that makes sense so the second section is features and these are all the features that are available on shopify on the basic plat now if you want to go and check out what's on screen this is my full written comparison between shopify and woocommerce and you can check that out on ecommercegold.com but i'll leave a link in the description below now with shopify as it's fully hosted you do get a massive amount of features and these are all geared towards generating sales so as you can see you get a lot of e-commerce tools there's drop shipping integration with third-party apps you get flexible shipping rates you can sell them in multiple languages so if you have a fully international audience you can accommodate these which is a really good thing you can sell digital products you can have gift vouchers and also you can actually manage these on the go with the shopify management app but where shopify is really good is when it comes to the marketing features because as you can see you get a lot of different marketing and seo based features which means it's really easy to market your website out there on like social media or get it ranking in google and things like that really really good features out there you also get reporting options you get a really good array of reports within shopify they really help you analyze your shop and see what's doing well and what's not and you get these payment gateways that are available as well as i said if you're using anything other than shopify payments you will incur that additional transaction fee on top of your payment gateway transaction fee but one of the things that really stands out on shopify is the shopify app store when it comes to features because even though they offer lots of features as standard sometimes there isn't quite enough or you want this additional like feature or functionality this is where the shopify app store comes into its own and there's over 3 000 apps to choose from within the shopify app store and they cover a multitude of different areas from marketing to stock management to pretty much you name it when it comes to e-commerce there's something in there that will be there to help you out now unfortunately not all these are free to use because majority of them are actually made by third-party developers and to get access to all the features you are going to have to go on to a pay plan which is charged monthly which can make shopify quite expensive quite quickly if you're not careful so always be careful when you're actually selecting which apps you want to choose so what about woocommerce well woocommerce in terms of features in the core platform really doesn't compare that well to shopify this is because woocommerce is literally a core it's a core plug-in which gives you basic shopping cart functionality if you want to add any additional features to it you're gonna have to go into the wordpress plugin library because let's say it's a core plugin it's a core feature and then you can build whatever you want off it and this means it's really flexible and what i mean by flexible is there's so many different like businesses e-commerce websites you can build from this you can build basic b2c you can build b2b you can build multi-vendor marketplaces subscription sites pretty much the opportunities are endless when it comes to woocommerce and as i said you want to go into the plug-in library now everything in the main wordpress plugin library is free to use but these apps are often limited when it comes to the amount of features that are available yes there's some freemium apps in there but generally if you want full functionality of all these apps you are going to have to pay the developers for it pretty much the same way you're going to have to pay the developers with the shopify apps the main difference is that with wordpress you generally pay a one-off fee for the plug-in you're generally not paying it month by month and this can make it cheaper over the long term yes the initial cost to develop your site maybe more but the actual monthly ongoing running fees are generally going to be cheaper between the two platforms so that is an overview of the features of the two platforms if you want to read more of this as say go and click my link in the description below to my full written review because i cover this in a bit more detail so number three is theme selection and theme customization now as you can see i'm on screen i'm actually in the shopify theme customizer but i want to briefly talk about the amount of themes that are available before i show you quickly what this is like to use with shopify there are a selection of nine free themes you can choose from in the shopify theme store there's an additional selection that range from 140 to 180 but there is actually a lot of themes available outside of the shopify ecosystem on marketplaces such as theme forest there's over 1200 shopify themes you can choose from and then you can install them on your shopify site this gives it the largest selection of themes of any fully hosted e-commerce platform out there and the theme selection is incredible pretty much it covers every kind of niche you could imagine but once you've got it installed the theme customizer is really good in shopify the only negative i've got with the theme customizer is it's limited to the home page so as you can see i've got all these sections i can choose from move about edit and there's an ad section option here which gives a lot of different sections so you can really customize the look and feel of your home page the problem is this doesn't really expand into the rest of the shopify platform so you can't really customize your about page that much unless you install additional apps as basic you just get a basic text editor which is a bit of a letdown it would be nice to see this functionality expanded into the rest of the shopify website builder because it would just make shopify so easy to customize and be able to really create very custom websites even using pretty basic generic themes so next let's look at woocommerce well woocommerce nothing even comes close to theme selection when it comes to woocommerce this is because in the free plug-in library there's over a thousand results if you use woocommerce as the chosen keyword this is incredible there's nothing to say nothing even comes close and then when you go on to places like themed forest there's thousands and thousands of premium themes available honestly the selection is massive you will struggle to not find a theme that matches your business but when it comes to actual theme customization it very much depends on the theme available this is the storefront theme which is the basic uh like woocommerce theme it's the thing that you can install for free and it's the one by the actual guys at woocommerce as you can see there's lots of options in the customizer but some themes will have less integration and less options some will have better integration and even more options it very much comes down to the theme but one of the good things with wordpress now is the gutenberg page builder and this means you can build custom like home pages custom about pages really easily and really quickly and it's the amount of blocks available is just growing and growing every single like update and there's also third party plugins that produce