- Shopify and WooCommerce are two common options
for setting up and running an online store.
Shopify is extremely popular,
but does it live up to its reputation?
I'm gonna be comparing Shopify against WooCommerce
to find out which one you should use.
Starting off with pricing,
WooCommerce is a free to use WordPress plugin,
but many of the official features
like subscriptions and pre-orders are locked
behind a paywall with an annual fee.
I'll touch more on the add-ons later in the video.
Since WooCommerce runs on WordPress,
you'll also need to consider web hosting.
You can get hosting for as cheap
as a couple bucks per month.
But since WooCommerce is a resource heavy plug-in,
I would personally recommend looking
at managed WordPress hosting,
and this typically goes for about 20 to $30 a month
for the starter plans,
and it will scale up from here,
depending on your level of traffic.
Shopify's basic plan is $39 a month billed monthly,
and they do offer an annual discount.
Shopify does have a starter plan at $5 a month,
but this only allows you to sell your products
through social media apps directly,
and you don't get access to a storefront.
Shopify also really wants you
to use the Shopify payment processor,
and this is available for a 2.9% transaction fee
and the basic plan.
And if you don't use Shopify payments,
they charge you an additional 2% transaction fee
on the basic plan,
1% for the middle plan,
and half a percent for the highest plan.
So if you decide you wanna use
a third party payment processor,
you're gonna have to pay a penalty
in the form of a transaction fee to Shopify
for every single order.
I really don't like that Shopify is pushing so hard
to get you to use their payment processor
by penalizing you for using a third party payment platform.
And Shopify is basically ensuring
that they're going to get more money out of you
on top of your monthly subscription fee.
With WooCommerce,
there's no fee for using a third party payment processor,
so the choice is yours.
When it comes to setting up your store,
I do feel that Shopify has the edge with ease of use,
and I think that's gonna be a theme throughout the video.
Shopify's dashboard just feels approachable.
You have everything you need right there in the sidebar.
It's not confusing, and I think it's something
that's easy to navigate for beginners.
The WooCommerce interface
feels quite a bit more cluttered in comparison,
and that's in addition to the fact
that WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin.
So you have the rest of the WordPress menu items
on the sidebar to clutter things even more.
I've never understood
why WooCommerce has a dedicated Woocommerce option
on the WordPress sidebar,
but then there's also the products option.
I don't know why they don't have one for orders.
Orders is under WooCommerce, but products is its own thing.
It just doesn't make any sense.
And when adding new products,
the interface is so disjointed.
You have the description box,
a box under that for managing inventory
and pricing and skews,
and then another box under that,
which is a short description.
And if you wanna add images to your product,
there's one box on the right sidebar,
but there's another one under that,
that's the product gallery.
But they're both for images.
It's just so confusing.
For getting started to adding all of your items for sale,
I do feel that Shopify has the advantage.
But what about order fulfillment?
Order fulfillment in Shopify is smooth.
It's easy to see all of your items in the order.
They have arrows to page back and forth
between different orders,
and they have a fulfill items button
that opens a new screen,
so you can easily confirm
that you're adding all the items to the box,
and then move on with the next order.
With WooCommerce, once again,
it's a bit of a cluttered experience.
There's no way to easily go back and forth between orders,
and when you're in an order,
there's no easy way to just mark it as fulfilled.
There's a dropdown to set it to completed,
but then you also have to input your tracking number
into another box.
And everything about WooCommerce could be streamlined
quite a bit to make it more efficient
for the fulfillment process.
But what about the speed
and reliability of your online store?
If your website is not snappy and responsive,
it can cost you business.
Well, Shopify is what you would call a hosted platform,
meaning they provide the web hosting for you.
They take care of it.
They put your Shopify store on their servers,
and they are responsible
for the speed and reliability of your website.
In most cases, this is a good thing
because as your traffic scales,
Shopify can allocate additional resources to your website
to make sure that it stays running smoothly.
But this could also be an issue
if you got a huge run on a Black Friday sale,
and Shopify just wasn't expecting it.
It could definitely cause your store to go down,
and then you're reliant on Shopify
to do something about it in order to bring it back.
WooCommerce on the other hand, requires web hosting,
which will need to be manually scaled up based on demand.
The speed and reliability of WooCommerce
is entirely dependent on the web hosting you pick
and what optimizations you do within WordPress.
For example, displaying the contents of a user's cart
in the header with WooCommerce is extremely inefficient.
This is because WooCommerce disables the cash
as soon as a user interacts with their cart.
So every time they add something new,
or they continue browsing your site,
the server has to build the entire page from scratch.
And if you get a big run of traffic on Black Friday
or after an email blast,
this could be detrimental to your website.
It could literally crash it.
WooCommerce also doesn't handle search well.
