WooCommerce vs Shopify 2024 Comparison: Which is Better?

If you're here, I understand the dilemma: WooCommerce vs Shopify – which is better for your online business? It's a common question, given that both platforms are among the most popular eCommerce options in the market. Making the right choice or deciding if it's worth switching platforms can be a tough call.

To understand the difference between WooCommerce and Shopify, I will walk you through the following key points in the article below:

• An overview of WooCommerce vs Shopify
• Pros and cons of WooCommerce and Shopify
• 13 criteria that make a difference between Shopify and WooCommerce

Let’s dive into it!

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WooCommerce vs Shopify: An Overview

WooCommerce is an open-source eCommerce plugin for WordPress that uses the most powerful content management system (CMS) for running an online store. According to BuiltWith, it has been chosen as the foundation of more than three million websites worldwide.

Shopify is a hosted eCommerce platform that helps you to create an online store without worrying about technical knowledge. Currently, Shopify has attracted 5+ million customers worldwide (source: BuiltWith).

Both Shopify and WooCommerce share the same core eCommerce functionalities:

• Enable users to build and manage a fully functional online store.
• Offer tools for listing products, setting prices, managing inventory, and processing orders.
• Integrate with various payment gateways to accept payments from customers.
• Customize the storefront of your store with themes and design options.
• Prioritize responsive designs to cater to shoppers on various devices like PC, tablet, or mobile.
• Support multichannel selling on popular marketplaces like Amazon on eBay with a multi-channel selling tool like LitCommerce.

Still, there will be many differences on these 2 platforms.

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Pros & Cons of WooCommerce vs Shopify

So, after using and testing both platforms for several years, here are my quick summaries of WooCommerce and Shopify's strengths and weaknesses.

Pricing

The expenses of running online businesses need to be weighed against the benefits of having a fully functional website. Otherwise, the total cost might easily exceed the available funds.

WooCommerce pricing

As an open-source WordPress plug-in, WooCommerce is free, but additional fees may apply to unlock all features. You will also need a domain name (typically around $12/year) and hosting (ranging from $5 to $25 per month).

I recommend some of the best WooCommerce hosting providers, such as Bluehost or Cloudways. But usually, you cannot prolong the free trials with the hosting service. Below is my conclusion on the WooCommerce costs for your estimation:

Shopify pricing

On the other hand, as a hosted platform, Shopify offers the full package for your online store, ranging from $5 to $2,500 per month.

Below are the details of Shopify fees:

And here's my take on each pricing package; it might be helpful if you're sitting on the fence about which to start:

• Basic Shopify ($39/month) is best for merchants who want to start selling online with just basic needs.
• The Shopify plan ($105/month) gives you everything needed for growing businesses.
• Advanced Shopify ($399 per month) offers the most advanced features for fast-growing medium-store and large-scale businesses.

Besides, Shopify Starter ($5 per month) allows you to sell an unlimited number of items. However, this plan is not a suitable option if you want to construct a fully functional online store.

Shopify Plus is the best option for enterprise or high-volume businesses. For a monthly fee of $2,500, you’ll get many advanced features and better platform support.

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Ease of Use

Most users starting an online store are not web designers or Shopify developers. Even users who are familiar with basic concepts like me also need a platform that is easy to set up and operate.

WooCommerce Ease of Use

Since WordPress WooCommerce is not a hosted solution, you must manage your store's installation, updates, backups, and security.

Setting up WooCommerce is quite complex because I needed to install WordPress first. Following these steps to institute WordPress:

• Get a domain name on WordPress
• Sign up for a hosting account
• Install WordPress
• Find and install a WordPress theme

Here’s our tutorial video to help you set up your WooCommerce store with ease.

It's my estimation that you should choose a trusted WordPress hosting service that will take care of the whole setting process for you, including hosting, domain, and WordPress installation because those steps do require some web-related knowledge.

Shopify Ease of Use

The main advantage of Shopify is that it has a built-in online store, so almost everything is intuitive. Thanks to its simple interface, setting up and managing stores on Shopify is a breeze.

To start with Shopify, I first created a free trial account, followed some basic set-up instructions, and then built my store. From my point of view, Shopify is designed for all owners, even for those who have zero coding knowledge (which most starters do).

Build your Shopify store only in 10 minutes, can you believe it? Watch our Shopify tutorial below to confirm the answer:

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Page Speed

Shoppers, no matter how interested they are, are not willing to wait more than a few seconds. If your site is slow-loading, you stand to lose not only current but future customers as well.

