ShopWired vs Shopify - Which is the better Ecommerce Platform?

what's up guys Paul here from e-commerce gold and in this video I'm going to be comparing two very popular options when it comes to creating an e-commerce website here in the UK and they are shop wired and Shopify and for this comparison I'm going to be looking at the price in the performance what they like to use and also the support options that are available for you as the user now I'm not going to be covering the features because I've already done that in their separate review videos which I'll leave in the card above and I'll also leave a link in the description below I'll also leave a link in the description below to my fall written comparison of both the platforms because there's stuff in there that I'm not going to cover in this video because this video would just go on forever and ever if I went over everything so if anything I haven't covered in this video I will have covered it in the written review so go and check that out so with that said let's jump into my computer and get this comparison started now as I said the first thing we're going to be talking about is the pricing of these two platforms now they are very similar in terms of pricing because they're both around that 30 pound a month mark no shop wide comes in at 29 pound and 95 pounds a month but you do have to add fat on that if you're not average to a company here in the UK Shopify on the other hand comes in at $29 a month which means with conversion rates is going to work out slightly cheaper on a monthly basis but your price will fluctuate slightly every month due to the aforementioned conversion rate because it changes on a daily basis but when it comes the price in both companies operate a different pricing structure because shop wide operates on a tiered pricing structure and what this means is when you hit certain turnover limits so 75 thousand pound is the turnover limit for their basic package you're automatically moved on to their larger package and what this enables you to do is get more access to resources features and also better support options over the basic package whereas Shopify operate on a fixed pricing structure but there is a bit of a caveat to that in that is their transaction fee because on all of their packages they charge a transaction fee and on their basic package this is a two percent transaction fee and almost there's an incentive as a way to move up onto their larger packages this does reduce as you move up so it reduces to one percent on their Shopify standard package and on their advanced package e drops the nor point five percent so this isn't their kind of incentive paired to the tiered structure that shop wide use to get you to move on and move all through the packages but for this comparison I'm mainly going to be focusing on their basic introductory packages because that's where most people are going to be starting so what do you get for your money well with shop wired you get up to 750 pilots that you can list and for most small e-commerce businesses this is going to be more than enough as I already said you get up to 75 thousand pound allowance when it comes to turnover when you go over this you're automatically moved up to that next package but with these packages you don't get charged any additional transaction fees over the ones you get charged from your payment gateway so that is one good thing plus you get limited data storage free SSL certificate and standard UK support we shall fight on the other hand there are no product limits so you could have tens of thousands of products on the basic package if you wanted to there's also no turnover limit but you do have that transaction fee that I've already talked about you also get unlimited data storage free SSL and 24/7 support and I'm going to cover the support a little bit more later on in the video so with the pricing out the way let's have a look at the performance of these two platforms because it's a really important thing when it comes to choosing the Acamas platform is how good are they on their performance how good is the hosting environment that your website is going to be built on well both companies actually do really really well but what they offer is unlimited bandwidth unlimited storage PCI compliant servers and a global content delivery network this available on both platforms now Shutterfly have built their own infrastructure where a shop word is actually built off Amazon's Web Services which is one of the most reliable hosting environments in the world and lots of big companies use it so they've definitely chose a good option with that and they also offer a minimum of 99.9% uptime which is good you want to know that your site's working when you're not looking at it because if it's not reliable it's not good for an e-commerce website but even though all this is great on paper I don't like to say these companies on their word I like to test them out so why did with both platforms was I took three of their customer example sites and ran them through Pingdom speed test or on their London server once a day for three days to get a nice spread of information these were the results now as you can see both platforms performed really really well they were both well under that golden to second times that you want an e-commerce websites are loading and what I think is really good especially with Shopify is the majority of Shopify sites are actually hosted in the US and pieces one a london-based server that I run these tests and they got an average load time of one point six zero second but shuffle where did win on the Amazon Web Services Platform and got an average load time of one point four four seconds and if you look at the actual averages for the website shop wide was a bit more consistent across their websites there was a less of a gap between the three web sites whereas shop if I had a slightly larger gap with one website coming in at two point three six average the other one coming in