There's no auto complete feature
as the user types in the search bar,
and it's not smart enough to pick up on misspellings.
So if a user misspells an item,
it's just gonna say that no items match their search,
even though they may just be one character off
from finding something that you sell.
These things can greatly hinder your conversion rates,
but that doesn't have to mean you need
to avoid WooCommerce entirely.
That's because WP Engine, the sponsor of today's video,
has an amazing WooCommerce hosting solution
that will change the way your E-commerce store runs.
WP Engine solved the problem
of cart fragments in WooCommerce with live carts.
Instead of the page reloading
every time a user adds something to their cart,
live carts automatically updates the cart data
in the background.
And with EverCache,
90% more of your store's pages are cached.
This is because WP Engine keeps caching enabled
after the user interacts with the cart.
So your website is gonna be fast and snappy
all the way through checkout,
and this increases conversion rates.
WP Engine also has instant store search for WooCommerce.
This enables auto complete in the search bar
and enables did you mean suggestions
in the event that a user misspells an item.
The E-commerce hosting is easy to manage too.
The dashboard lets you quickly activate
these powerful features.
And if you ever need any help,
WP Engine's support team is just a click away.
I'll be using WP Engine E-commerce
to host my upcoming store
where I'll be selling these Craylor-made hats.
Go to this link to get started with WP Engine for Woo,
and thanks to WP Engine for sponsoring today's video.
Now it's clear that WooCommerce
could use a bit of help performance-wise,
but if you do put in the time to optimize your site,
Woo Commerce is very powerful.
You can use a drag and drop page builder
to make customized landing pages,
about pages or contact pages.
WordPress is also a powerful blogging platform,
so you can have a news or blog section
as part of your store.
WordPress does have a bit of a learning curve,
but if you can invest the time to learn it,
there's so much that you can do.
There's a reason that WordPress powers
over 40% of the internet.
Shopify's default page builder
and blog capabilities are pretty basic.
It's just a text box with minimal formatting options.
You do have the ability
to get a third party drag and drop page builder
with the Shopify app store,
but none of these page builders are quite gonna measure up
with the industry standard options
in WordPress like Elementor.
And speaking of third party apps,
this is where both WooCommerce
and Shopify start to get expensive.
As I mentioned earlier,
WooCommerce has quite a few paid add-ons
that are made by WooCommerce officially,
and I don't like seeing this trend.
The subscriptions add-on to enable autoship is $240 a year,
the shipping rate calculator add-on is $100 a year,
and the pre-order add-on is $160 a year,
and the list goes on and on.
Now, sure, there's quite a bit included
in the free version of WooCommerce,
but I don't like the fact
that WooCommerce is directly locking
some of their own features
behind a rather expensive paywall.
Shopify, on the other hand,
gives you nearly all of its features in the basic plan.
There are just a couple of advanced features reserved
for the middle plan,
but I don't think most shop owners are going
to require these features anyway,
so it's not that big of a deal.
They do have an app store with apps for product sourcing,
drop shipping, page building, and more.
These apps are all offered by third party developers
and designed to make your Shopify store better.
And Shopify definitely has the biggest collection
of integrations and third party apps
to enhance your E-commerce store.
I used to believe
that Shopify was hands down the best E-commerce platform.
As you can see, it's definitely the most intuitive option.
But recent decisions from Shopify,
like increasing their prices
and forcing you to use Shopify payments
or face a penalty fee,
have left a bad taste in my mouth.
In some ways, it almost feels like Shopify
is now a marketplace like Etsy or eBay.
I mean, sure, you do have your own storefront
for customers to interact with,
but when you have to either use their payment processor,
which they get a percentage of,
or pay a transaction fee
for using your own payment processor,
it sure does feel like Shopify sees themselves
as a marketplace.
If you aren't super tech savvy,
and you're just looking for an easy way
to sell your items online,
Shopify may be the best option.
It's very approachable for new users.
But if you don't mind investing the time
to learn WooCommerce and WordPress,
and if you want full control
and freedom over your E-commerce store
without your own E-commerce platform
skimming some of your profit off of every transaction,
I would definitely recommend WooCommerce.
It's more flexible,
and I think it can be more powerful
if you put in the effort to customize it
to your exact needs.
It can definitely get expensive with the annual add-ons,
but I still think it may beat
paying Shopify a transaction fee
and not having control over who your payment processor is
or paying an absurd penalty fee if you do use someone else.
For me personally,
I'll be sticking with WooCommerce for my E-commerce stores,
and I've actually been pretty happy with the speed
and reliability thanks to WP Engine's WooCommerce hosting.
Don't forget to check out this link
to get started with WP Engine.
One other thing to consider is getting a custom domain
for your online store.
And you can find the best place to buy your domain name
by checking out this video here.