Shopify vs WooCommerce: Which Ecommerce Platform is Better?

Before diving headfirst into an ecommerce platform, you’ll need to look at the pricing plans available. Are they in your budget? Will they supply you with the necessary features you need to set up and sell?

At first glance, WooCommerce is the cheapest ecommerce platform. This is because, unlike Shopify, it’s a free WordPress plugin offering key ecommerce capabilities. However, since it’s a self–hosted platform, you’ll be responsible for finding and purchasing a domain registrar, a suitable website host for WooCommerce, and additional plugins to install — this is where costs start to rise.

For your reference, we’ve broken down the average WooCommerce pricing for each of these factors:

Domain registrar

• $10 – $20/year

Hosting provider

• $36 – $5,400/year (ranges from inexpensive shared hosting to pricier dedicated hosting).
• Top Tip: Some website hosts, like Bluehost, offer additional features like a free domain for your first year. Look out for similar deals before making your final decision.

Themes

• Free – $130/year

Additional plugins

• Free – $129/year

Total monthly costs

• $4 – $480/month

If you’re confident budgeting and deal hunting, then you won’t find it challenging dealing with these additional costs. WooCommerce is a great option if you enjoy searching for flexible pricing that’ll suit your store’s budget, or if you want more control over how you spend your money – be it on cheap shared hosting or your go-to domain registrar.

Shopify’s price plans, ranging from $29/month on the Basic plan to $299/month on the Advanced plan, aren’t cheap. Additional costs from paid templates, apps, and transaction fees can also add up over time — this isn’t great if you need to accommodate a tight budget.

But the quality of Shopify’s in-built features make this investment worth it. In fact, its value for money scored a fauless 5 out of 5 in our hands-on research. On each plan, you’ll receive a pre-built or custom theme, multiple sales channels, ecommerce app access, and Shopify POS for in-person transactions. This is everything you’ll need to set up a successful online store quickly even if you don’t have much technical expertise.

Transaction Fees

Since you’ll be selling multiple products, it’s worth looking into transaction fees. Not all ecommerce platforms charge a transaction fee per sale, but you will always encounter processing fees based on the payment gateway you process orders through, such as Stripe or Safepay.

Shopify’s transaction fees vary based on the plan you’re on. For example, the Basic plan is 2.9% plus 30¢ for all online transactions. However, if you use Shopify’s in-house payment processor, Shopify Payments, you can avoid these transaction fees. This is applicable for all orders processed via Shopify Payments, Shop Pay, and Paypal Express.

Although WooCommerce doesn’t take out a transaction fee for each sale, the payment gateway you opt for will. Rates can vary depending on the provider you choose. As an example, WooCommerce’s WooPayment plugin offers standard pricing from 2.90% plus 30¢ per transaction (the same as Shopify’s Basic plan).

Free Trials

Hesitant to commit to WooCommerce or Shopify just yet? Luckily for you, both ecommerce platforms offer free trials so you can try before you buy. Although Shopify’s free trial lasts for three days, you also have the option to purchase your first month of Shopify for $1. This is enough time to test out the platform and decide if you truly want to commit.

WooCommerce has a similar trick up its sleeve. Alongside a 14 day free trial, you can also upgrade your plan and receive your first three months for $1. This comes with the chance to experiment with premium themes, SEO tools, editor customization, and priority support.

When choosing between Shopify and WooCommerce, you’ll want to take advantage of these deals. It’s a brilliant opportunity for potential switchers and new business owners to test the waters first.

The Winner

WooCommerce’s flexible pricing means you can find the right price range for your business

Despite the need to pay for domains and hosting, WooCommerce’s flexibility allows you to find pricing that suits you best while you set up your online store.

The saying “time is money” is felt by anyone setting up an online store for the first time. If you need to set up your store fast and dive straight into making your first sale, Shopify will speedily lead you through the entire process, from uploading your first items to choosing the right template.

In particular, Shopify is best fit for large scale stores. From the outset, you’ll be asked to upload your products before you pick out a template. This process is intuitive, allowing you to edit items and create variants as you go along, or even upload bulk items via CSV. The CSV feature is especially useful if you’re switching to Shopify from another ecommerce platform and want to migrate your listings over.

Once you’ve uploaded your items, it’s plain sailing while you choose a template and add sections like contact forms and featured collection lists to your website. Also, there’s much less to worry about overall because the plans already include in-built hosting and an SSL certificate.

Need an additional hand generating content for your online store? Well, Shopify’s new and improved AI features, ranging from image generators to writing tools, will add some extra polish to your website quickly.

Of course, we’ve already established how WooCommerce is better for users with more knowledge. Setting up with this platform will take longer if you’re a beginner starting from scratch. The editor itself isn’t difficult to use, but you’ll need to think about your domain, hosting, and additional plugins while you set up.