a massive amount of different blocks so you can really customize the look and feel of your website really easily using woocommerce out of the two i would just give it to woocommerce because you can expand this real like customizability throughout the whole site it's not mainly limited just to the home page and section number four is support and this is the support options that are available for you as the user now shopify wins this one hands down this is because it's a fully hosted platform and it offers every user 24 7 support and multiple ways you can actually contact the shopify support team you can contact them via the phone you can contact via support tickets via live chat and you can even message them over twitter if you want to they've also got a community support forum that's frequented by members of the sport team plus developers and general shopify specialists basically who can provide really good answers and sometimes alternative answers that may be available from shopify directly so it's a great source of information whereas woocommerce on the other hand has very limited support options and this is understandable because it's an open source piece of software they're not going to offer the same kind of levels of support and a free plug-in as shopify are on their paid option but you can still drop them an email ticket if you want to to the guys directly at woocommerce but one of the great things about woocommerce even though you can get support directly from them is the amount of resources available that are online there's support forums there's facebook groups there's massive amounts of resources out there that you can choose from there's people like myself who make guides there's other youtubers bloggers that say you name it the amount of resources that are available online for woocommerce is incredible this is why so many people like using it and it's such a popular option but i do have to give the advantage to shopify on this because you can actually contact them directly and speak to a member of their support team rather than having to rely on third party options as you mainly will have to with woocommerce and section number five is hosting and performance and it's really difficult to do a straight head-to-head comparison on this one because they operate in completely different ways as shopify is fully hosted you get hosting as part of your package and with this you get pci compliant hosting you get unlimited bandwidth unlimited storage 99.9 guaranteed uptime a global cdn and a free ssl certificate included for your monthly package now when it comes to woocommerce it all depends on the hosting company you choose as to what things you get what uptime guarantees you get what bandwidth what storage capacity so this is where it becomes really difficult to compare the two and it depends on the quality of the wordpress host as to how well it will compare against their shopify store but i still managed to do a bit of testing on this and what i did was they took three of shopify's customer examples i ran them through pingdom speed test tool using their washington dc server i also ran them through google's page feed insights as well once a day for three days to get some good spread of data and what i did with woocommerce was i built a test site and i ran it through pingdom's speed test tool once again to see how well it performed they say this is not a complete head-to-head battle because there's just way too many elements that influence how well a woocommerce site performs but shopify done really really well on the test and it averaged a 1.07 second low time which is incredible to get anywhere close to one second is fantastic and considering how big shopify are the amount of websites they run to be able to produce this kind of performance to me is absolutely incredible and shows how robust their hosting environment is they also done really well on the google page speed scores the mobile was 38 out of 100 which sounds quite low but in comparison to other um fully hosted e-commerce platforms it's actually pretty good and they scored 80 out of 100 on desktop which is also really good and especially when compared to other fully hosted e-commerce platforms woocommerce did really well in my test it loaded in 0.95 seconds but as i say it's very difficult to compare these two because my hosting provider is really good but i didn't do any optimization on the site it was just woocommerce demo content i didn't do any uh like code optimization and the image optimization anything like this this was just the core woocommerce plugin on a wordpress install and it loaded in 0.95 seconds so i hope i haven't rambled on too much when it comes to performance but it is difficult to compare these two some people can make woocommerce perform really really well i managed to have a fully fledged e-commerce site run on woocommerce and i averaged it loading like 1.5 ish seconds and it scored pretty well on google's page speed insight but i've tested other sites that do really really poorly because they're not optimized very well so it all depends on your hosting provider and how well optimized your site is and the final section is how easy are they to use and there's a couple of things i look at for this including how easy they are to get started what i like to use in terms of the dashboard how easy it is to add and manage products and how easy it is to manage your orders and for this shopify is really simple and it's really easy to get started with shopify's just in case you're going to the shopify site and clicking sign up and all you need is your email address and password to start the free trial now i will leave my affiliate link in the description below and i do really appreciate it if you go through that link to shopify because if you do and you sign up for the shopify platform i get a commission at no extra cost to you and it really does help the channel out and help the website out as well so i really do appreciate it if you go through those links now once you've gone through and you've entered your email address and your password you'll be taken through a couple of pages asking at what point your business is at so whether you're just getting started whether you're established things like that because it'll help tailor the dashboard a little bit more to you and then once you figure that out it'll ask for your business information your address email address things like that very simple signup process and it'll take you through to your dashboard that looks a little something like this now this is the shopify dashboard i really like it it's got a very minimalistic style and it's just easy to use everything is well labeled and well listed so it doesn't take long to learn how to actually navigate your way around the dashboard and this is pretty much exactly what it's going to look like for you there may be different sections depending on what you've selected in the setup process so what stage you're at things like that so outside of the dashboard what's it like to like manage your inventory that new product page is really simple it's a single page layout that's really easy to use and it doesn't take long to get used to adding a new product when it comes to organizing your inventory it's a little bit more complicated because they use collections and the basic collections or