Wondering which is the best eCommerce platform? In this Wix vs shopify tutorial, we'll be doing
a Shopify review and Wix review to determine which is the top eCommerce platform. So let's
get right into this Shopify vs Wix 'things you need to know before using them' video,
which will help you know whether Shopify is better than Wix for your online store.
1. Price
Wix has two types of plans: website plans that are great for showcasing a professional site,
and business and ecommerce plans which are essential for accepting online payments,
and you can choose between four options within each one.
The website plans range from $14 per month for the Combo plan up to $39 per month for the VIP plan,
and the business and eCommerce plans range from $23 per month for the Business Basic plan up
to custom pricing for the Enterprise plan. Hosting is included in all of Wix's plans.
With Wix, you can create a website for free, and get hundreds of templates, unlimited pages and
top grade hosting free of charge. If you decide to upgrade to a premium plan, you can connect
your own domain, remove Wix ads from your site and more. You can try a Wix premium plan for free as
well, and if you decide it's not for you, you can cancel within 14 days and receive a full refund.
Shopify has three pricing plans: Basic Shopify, which costs $29 per month,
that is best for new ecommerce businesses with occasional in-person sales,
Shopify, which costs $79 per month, that is best for growing businesses selling online or in-store,
and Advanced Shopify, which costs $299 per month, that is best for scaling businesses
that require advanced reporting. Shopify also has a Shopify plus plan, which offers enterprise-grade
solutions for high volume merchants, and large businesses, and a Shopify Lite plan, where you
can add products to any website or blog and accept credit card payments for only $9 USD per month.
Although Shopify doesn't offer a free website plan like Wix does,
you can try out any of its premium plans for free for 14 days. They don’t collect
your credit card until you’ve determined that Shopify is the best eCommerce platform for you.
2. Features
Both Wix and Shopify offer core features every website needs, such as a free SSL certificate and
a multilingual website. However, since Wix is more of a general website builder whereas Shopify is an
eCommerce platform, you'll have to opt for a Wix eCommerce plan in order to accept online payments.
All of Shopify's plans come with an online store, unlimited products, staff accounts, 24/7 support,
sales channels, inventory locations, manual order creation, discount codes, free SSL certificate,
abandoned cart recovery and gift cards.
Both website builders and eCommerce platforms also take care of hosting for you, so you can run your
online business with quick, reliable and unmetered hosting independent of the platform you choose.
3. Editor
Wix offers a visual, drag-and-drop editor that allows you to have total design freedom since
you can move any element anywhere on your page in a way that's completely unrestricted. Shopify
is more similar to Wordpress and Squarespace in the sense that it's a block-based editor.
With Shopify, you can use any text editor to edit all template files and assets.
At any time you can sync your changes to your live store and test your new design. To begin
building your website with Shopify, all you need is a basic understanding of HTML and CSS, which is
more limiting if you don't know how to code. They use a designer focused programming language called
Liquid that's easy to learn and is well documented and supported to help you along the way.
4. Templates
Wix offers a number of templates that you can choose from,
that are organized into different categories, such as blogs and online stores, to make it
easier for you to select a website template that fits your needs. There are both modern and
classic templates that you can choose from, and all templates are mobile responsive.
One important thing to note is that once you select a template in Wix,
and start editing your website with it, you can't go back and change it to another template
without losing all of the work you've done due to Wix's unrestricted drag-and-drop editor. On
the other hand, since Shopify's editor is structured, you can change your template
freely even after you've started creating your website without having to redo all of the work.
With Shopify, you can choose from 70+ premium and free eCommerce website themes. These themes
are created by world-renowned designers like Happy Cog, Clearleft and Pixel Union.
Every website template comes with its own settings so you can quickly and
easily customize your website’s design, and Shopify's brand-new Theme Settings editor
lets you preview your storefront as you’re making changes to it.
Since you can customize your templates in Shopify using Liquid, HTML and CSS, it's easy to customize
every aspect of your store’s theme, making you have complete control over your website’s design.