The Winner

Shopify’s easy-to-use editor allows you to set up your store fast

Thanks to its intuitive, user-friendly editor, Shopify is the best ecommerce platform for setting up shop under a tight schedule. If you’re new to ecommerce platforms, you won’t feel intimidated either since Shopify will take you through each step.

Whether you’re selling sleek athleisure or stylish homewares, your online store will need to reflect your brand through a polished and professional design. After all, you don’t want to alienate potential customers with a cluttered layout that’s difficult to follow.

Though both Shopify and WooCommerce offer polished designs, Shopify’s optimized templates will give your brand some flair and entice users to keep clicking through your site.

You can browse through over 100 themes, of which 12 are free and the rest require a one-off payment to use. Each theme offers practical features leading to seamless site navigation, including mega menus, quick views, and even a stock counter showing how much of a specific item is left. Just be aware that the best themes must be paid for since the average prices range from $140 to $400.

All of Shopify’s templates are also optimized for mobile. This is especially important since, in 2023, Statista found that Smartphone usage is the most common way people purchase orders online.

If WordPress is a platform you’re familiar with, then it’s worth taking a look at WooCommerce’s templates for your online store. Not only can you choose from specified WooCommerce designs, but you’ll also be able to pull from WordPress’ existing theme catalog.

Don’t forget that you’ll likely need plugins to expand on certain WooCommerce templates. As we’ve mentioned before, this process can be time consuming or frustrating for new users.

The Winner

Shopify’s responsive and sleek templates will make your online store look professional

The clear winner is Shopify with its stylish templates containing user-friendly features and optimization for phone and desktop.

Now you have the foundations of your online store sorted, it’s time to look at sales features that’ll help you optimize your store in the long run. Based on our research, Shopify is the best platform for sales features, offering exactly what you’ll need to manage your store. We’re talking inventory organization tools, in-person sales options, and flexible shipping.

Inventory

Shopify is the perfect ecommerce platform for stores with a large inventory. Helping you scale your business, you can access handy sales features that make it easy to manage a large quantity of items. For Shopify Editions Winter ‘24, the platform made it even easier to manage your inventory, allowing users to show different product variants on the same page, increase bundle sizes from 10 items to 30 items, and automatically categorize new items.

When your store does expand, you’ll want to look into the Shopify Plus plan too. Access to this plan grants you advanced organizational settings and a customizable checkout, alongside the ability to create unlimited staff accounts to accommodate your growing staff.

In comparison, WooCommerce’s scalability options are limited. You will receive a degree of inventory control — mainly through in-built features like stock tracking and product variations — but you will also need to download plugins to access more features. Also, the platform lacks inventory automations like Shopify, making managing your WooCommerce inventory much more tedious.

Because of this limitation, WooCommerce is more suitable for small to medium-sized stores. If you’re already using WooCommerce but are looking to scale your inventory, then Shopify is the platform you’ll want to switch to.

Shipping Options

So a customer has snapped up an item and you need to make sure it gets to them. How will you make that shipment? Well, if you’re using Shopify, you can pick from four courier shipping options: USPS, UPS, DHL Express, and FedEx. Even better, you can use Shopify Shipping to print discounted shipping labels that’ll save you some cash during the process. Now doesn’t that sound like a seamless process?

This still hasn’t covered the variety of Shopify’s shipping options that are accessible from the dashboard:

• International shipping
• Free shipping
• Local pickup for buyers to collect their parcel from a specified location
• Estimated delivery dates shown at checkout
• Custom shipping rates
• Delivery customizations that must be carried out via your external app of choice

WooCommerce does offer essential shipping options with its in-built system — think free shipping, DHL and USPS label printing, and shipping zones based on area — but your options will be limited unless you add additional plugins. To save you from this hassle (unless you like the flexibility of adding your own plugins), Shopify will streamline the shipping process for you.

Payment Methods

Payments needn’t be a headache with Shopify. Its unique Shopify Payments feature is built into the platform, offering a streamlined and stress-free process that is managed from the dashboard.

Sellers can easily accept payments for their stores, while buyers have the option to process their orders through payment providers like PayPal, Meta Pay, Amazon Pay, and Apple Pay. Do note that transaction fees will vary depending on the payment provider used, so be sure to check these beforehand.

WooCommerce is also flexible with its payment gateways. Through extensions, you can integrate your store with PayPal, Stripe, Amazon Pay, and Klarna.

Alongside online payments, Shopify provides point of sale systems that allow you to sell in-person — another great way to increase your business’ sales by moving beyond your online retail space. WooCommerce does offer its own POS, but you’ll need to purchase a dedicated plugin that costs $199 a year. 