at one point zero four is not a massive gap but it does show that shop wide is a little bit more consistent on their load times now with the web sites that I did use for testing I made sure that there was all in the same niche and all had similar levels of content on the site so it was a nice even fair test but I nisi with either platform you haven't got to worry about anything when it comes to the hosting or performance both they're gonna do really really well now the next thing we talk about is how easy these platforms are to use and both of them are really easy to get started with because they both offer a 14-day free trial and I'll leave my partner links in the description below so you can go and try them out for yourself and I do recommend anybody does that before committing to a platform go and try as many as you can so you find the one that's right for you and your business because even though I do try and cover as much as I can in these reviews and comparisons it's still not the same as getting your hands on the system themself and trying it out for yourself so shop white is really easy to get started with you just go to the shop own websites to save the link is in the description below so you can go check it out for yourself go on twit go through the signup process all you need is your email address and to create password and you are good to go once you are taken through to your shop white dashboard you'll be taken through to the tutorial now this is a really good tutorial in my opinion pleitos through pretty much everything you need to do in order to get your website set up things like set up your business information create a category create a product set up your checkout source every payment gateways things like that choose a theme then go live now the only thing that's missing for me here is to set up your legal information and this is things like your privacy policy and terms and conditions but this is something that every ecommerce platform seems to miss out on I don't know why because especially here in the UK and the EU these are legal requirements so why these aren't part of your sale process I do not know but the sets of process is really good and s8h through pretty much everything you need to do in order to get your site so it's all probably except for setting up your pages but the dashboard itself is actually a really nice place to be and it's really well laid out you've got really well labeled headings here now you don't have to scroll down a bit within the navigation bar to see all of the settings but everything is clearly labeled and it really doesn't take a long time to get up adjusted to the platform and navigating around it really quickly it's very well laid out and it's got a very easy workflow to it there's nothing that's really complicated when it comes to the shockwave dashboard well what about Shopify well Shopify once again is very easy to get started you just go onto the Shopify website once again with links in the description below fill out the signup form which is your email address and create a password you'll then be asked a few questions about where your business is at so whether you're just getting started or you're already in business because it helps Shopify tailor the dashboard a little bit more to you and where your business is at to give you the right help and assistance to help you get up and running properly now once you complete the signup process and answered all the questions you'll be taken into your Shopify dashboard which I look pretty much exactly like it does on the screen right now and you'll be greeted by this setup guide which in my opinion is a little bit on the light side because it doesn't include anything to set up your delivery methods or set up your business pages so once again it's a little bit too light for me but the one thing I do like about Shopify is if you click on this learn more about getting started button you're actually taken to a video series to help you get set up and get started and there's a total of 27 lessons which 27 videos which take about an hour and a half to do and you work your way through them and there's some really good information in there and now all done by this lovely lady here who's actually got her own Shopify store as well as working for Shopify so she really doesn't know what she's talking about and there's lots of useful in from nation and a few hints and tips in there as well so it's definitely worth watching through these videos if you're just getting started with Shopify it will give you lots of useful information so with a set-up guide out of the way what's the Shopify dashboard like to use well I really like the Shopify dashboard because it's got a very minimalist feel to it as you can see it's not overcrowded there's not too much going on and all the headings are clearly labeled and this makes it really quick and really easy to get used to and it really doesn't take long to get up to speed with the Shopify dashboard and within no time you'll be quickly navigating between where you need to go within the Shopify admin area so I really like it I think it's one of the best dashboards out there just because it's so simplistic and so easy to use so with the getting start out of the way I'm gonna look at what it's like to actually use this from an e-commerce basis so what I'm gonna look at is white site to add and organize your product waste like to manage your orders and what it's like to customize your website because those are three really important elements when it comes to building the site and also written a site on a day to day basis so what's it like to manage your inventory within shop wide well actually it's really simple to do so you're just going to your shop white dashboard navigate to products and then you'll see this selection of subcategories come up which include your products and your categories and this makes it really simple and really easy to manage your inventory so if you want to create some new products