5. Ecommerce
Both Wix and Shopify include ecommerce functionalities, though you'll have to
opt for a more advanced premium plan in Wix in order to sell your products and services.
Its online store includes features such as digital products, custom email receipts,
connect to print on demand services, point of sale system, Instagram shop tagging,
automated cart recovery, and recurring payment products.
Setting up an online store with Shopify is easy since that is what it was created for.
In addition to the features I mentioned earlier, Shopify has a number of other Shopify shipping,
Shopify payments, point of sale and global selling features depending on the plan you choose,
including shipping discount, shipping labels, USPS priority mail cubic pricing,
fraud analysis, online credit card rates, in-person credit card rates, transaction
fee if not using Shopify payments, Shopify POS lite, Shopify POS pro, sell in 133 currencies,
sell in multiple languages, international domains and international pricing.
6. Blogging
You can create a blog in both Shopify and Wix, though the Wix blog has more features
than the Shopify blog. Wix includes all of the functions a blog needs,
such as creating and scheduling blog posts, saving blog posts as drafts,
adding tags and categories to blog posts, and editing the blog post's description and URL.
With Shopify, you can add blogs to your online store, and then post to the blogs to update your
customers about your business or products. You can also add a link in your online store
navigation to a blog hosted on a third-party platform such as WordPress, Tumblr, and Blogger.
7. Support
Every Wix premium plan comes with 24/7 priority support, and you can contact them both by email
and phone. When you upgrade to an even higher premium plan, you can also get VIP phone
support and skip the line. Wix also has a help center, with forums, articles and tutorials,
that help you when creating your website with step-by-step instructions and videos.
Shopify also has a dedicated support team to help you 24/7 so that you can get the help
you need with your Shopify business. Shopify has a help center as well, where you’ll find
tutorials to help you manage every aspect of your online store, eCommerce forums designed
to help you sell more through ebooks, videos, and success stories, and theme and API documentation,
covering all aspects of their templating language, Liquid, and their app development API.
8. Apps & Widgets
Wix has an app market that allows you to add-on a number of extra features to your site in a
number of different categories. There are both free and paid add-ons, as well as ones that are
created by Wix and others that are created by third party developers. You can also use Corvid
by Wix to create databases and customize your site's user experience even further.
Shopify also has an app store that includes both apps that are created by Shopify
and by third-parties. You can sort them by different categories,
including sourcing and selling products, store design, merchandising, marketing, conversion,
fulfillment, shipping and delivery, customer service and store management, as well as by
collections, including launching your store, growing your business, works with Shopify POS,
works with Shopify Marketing, top email marketing solutions, mady by Shopify,
sales channels, works with Shopify checkout, and useful apps for the country you're currently in.
9. SEO
Wix includes a number of features that make it easy to optimize your site for
search. These SEO features include page title, meta description, custom URLs,
headings, image alt attributes, 301 redirects, SSL encryption, search engine instructions,
and the options to add both Google Analytics and Google Search Console.
Shopify has a SEO friendly CMS, which supports best practices like customizable H1, title
and meta tags, and SEO friendly urls. Shopify also automatically generates sitemap.xml files
so new products and site changes are indexed and show up on search engines quickly.
To learn about the differences between Wix and other website creation platforms,
such as Wix vs Squarespace and Wix vs Wordpress, make sure to watch my videos on these topics.
I'll leave the links to them in the description box below.
If you're serious about figuring out which is the best eCommerce platform for you,
make sure you check out our Wix tutorials playlist
for even more Wix tips and tricks, as well as our FREE Complete Website Creation Guide below this
video to learn more about how to create your own website step-by-step without stress or overwhelm.
Leave a comment below and let me know which eCommerce platform you'll be choosing:
Wix or Shopify. If you liked this video, make sure you give it a thumbs up and subscribe to
my channel so that you can navigate the tech side of online business with ease, and stay tuned for
our next video which is about how to change a meta title in Wix. As you wait for my next video
to go live, check out these two videos I have right here, and I'll see you in my next video.