WooCommerce vs Shopify

Update: This blog post has been refreshed and republished with new insights. Click here to read the updated version.

When talking about WooCommerce vs Shopify, one of the most common reasons people prefer WooCommerce is that it’s less expensive. After all, WooCommerce is free and open-source, whereas Shopify comes with a monthly subscription fee and additional charges for each sale.

But WooCommerce is a self-hosted platform. So, you need to purchase a hosting plan to host the WooCommerce. Many hosting service providers offer ridiculously cheap hosting plans. With these cheap plans, you can reduce the WooCommerce hosting expense. But you will have to compromise with the website performance.

You need to have a relatively good hosting plan for the WooCommerce store to ensure good page loading speed and manage a sizable number of visitors. This will make the cost of creating eCommerce websites with WooCommerce and Shopify almost the same.

So for us, it’s not the price that makes WooCommerce more attractive. There are many other reasons why we think WooCommerce is better than Shopify to build online stores. Let’s check them one by one.

Never get banned

In eCommerce related online forums and social media groups, people often post about Shopify shutting down or banning their stores.

Shopify hosts your online store on its own servers as part of its hosted solution. While it takes away your responsibility to find a good hosting service, it also comes with a drawback.

Since Shopify owns the platform and hosts your store, it retains full control over your website. If they find that your store violates their terms and conditions or you sell shady products, they could ban your store.

It happens all the time.

The worst part? When you reach out to support after they ban your store, they rarely explain what went wrong or why they took action. What they would provide is a cookie clutter response saying you violated the terms and conditions or there are security issues with your website.

But with WooCommerce, you stay in full control no one can suddenly ban or shut down your site. It’s an open-source platform that you can host anywhere you like. So, you have full ownership and complete access to the code. It means there is no way WooCommerce or WordPress can take any action against your online store.

Customize Your WooCommerce Store Fully

When it comes to the customization or personalization of the online store, Shopify puts more restrictions compared to other platforms. Shopify gives only limited access to the code which makes complete customization impossible.

However, WooCommerce allows you to customize the website any way you want. So you can make your online store really unique.

Even if you don’t know how to code, there are many plugins that will help you to customize your WooCommerce store.

For example, CartFlows is a powerful free plugin that allows you to create custom cart pages in WooCommerce stores. If you want to know how to customize your cart page on a WooCommerce website, check out this in-depth blog that will walk you through the step by step process of creating a beautiful custom cart page in WooCommerce using CartFlows without coding.

Apart from CartFlows, there are hundreds of plugins that will help you to customize WooCommerce the way you want. You can also hire a WooCommerce developer to create an online store with a custom design.

WooCommerce vs Shopify: Flexibility with Payment Processors

Shopify forces you to use their payment processing service, Shopify Payment If you use an external payment option such as Paypal or Stripe in a country where Shopify payment processing service is available, Shopify will charge you an additional fee. In countries where Shopify Payment service is not available, PayPal and Stripe are free but other payment processors will cost you a huge amount.

However, when it comes to WooCommerce, you are free to use any payment processing service on your website. Moreover, there are 100+ payment gateways that you can seamlessly integrate with a WooCommerce store.

Multi-lingual stores are cheaper

Shopify allows you to create multilingual online stores with Langify but it costs $17.50/month. On the other hand, it’s way cheaper to make a WooCommerce website multilingual. One of the most popular plugins to make a WooCommerce multilingual is WPML and it costs just $29 for the first year and $21 for the subsequent years.

WooCommerce vs Shopify: Which Offers Better SEO?

Shopify has great SEO functionality but we don’t think it’s not good as the SEO functionality of WooCommerce. In Shopify, it’s quite difficult to add the metadata for rich snippets. Moreover, the URL structure of Shopify is a little weird because it doesn’t allow you to easily remove /blog, /news /pages from the URL.

On the other hand, WooCommerce offers better SEO functionality and it’s much more powerful with plugins like Yoast SEO.

Summary

From our years of experience in building and maintaining both WooCommerce and Shopify stores, we can say that WooCommerce is better than Shopify for most eCommerce businesses for multiple reasons. WooCommerce is more customizable and SEO friendly. Moreover, it also gives you complete control and ownership of the code. You also don’t face surprise bans or vague explanations when you run your store on WooCommerce.