click on the new product button and it'll bring up this single page layer which has got a really good work for - in my opinion because it's just a logical way of working through adding a new product so you start with your product name and your description you can select if you want it's digital products and gives you the chance to upload a file to that product then you've got your images your categories your pricing your imagery management and then you can go on create additional information related products variations things like that it's just got a really good workflow to it and it doesn't take long to get used to using this page it's a very simple layer and it doesn't over complicate things like some ecommerce platforms do so once you've gone through and created your products you want to organize your products now this is really important not only from your perspective of creating a good product hierarchy but it's also gonna help your customers as well because they're gonna find it easier to navigate around your site now this is really simple and really easy to do in shop wired because they've gone on a basic category system and when you go on to create a new category it brings up a very similar page to the product creation page and you've got a few options here and then one thing you can do is you can select whether you want it to be a parent category or you want it to be a child category so safe use do men's clothing you can then create subcategories such as men's t-shirts minish jeans men shorts things like that as an example so this makes it really easy to organize your inventory so what about actually managing your inventory what about managing the stock levels well within shop wide they have this section called manage stock and what this allows you to do is quickly and easily update your stock quantities by just clicking on the quantity button here it'll bring up an editable box where you can quickly and easily change your stock levels now while this is a really good feature unfortunately it is the only thing you can do in bulk you can't update prices or product codes anything like that in bulk if you want to do that you have to go back in and edit the products individually the only thing you can do in bulk is update the stock quantity which is better than nothing let's be honest so that's why it's like to manage your inventory in shop where they've got a really good system set up and as with most things within shop white it doesn't take long to get used to it get used to setting things up and working your way through and it's easy to create parent and sub categories which is one thing that's really useful to me because it allows you to create a really good product hierarchy so what's it like to do all these in Shopify well let's go and take a look so jump back into the Shopify dashboard and when you click on products it will automatically bring up a list of the existing products you've got created as you can see I've created a couple of test products here and to add a new product you just go and click the add product button in the top right hand corner and it will bring up a new page now once again it's a very minimalistic page which circle recurring theme you'll see throughout the Shopify dashboard everything is really simple and it's not over complicated and it's a single one page layout with just a few sections and it is really easy to work your way through it maybe slightly easier to use in a shop word just slightly but both of them have used the same kind of principle 20 comes to creating their products they've made it really simple that haven't created too many options in there so it's a bit confusing and a bit daunting for anybody who's new to using the platform they've just come for a single page layer and they both just work they both work really really well there really isn't much to choose between them now when it comes to organizing your inventory it is a little bit different between the two platforms because as I already mentioned shop wired have a traditional category system whereas Shopify have gone with a collection system which is something they developed themselves and as you'll see there are two different options when it comes to organizing your products so we'll click on create a collection and it will take you into the create collection page then under collection type you can choose whether you want it to be a manual selection or an automated one and this is where it gets a little bit quirky let's say now the manual one works very similar to a traditional category set up but in the fact that you add products to that collection simple easy to use automated is a little bit different because it works on product tags that you create when you're editing or creating a new product and you'll create a tag and then you can use rules based around those tags and this is a little bit complicated to start with because there are quite a few different options in the way you can set this up now it does take a while to get used to it and it's worth reading through the documentation and watching a couple of videos on these so you can get this off to a fine art rather than trying to do yourself to start with because you'll probably make a few mistakes because I know I do when I was trying to work this out so if you want it to be the simplest way it go with the manual collection if you want it to be a little bit more complicated way go with the automated one now another quirk with Shopify is that to create a sub collection isn't completely straightforward now with shop wired you can create parents and child categories really simply from the category creation page not so straightforward with Shopify so as you can see there is actually no way to create this as a parent or a sub collection to do that you have to actually go into your online store go into the navigation edit your main menu and then add a collection as a sub section an existing collection within your virtual navigation menu this is how you create