The Winner

Shopify’s sales features go above and beyond WooCommerce’s

From a straightforward inventory system to various shipping options, Shopify’s strong built-in sales features help large-scale stores to thrive.

To boost your sales over time, you’ll need to get your online store out there. The easiest way to do this is by implementing a foolproof content marketing strategy. Whether you’re experienced with the art of the email campaign or new to the world of blogging, Shopify and WordPress have marketing features that’ll allow your brand to grow online and, ultimately, bring in more conversions.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Sharing your new online store with family and friends is all well and good, but it won’t measure up to solid SEO. Great SEO practices will ensure that your product listings are visible to users on search engines like Google and Bing. But how do Shopify and WooCommerce’s SEO features compare?

Since Shopify is a website builder fit for SEO, it has everything you need to set up this technicality. Its features include the automatic generation of canonical tags and sitemaps, alongside the ability to edit meta tags, alternative text, and other SEO fundamentals. These features are a brilliant way for beginners to grasp SEO basics regardless of technical knowledge. However, since all of these features are all baked into Shopify, you’ll have less control over your website’s technical performance.

That’s where WooCommerce comes in. Since WooCommerce is powered by WordPress, known for its great SEO plugins and ability for users to add their own code, this platform is great for more experienced users who do want more control over their website’s SEO. These technical aspects even go beyond SEO. Depending on your personal needs, you can pick out a plan that gives your online store optimized site speeds, storage, and bandwidth.

But be careful. If you ever need to change website hosts, the downtime will temporarily impact your SEO while you migrate your online store to a new host. Definitely something to think about when considering WooCommerce over Shopify.

Email Marketing

To drive a consistent stream of traffic to your online store, it’s highly recommended that you set up email marketing campaigns to keep your email list in the know.

With Shopify comes Shopify Email, another useful, in-built feature that provides users with professional email marketing templates. An easy way to create and manage campaigns all in one place, you’ll receive a selection of pre-built templates and an intuitive drag-and-drop editor to work with, alongside automated emails to speed up the entire process.

Whether you’re on the Basic plan or Shopify Plus plan, you’ll get to send 10,000 free emails at the beginning of each month, with additional emails starting from $1 per 1,000 extra emails.

But if you’re keen on using another email marketing platform — like Klaviyo, Mailchimp, and Privy — you can download their respective apps from the Shopify app store.

WooCommerce, however, doesn’t have an in-built email marketing feature. Instead, you’ll want to delve into the available plugins and look for a suitable provider. As a recommendation, Mailchimp and MailPoet have plugins that are free to download from WooCommerce’s extensions page.

Analytics

With SEO and ecommerce email marketing driving traffic to your online store, you’ll probably be keen to keep track of your store’s visitors, clicks, and conversions. No matter which pricing plan you choose, Shopify offers brilliant analytics that score a perfect 5 out of 5 in our user-backed research.

Listed below are just a few of the analytics you’ll find on your Shopify dashboard:

• Total sales
• Online store sessions showing the volume of visitors to your page
• Conversion rates of the visitors who have added items to their cart, reached checkout, or bought an item
• Total orders
• Average order value
• Top selling products
• Returning customer rate
• Sales by traffic source

In comparison, WooCommerce’s analytics aren’t as extensive as Shopify’s and are only compatible with WordPress 5.3+. Despite its limitations, you’ll still get some interesting ecommerce metrics to track such as total sales, number of refunds, number of discounted orders, and the amount of downloads.

The Winner

Shopify’s in-built marketing features will help your online store grow quickly

Even if your marketing knowledge is limited, Shopify makes it easy to grow online thanks to its in-built SEO, email marketing, and analytical tools. Put all of these tools together and, hey presto, you have a solid marketing strategy for your online store.

Anyone setting up their ecommerce store for the first time will need a little help along the way. For this reason, we recommend Shopify as the best platform for reliable help and support. Its customer service lines are available around the clock, offering communication methods via phone, live chat, email, and social media.

Alongside Shopify’s seamless customer support, its website is home to useful resources that’ll help support you at each stage of your journey. Among these resources is the Shopify Help Center, including everything you need to know about the platform, and the Shopify Academy where you can take interactive courses and upgrade your ecommerce skills.

In comparison, WooCommerce makes it trickier for users to find the help and support they need. Although the platform has comprehensive information in documentation and blog posts, many users find themselves digging through community forums to find answers to a specific question, or even watching YouTube videos from veteran WooCommerce users.

On the flipside, you won’t ever feel alone when using WooCommerce. Since it’s such a popular platform, you’ll find a wealth of user-led resources across the web that will help you while you build your online store.