the manual collections are really easy to use they work like traditional like product categories but they do have automated collections and this takes a little bit of getting used to and if you do sign up to shopify and you want to learn more about that i'll leave a link in the card above and in the description below to my tutorial on collections because i do explain it in much more detail in that video and then managing your inventory is really simple because they have bulk editing tools and they're really really good they allow you to change pretty much any field that's on the create a new product page from a bulk editor it just makes it really quick and easy to update your inventory if you need to update prices or sku codes things like that you can do really really quickly order management isn't that great as standard because you can't print orders off with the core shopify system you do need to install the order printer app which is a free app made by shopify or they just don't install this anyway as standard i do not know but if you want to print off your orders directly from your shopify dashboard you are going to need this app so overall shopify is pretty easy to use it does take a little bit of getting used to with the collections and you do need to install an app in order to be able to print off your audit invoices and your packing slips but what about woocommerce well woocommerce getting started with is a bit more complicated and the reason for this is you're going to have to find a hosting provider you're going to have to install wordpress and then you're going to have to install woocommerce and this is a little bit more technically involved because some hosts do install wordpress for you other hosts you're going to have to install it yourself and even though the installation process is pretty simple you do need to make sure you're inputting the right information to make sure that it actually installs properly but there are lots of guides out there to show you how to do this once again i'll leave my full written guide to woocommerce in the description below and it takes you through all of these steps to help you out i'm also planning on doing a video in the future as well but once you've gone through the setup process you'll be taken through to your dashboard that looks a little something like this and it is once again a very simple dashboard and it doesn't take long to get used to navigating your way around as you see there's a separate section for woocommerce here and this will take you into your specific woocommerce section because everything else is related to general wordpress not specifically woocommerce now when you do start installing additional plugins you'll probably find that this navigation bar will get more and more padded out because some plugins will add links directly into this navigation bar and that's something you do want to be aware of because that sidebar navigation menu can get quite full quite quickly but what's it like to manage your inventory well add a new product is really simple because as with shopify they've gone for a single page layout and this is based off the old classic editor on wordpress and it just works and it works really well it's not the most visually appealing page but once you learn how the layout works it is an absolutely brilliant tool and it does really allow you to populate a very substantial product page for your product these things and it just there's lots of information you can add because you've got multiple sections on it managing your inventory is really simple as well because they use just a basic category system which can produce parent and sub categories and it just makes it really easy to create a product hierarchy for your products really simple managing your inventory in terms of stock level is pretty simple they have a quick editor which you can use on the product overview page and this allows you to change certain options but if you want to change like your description and things like that you're going to have to go in and do that by a product by product basis but you can in the quick edit to manage things like your sku code your price sale price and stock quantity it is a really good tool if not quite as good as shopify's but managing orders within woocommerce very much has the same limitations as the core shopify in terms of you need to install an additional plugin in order to add this functionality and there is one that's really really good it's the woocommerce packing slips and pdfs i've probably got that name wrong but when you go on to install woocommerce it'll be the next option on the right as far as i can remember and you want to install that as well because not only does it allow you to print orders off directly from your woocommerce dashboard but it also adds sequential order numbers as well which is something that woocommerce doesn't do as standard and you do want this because it just makes managing your orders so much easier so my conclusion out of these two platforms which one is better well it very much depends on you and your business because if you just want basically a turnkey option where you can just sign up add a few products customize the theme and you're good to go then shopify is the better option for you but it does have some limitations in terms of some customization options and the fact that you don't have full control over how your shopify site works because it is limited a little bit but if you want a site that you want to have full control over and full flexibility over then woocommerce is a really good option also if you want to build something more than just a basic e-commerce website so you want to build as i mentioned like a multi-vendor marketplace a subscription website a membership website you can do that using woocommerce as a core so if you want something a little bit different then woocommerce is a really good option so as i say it very much comes down to you and your business one final thing i will say is with shopify you don't have to worry about any of the technical aspects so you pretty much know that your website is going to work woocommerce on the other hand you can run into technical difficulties especially when it comes to updates things like plug-in updates or theme updates it can cause potential problems and it is something you need to be aware of because it doesn't always run smoothly i know i've been there myself whereas shopify is pretty much guaranteed to work all the time and without any input from you there you go it very much comes down to you and your business as to which one is better for you so i hope you enjoyed this video guys i know i enjoyed making it thank you so much for watching if you have enjoyed it please smash that like button because it really does help the channel out also if you haven't already please consider hitting that subscribe button so once again guys thank you so much for watching stay awesome and i'll see you all next video

Channel: The MoneySmith

Views: 17,751

Keywords: shopify vs woocommerce, shopify vs woocommerce 2020, woocommerce vs shopify, woocommerce vs shopify 2020, shopify vs woocommerce which is better, ecommerce comparison, woocommerce review, shopify review, best ecommerce platform

Id: 9vRReEdlFIY

Length: 24min 13sec (1453 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 10 2020