parent and sub collections it's just a kind of roundabout way of doing it and it does work but it's not completely straightforward how to do it straight away that's why I've shown you how you can do it in this video because it's it's just something that unless you're used to using Shopify you might not pick up on straight away so that is how you can create a new product and that's how you can create a new collection within Shopify to have organized your products but what about when it comes to managing your products because this is once again something that's very very important especially if you've got a large imagery now Shopify very similar to shop wired have got a separate page for managing your imagery and once again this allows you to add and remove quantities within your product so when it comes to the inventory side of things there's really not much to choose between the two of them but what about when it comes to managing your orders because this is some where hopefully you'll be spending most of your time because you're gonna be gaining lots of sales into your new e-commerce website so let's have a look at what it's like to do this with shop wide so you go back into your dashboard click on orders and then click on View orders and it's quite a lot you can do in bulk because if you select the orders this wouldn't matter how many orders you've got whether you've got 5 15 or 50 orders you can do all this in bulk and what you can do is you can either print the orders off or you can export them via CSV which is good if you're using kind of third-party order management software or what you can do is you can mass update your order statuses so if you've sent them all out you've post the more like you can then change it to completed or dispatched this is a really good way of managing your orders and being able to do all of this in bulk is a massive time saver when it comes to running the commerce website because if you have to do all this on an order by order basis it can take you a long time to do trust me I know I've been there now this is really good with shop wired and everything's just dead there straight away we Shopify it's not quite as straightforward so let's go back into the Shopify dashboard click on orders and even though there is some stuff you can do in bulk the main thing that's missing for me that you cannot print orders off in bulk you have to actually install an app from the Shopify app store in order to be able to do this this isn't a feature that's included with the native Shopify platform and I don't get why shop if I don't include this is kind of boggles my mind a little bit because it's a really basic thing because not everybody uses third-party or the management software so it's a thing that you do actually want to do you want to be able to print your orders after you can start packing them and dispatch them really quickly well what you can do in bulk from Shopify is you can fulfill orders or you can capture payments you can also export the orders if you want to as well so if you are using third-party management software it would just make life a bit easier so that is a bit of a letdown for me on the Shopify side is the fact that you cannot print your orders off and also even if you go into the orders and you print the order information off it does not really print it in a format that usual as really a dispatch no or any kind of packaging label because it just doesn't look right so you do need to install an additional app in order to get this working properly which say I don't understand why up if I don't do this straightaway because is basic ecommerce functionality to me so that is basically the e-commerce side of both platforms what it's like to get started weights like to organize your products and manage your products and manage your orders so what's it like to customize the two websites when it comes to the aesthetic so your design and things like that now unfortunately this is an area where shop wide isn't particularly strong so let's go down into themes install themes and let's click on the style editor and these other options you get as you can see there's not a lot you can do or you can really change is the colors a few tech snippets and the text on some of the buttons there's not all that much you can actually do when it comes to customizing your theme you can't do much in terms of the layout options it's just very almost rigid and quite restrictive which is a bit of a letdown because it's something that's quite important to a lot of people is being able to have a lot of control over the aesthetics of their site now this is an even more of a letdown when you look at the quality of the shuffle at themes now these are all made in-house and they're all free to use and as you can see they are really well designed they look amazing you can't take anything away from the actual themes that are available on shop work they are all really good and they're some of the best out there especially the fact they are all free to use it's just a shame that the rest of the customization just doesn't back this off so you are a bit limited but if there's a theme there that you really like and it fits your business then this could be perfect for you now this isn't something you have to worry about when it comes to Shopify because Shopify is kind of renowned for being good when it comes to design so if you can't an online store click on themes and then go into their customizer you will see the Shopify customizer which is arguably one of the best tools on the market because there's so much you can do because you've got all these sections that are already installed you can add sections you can remove sections you can also customize all the text on the site you can customize images on the site there's just so much you can do in terms of your homepage what you can do in terms of layout content things like that you just have so much more control over the aesthetics of your site then you do with shop weird now one