Hence, when determining the right platform for your online store, you should definitely consider WooCommerce vs. Shopify page speed.

WooCommerce Page Speed

The performance test gathered from this study showed that WooCommerce is actually rather slow. The average page loading time of all monitored stores reached 776 milliseconds, and the average cart page loads in 1.32 seconds!

Optimizing loading time in WooCommerce is up to you and your hosting plan. If you choose to go for cheap $2 hosting, you cannot expect it to be fast, no matter how much you pay SEO experts to level up your site for you.

Shopify Page Speed

In contrast, Shopify’s web pages load in 309 milliseconds, the ideal loading time for any website since Google recommends an average of 500 milliseconds of loading time! In light of its fast response times, Shopify delivers a very good overall user experience.

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Design & Templates

When it comes to themes, we all understand that they’re an important factor in attracting customers. A good theme can make or break a business, and a positive experience can create long-lasting business relationships.

WooCommerce Themes

The design and template of WooCommerce are synonymous with a whole new world appearing in front of your eyes. From its official store, you can find around 90+ both free and paid options, which mostly vary from $0 to $79/year.

Also, because WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin, it's been designed to work well with almost all themes out there. So, in most cases, you can simply pick any theme, like thousands, and make it work with WooCommerce. If you like, you can also explore the fantastic collection of WooCommerce themes on Themeforest.

I personally don't find WordPress WooCommerce themes very attractive, but I do enjoy being able to customize some code in WordPress.

Shopify Themes

Currently, Shopify offers 200+ options. Each theme has specific variations, so technically, you are getting even more different designs.

Created by a group of professional website designers, Shopify themes are generally elegant and tidy yet feature-rich and mobile-friendly. Aside from that, customizing and changing Shopify themes has never been easier, thanks to its intuitive Shopify editor and Liquid code. I can save up tons of time thanks to recent upgrades in editing workflow and theme load times.

What I love is that even on the free trial, I can try all premium Shopify themes and test them out. If it's your preference, here are my favorite Shopify themes.

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Apps & Plugins

Regardless of how robust an eCommerce platform is, you’ll always need to add some extensions to boost your store. Luckily, WooCommerce vs Shopify both offer a massive directory of plugins and integrate with many third-party services.

WooCommerce Plugins

If you're choosing WooCommerce on WordPress, you're in luck! You'll have access to WordPress's massive plugin repository, with almost 60,000 free and paid plugins to meet all your logistical, technical, and marketing needs. On top of that, WooCommerce offers more than 850 extensions tailored for eCommerce.

Shopify Apps

Shopify is packed with 8,000+ apps and extensions developed by both in-house teams and third-party developers. 

The huge chunk of apps on its store is divided into different categories, such as inventory management, orders and shipping, sales and conversion, etc. All these extensions support you in monitoring your eStore seamlessly and driving more traffic and sales.

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Inventory Management

Now turn to WooCommerce vs Shopify comparison based on inventory management!

WooCommerce Inventory Management

WooCommerce offers a great degree of flexibility, and its inventory management feature is no exception.

I can painlessly use WooCommerce to create inventory reports and change any product attributes. What I love about it is that there are no limitations on how many variable products you can create and manage.

Shopify Inventory Management

Similar to WooCommerce, Shopify empowers merchants with full control over the Shopify inventory management system. Under the hood, I can track stock and easily access stock alerts, automated purchase orders, in-house revenue reports, and so on.

In addition, I can add single or buck items, customers, orders, and other data manually or with the help of Shopify CSV files. Shopify users can also take advantage of a wide range of inventory apps available to run businesses seamlessly.

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SEO & Blogs

To fully analyze the SEO capabilities of the two platforms Shopify vs WooCommerce, certain criteria need to be taken into account, such as:

• SSL Certificates
• Auto XML Sitemap
• 301 Redirects
• Apps and Plugins for SEO
• Blog Posts Section

WooCommerce SEO

Being built on a dedicated blogging platform, WooCommerce definitely has an advantage in SEO. With the WordPress editor, it's much easier for me to alter body content, basic URL redirections, meta descriptions, alt tags, and other page elements to optimize product pages.

At the same time, WooCommerce also offers numerous SEO plugins that I can use to optimize your store, and Yoast SEO is considered the most well-known SEO plugin.

Moreover, blogs and content are where WooCommerce shows off its muscles. I can create a blog for WooCommerce by adding a post right from the WordPress Admin dashboard. Also, I can improve customers' blogging experience by utilizing templates on Storefront – WooCommerce default store design or purchasing nicely designed blog templates on ThemeForest.