Finding additional support becomes even more strenuous with the addition of plugins. Since they come from third-party companies, you’ll need to look elsewhere if you’re having an issue with a specific extension. So, if you’re looking for centralized help and support at every step of the way, we recommend Shopify.

The Winner

Shopify’s help and support services make it easy get find assistance

Shopify’s robust customer support and valuable help resources makes it easy to receive help and support when building your online store. Because these features are all in one place, it’s easy to find what you’re looking for.

Top ecommerce security is a priority for any online store. It’s also a two way street, because both merchants and buyers should be able to rest easy knowing that their precious data and card information is protected at all times.

Since Shopify is a dedicated ecommerce platform hosting thousands of online stores, it’s serious about the security measures in place to protect sellers. This makes Shopify the best platform for security overall.

Even with a Basic Shopify plan, you’ll receive all of the security features listed below that we found in our user experience research:

• Default SSL Certificates for secure website data
• A fraud analysis tool
• 2-factor authentication
• Dedicated customer login areas so users can manage their security settings all in one place.

WooCommerce does offer security measures, like 2-step authentication for admin accounts, but additional features will take longer to set up. In fact, more self-management is needed to protect a WooCommerce store against threats.

Since you’d be looking for an ecommerce hosting provider yourself, you’ll have to make sure that the provider you pick offers adequate security features. As a general rule of thumb, WooCommerce recommends users to look for reputable hosts that provide SSL certificates – a necessity for any safe online store.  As recommended by WooCommerce, Bluehost is a reputable choice for your website. With affordable pricing starting from $1.99/month, you’ll also receive a useful domain manager, an SSL certificate, and the ability to connect to Google My Business for further visibility online.

You’ll also need to take security plugins into account. Popular WooCommerce plugins that cover all-in-one-security include Jetpack, Shield Security, Sucuri Security, Security Ninja, and Wordfence Security – all scoring four stars or more on WordPress’ plugins store page.

This additional research on secure hosts and additional plugins can take time, so Shopify will give you a better peace of mind for security since it’s all included in your plan.

The Winner

Shopify’s in-built security features make is easy to protect your store against threats

Thanks to the variety of security features included in its plans, Shopify is the best ecommerce platform to keep your store’s data safe and secure. Of course, your buyers will also benefit from the safe transactions on your site.

Finding it difficult to choose between Shopify or WooCommerce? To help you decide, it’s useful to think about which features to look out for based on your unique needs. Below are a few pointers to help you get started.

Will the platform help me scale over time?

• Strong inventory management tools
• Ability to create variants on products in multiple styles
• Varied shipping options that ship globally and offer discounted rates
• In-depth analytics handling large amounts of data from visitors

Will the store be quick and painless to set up?

• Pre-made templates
• Intuitive store editor
• Prompt customer service to resolve any technical issues along the way
• In-built security measures

Will there be any additional costs over time?

• Free extensions
• Free themes
• Reasonably priced plans that features the key features you’re looking for
• Special offers on plans
• Good transaction fees

Will the platform’s marketing features help me grow my store?

• Social media integration
• SEO
• Email marketing
• Tracking tools to follow user behaviors

Will I have access to additional features when needed?

• App market to download additional extensions from
• Price plan upgrades when your online start scales up

Don’t worry, the conclusions in this comparison haven’t come out of thin air. Our findings are based on hands-on ecommerce website builder research that examined what users are looking for in a platform.

While comparing both Shopify and WooCommerce, we narrowed down the key criteria that are most useful to someone using an ecommerce platform. This included factors such as the pricing of each platform, the editor ease of use, overall sales features, and the level of customer help and support. From these key criteria, we were able to establish the best platform overall.

After juggling the pros and cons of each ecommerce platform, it’s clear that Shopify is the overall winner. We were impressed by its huge range of in-built sales features and seamless website editor, as well as its scalability capabilities fit for large businesses. Our research also agrees with this conclusion, the platform scoring a spectacular 4.8 out of 5 overall.

In contrast, WooCommerce offers an overwhelming experience for newbies due to the hosting, domains, and plugins needed. However, more knowledgeable users may prefer the independence the platform gives them.

Of course, since everyone’s needs are different, let’s briefly summarize who Shopify and WooCommerce are best suited for.

• Shopify’s in-built features tailored to ecommerce will help your business scale over time with ease. Its intuitive editor, brilliant inventory options, and prompt customer support means you’ll receive everything you need to manage and grow your store.
• WooCommerce offers more flexible pricing and customization options. It’s better for two kinds of users: those with technical know-how, and those who want more control and personalization options over their store.

Still need more information? Be sure to look at our thorough Shopify review and WooCommerce review, covering key features in even more depth.