thing that does let the Shopify customizer down for me is that you can only really do all this on the home page so you've got all these great tools being able to add and remove sections customize the look your site you can do it on the home page so if you try and do it onto one of your regular pages so about me as you'll see all these options disappear and you can click the Edit Page button it will just take you into a basic text editor which you can add pictures to and you can format slightly but it still doesn't give you the control and the flexibility when it comes to design as the main customizer so that once again a bit of a letdown for me that you're just limited to all these fantastic tools on the home page I'm a surprise shop I haven't expanded this to the rest of the site because it would just really would take Shopify to the next level when it comes to customization so that's what it's like when it comes to theme customization on both platforms as you can see Shopify does have the better options the two platforms so the next thing I want to talk about is the supports because that's one of the reasons why people go for a fully hosted platform is support that they get from the team because they want to know there's somebody they can phone up if they're having any problems say why is this happening how can I resolve this so let's see what both of these platforms offer so let's go back into shop word now shop wide is really good when it comes to support now on the basic package you get access to standard UK support and this is basically between the business hours which i think is nine till five Monday to Friday here in the UK now one of the good things about shop wide is that there's a support button directly within your dashboard so you click this it takes you straight through to their support options and if live chat is available you'll be able to click on that and it'll bring you up straight away or you can send them a message or it's not that hard to find their phone number now with the emails they will get back to you as soon as they can as soon as they usually come in if you send it on a Friday night for example you usually get replied to stray away first thing Monday morning they are really good I never had a problem with them when I was with them because I actually had a shop wide website a couple years ago and I never had any problems with the support and even when I contact them now whenever I've got any issues they're always quick to get back to me so the support is really really good and as you move up through the packages you do get access to 24/7 emergency supports as well which is really useful so what about in Shopify well Shopify does offer 24/7 support but actually contacting their support is a little bit difficult because there's no immediate way to do it's not like shop wired where they've got there's contact button straight within the dashboard instead what you have to do is click on your name here go down to the Shopify help center which will open up the Help Center and then scroll down to the bottom click contact Shopify support type a search term so we'll type contact click on search scroll down get help from the Shopify support team and then it will bring up all the options so this is the quickest or most straightforward way to do this it did actually take me a couple of times going through the Help Center to actually find out how to do these it's not completely straightforward and or enough how to contact them but once you get here there are lots of support options available as you can see you can contact them via live chat via email over the phone or via Twitter now they do have 24/7 support but depending on the amount of people who are contacting them at any one time it may be a slight delay in actually getting through to them so you may have a way on the live chat or it may take them a while to actually respond to your emails so just bear that in mind there's a lot of people who use the Shopify platform but they do have some really good support options you just have to go through and actually find out how to do it and I've just shown you how to do that so you can thank me later in fact you can thank me by hitting that like button I would really appreciate it so that is the two platforms that you shop wired versus Shopify now I like both of these platforms I think they are both a great option for building an e-commerce website and choosing between the two is actually quite difficult because they're very similar in a lot of ways and the only thing that you can really separate the two are is that shop wide is better when it comes to managing your orders and Shopify is better when it comes to theme customization that's really the only difference I can pick between the two so choosing between the two is really really difficult and I definitely can't give you a this one is better than this one because one isn't clearly better than the other they're both really good and they're just stronger in one area than the other and vice versa across both platforms so as I said earlier in this video I do recommend actually trying them out for yourself because once you get hands-on with them and you actually use them yourself you might find that one just clicked with you better than the other so say the partnered links are in the description below go and check them out and if you enjoyed this video as I've already said I'd really appreciate if you could hear that like button because it really does have the channel oh and if you do want access to more content like this consider hitting that subscribe button and the notification bar because I've post videos like this every single week so thanks so much for watching guys stay awesome I'll see you all in the next video

Channel: The MoneySmith

Views: 2,587

Keywords: ShopWired vs Shopify, Shopify vs ShopWired, ShopWired UK, Shopify Alternative, Shopify UK

Id: IXNuS0ZiYGY

Length: 26min 33sec (1593 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 11 2020