Shopify SEO

On the flip side, Shopify does have a few limitations regarding SEO. For example, it's not fully customizable regarding URLs, and creating sub-categories can be a bit tricky.

Nonetheless, Shopify has all the essential features I need for eCommerce SEO, and they're pretty easy to use. The SEO apps for Shopify are also known for being user-friendly when it comes to installation and operation.

With Shopify, setting up a blog and creating posts is a breeze. It doesn't take much time or effort, and I can easily optimize my Shopify blog for SEO with just a few clicks.

When comparing Shopify vs WordPress, there are definitely some limitations. Still, you can be reassured that Shopify still provides all the essential SEO functions you need to build your store.

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Marketing Features

Marketing is a core function that every online merchant needs to focus on in order to increase awareness of their brand and products. So, let's join us to explore the Shopify or WooCommerce battle on marketing features.

WooCommerce Marketing

You can count on WooCommerce when it comes to syncing your shop with Amazon, eBay, and social media sites like Facebook. I can manage your channels from your WordPress dashboard with free extensions that are certified by the platform for that. Unfortunately, the list doesn't include Google Shopping.

Unlike Shopify, which provides a built-in POS system for its users, WooCommerce does not have a native omnichannel solution within the platform. However, you can always find a suitable POS system for WooCommerce from various providers.

Shopify Marketing

Shopify allows you to effectively manage several email marketing campaigns at the same time. You can extend your possibilities with the best Shopify email marketing apps, such as MailChimp, Klaviyo, or Omnisend. Not to mention, you can keep track of all the necessary statistics from a single dashboard. These include conversion rates, sessions, order value, total reach, and so on. As a result, strategies to improve your campaigns will be applied on time.

If I want to sync my online shop to the social media store to have shoppable posts on Instagram, Facebook, or Google, I could easily do that in a few slick clicks. In all honesty, Shopify does this better, especially if you’re going to use Pinterest.

There's not much to say about omnichannel since Shopify is one of the top competitors in this section. It allows merchants to sell their products through multiple touchpoints, such as online stores, physical retail locations, social media platforms, and marketplaces while centralizing inventory, order management, and customer data, ensuring a cohesive and efficient operation across all channels.

Besides, you can take advantage of Shopify analytics to track key metrics, such as total sales, orders, average order value, conversion rates, and customer behavior. This data helps you understand your customers, identify trends, and measure the success of your marketing campaigns. By analyzing this information, you can make informed decisions to optimize your marketing strategies and drive business growth.

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Payment Gateways

Regardless of the type of products or services you sell, the ultimate goal is always to convert visitors and facilitate their subsequent transactions. Luckily, WooCommerce vs. Shopify offers a wide variety of tools to help you with this.

WooCommerce Payment Gateways

WooCommerce comes with default payment options for PayPal and Stripe, two proven payment processors. Most WooCommerce online stores can easily use either of these options without any issues. This means I don't even need a bank account to get started.

If you prefer to use a different service, WooCommerce allows you to do so. It also supports all other popular payment service providers through add-ons.

WooCommerce Paypal PaymentsThis platform supports many regional and less popular payment gateway services. Since there is no barrier to entry, every payment company can build and support add-ons for WooCommerce.

I am only charged transaction fees by my payment gateway or bank. WooCommerce will never charge you a percentage of the transaction fee; the corresponding payment processors will do so. However, its fees differ from one provider to another.

Shopify Payment Gateways

Shopify offers more than 100 payment gateways for you to choose from, but you need to pay a transaction fee of 0.5-2%, depending on the monthly plan you purchase. The higher the plan you choose, the lower the transaction fee you pay for Shopify.

Shopify also has its payment processor, Shopify Payments, which is totally free and super straightforward. With Shopify Payments, I no longer have to go through a third-party provider and be approved for a merchant account before I can process payments. This payment gateway also grants users access to Shopify's accelerated checkout button, Shop Pay.

Furthermore, if you’re selling internationally, some Shopify features can significantly support your business. For instance, with the new update, Shopify will automatically calculate and include tax in product prices based on your customer’s country.

Also, Shopify allows pricing control by region with international pricing. It means that you can choose specific prices per product, per country, or per region.

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Shipping Methods

One thing I have learned while working in this industry is that you should not underestimate the power of shipping. Providing a trouble-free delivery process is a great way to retain customers and boost brand loyalty. So, let's see who's the winner in the shipping section—WooCommerce vs. Shopify!

WooCommerce Shipping

WooCommerce offers a versatile and customizable shipping system. Merchants can set up shipping methods to match their specific business needs. The platform provides basic shipping options like free shipping, flat rate, and local pickup.

Additionally, WooCommerce's shipping extensions and plugins enable integration with major carriers such as USPS, UPS, FedEx, DHL, and more, providing real-time shipping rates based on customer location, package weight, and dimensions.

Shopify Shipping

Similarly, Shopify shipping also integrates with the biggest carriers like USPS, UPS, and DHL, as well as offers calculated shipping rates based on real-time factors. Merchants can also offer free shipping or set fixed flat rates for their products.

However, its connection with Canada Post, Australia Post, and more takes Shopify shipping to the next level. This gives businesses the flexibility and convenience to ship globally and effectively meet their customers' delivery needs. Also, changing shipping on Shopify was quite easy.

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Dropshipping

Dropshipping is an order fulfillment method that does not require merchants to keep goods in stock. Instead, whenever a new order is placed, the retailer purchases the item from a supplier and has it directly delivered to the customer. So, let’s delve into dropshipping with WooCommerce vs. Shopify!

WooCommerce Dropshipping

It's my personal opinion that WooCommerce is a favorable choice for dropshipping companies. With WooCommerce, drop shippers can pay for plugins that support instantly importing products, completing orders from your website, and more. The majority of those apps share the same functions.

Shopify Dropshipping

Currently, Shopify has integration apps for several popular dropshipping markets. Two of the most well-known are Dropified and Spocket.

No matter which app you choose for your Shopify dropshipping business, you will greatly benefit from its robust and exclusive features.

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Security

Security is a huge concern when running an online business. Hence, it is no surprise that many merchants ask the question, “WooCommerce vs. Shopify, which is better for security?”

WooCommerce Security

With WooCommerce, most of the security falls into your own hands. In greater detail, you will have to get your own SSL certificate, configure your site security plugins, implement two-factor authentication, comply with PCI compliance, and do some other things to protect your site all by yourself.

Shopify Security

Shopify, on the other hand, completely takes care of updates and security issues in the background.

This platform comes with an SSL certificate built-in for free, meaning all data transferred between you and your clients is encrypted. The Shopify system also runs on a Level 1 PCI-compliant server, which is mandatory to accept credit card and debit card details.

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Support

Every e-merchant, especially beginners, needs support when starting their website on any platform. Things are new, and you cannot be familiar with all the features, not to mention the problems you might run into during the setup process.

Both WooCommerce vs Shopify offer customer support, but there's only one winner.

WooCommerce Support

Just like most of the open-source eCommerce solutions out there, WooCommerce doesn’t support live chat, phone, and email. However, as a merchant who wants to take control of their own support strategy, WooCommerce impresses me by providing plenty of resources.

This platform provides assistance in WooCommerce Docs and an FAQ section where you can find answers to almost every common question. Furthermore, thanks to its large user base, I can also seek support from a vibrant community of peers, developers, and WooExperts in a heartbeat in case an unwanted contingency happens.

Shopify Support

Shopify, on the other hand, is renowned for its excellent customer support, which is available 24/7 via phone, email, and live chat. In addition, Shopify has an enormous database of FAQs and a Shopify Forum that is always willing to help.

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WooCommerce vs Shopify: Which One Should You Go for?

We have made great progress in reviewing WooCommerce vs Shopify and its features. Now, it is time for the final verdict to help you decide whether to choose WooCommerce or Shopify.

From my vantage point, if you’re looking for a solution with handy SEO features, high customizability, and flexible scalability, definitely go for WooCommerce. Also, if you want more control over your design, don’t mind tinkering, or your major marketing plan is to drive traffic through content for search engines, then choosing WooCommerce is absolutely fine.

If you’re new to eCommerce or you don’t want to bother about technical details or complex setup processes, enjoy the utmost security and dedicated support from the Shopify team, go for Shopify.

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WooCommerce vs Shopify: FAQs

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Bottom Line

Finally, if you are ready to upgrade your online store and migrate from WooCommerce to Shopify, LitExtension is here to assist you. Our specialized migration service ensures a smooth transition, allowing you to effortlessly transfer all your essential data, including products, orders, and customer information,…

Should you have any questions regarding WooCommerce and Shopify migration, the LitExtension support team is more than happy to help! You can also check out our LitExtension blog and join our Facebook Community to get more eCommerce tips and news.