So today we are going to discuss 5 top reasons why i prefer woocommerce over shopify. In past i tried to switch from woocommerce to shopify but there are a few reasons which stopped me from doing that. This post is just my personal experience, everyone is not a chocolate lover, some hate them too so if you are a shopify lover don’t be offended. 2 Years ago when i wanted to select one option from the 2, i did search in google regarding which is better then the other, but i never received the answer i was looking for. So i am going to post this article to show which one is best for you.
Reason 1 : Woocommerce Plugins vs Shopify Plugins
Woocommerce is available on the world’s biggest blogging platform called wordpress. I have been using wordpress for over 7 years now and familiar with over 500-1000 best plugins. This makes it very easy to optimize the site performance by just installing few plugins. Shopify might be great when it comes to designs and themes but i am sure they don’t have million useful plugins that wordpress has to offer. After all it is the most popular platform out there.
If we want to make a little tweak on our website, then all we have to do is search in the plugin box of wordpress and bam, we get what we were looking for. For example we recently wanted to add 2 currencies on our website since our payment processor do not accept USD, we searched for “Multiple currencies woocommerce” in plugin search options. We got over 10 results, out of which we selected the one with most reviews. We ended up using woocommerce currency switch, and within seconds we had multiple currencies on over 50 products we have on our website. So if you are someone who wants to keep things simple and not hire a team of developers then stick to the woocommerce and wordpress.
Reason 2 : Woocommerce Themes vs Shopify Themes
Many shopify supporters love to argue that shopify has more themes while there are just handful of woocommerce supported wordpress themes and i beg to differ. First of all lets compare number of free ecommerce themes wordpress has, just a simple search of word “woocommerce” in the themes section of wordpress ended up giving us over 500 results. These are the free woocommerce supported wordpress themes. If you search on google regarding “woocommerce themes” you will end up getting another tens of thousands of options. So you can literally select from thousands of free woocommerce themes available on the world wide web. If you look for shopify themes in google, you will find a lot of options as well but most of them are paid themes.
Now when it comes to shopify, they do have some amazing looking themes but there are only a few of them when we compare the number to the giant wordpress. We are comparing 100 free themes from shopify with over 10,000 free woocommerce themes that wordpress can support. So you can clearly see the huge difference here. Also there are premium woocommerce-wordpress themes you can buy from sites like themeforest, we are using flatsome theme on our website which is purchased from themeforest.
Reason 3 : Woocommerce Management Vs Shopify Management
Now i might be a little biased here since i have been a long time wordpress user. It is just too easy for me to work on wordpress since i have been using it for more then half a decade. So if you have been using wordpress for over 2 years and thinking of switching to shopify then DONT, reason is that you are more familiar with wordpress and it would be very easy for you to manage it. When you make switch to a different platform like shopify it will take you atleast 6 months to get used to it. You can utilize same time to make use of wordpress and woocommerce effectively.
If you are new to website/theme management then you can start with any of the options, since both woocommerce/wordpress and shopify are great options if you want to setup your online store. But never switch to second option if you are most familiar with the first one.
Reason 4 : Woocommerce Cost vs Shopify Cost
Now if you are someone who doesn’t want to spend $299 per month on shopify then woocommerce is the best option for you. Lets do some maths, you spend $3600 a year on shopify while $0 spend if you run on woocommerce. You save $3600, which you can utilize on other expects of your website like getting a paid premium wordpress theme which will cost one time fee of $50-100. Lets say you purchased $100 premium wordpress theme, you are now left with $3500. You can now spend another $100-500 to buy some quality premium wordpress plugins from sites like codecanyon.net. After this you are still left with $3000, which you can utilize to buy 10 hoverboards from our shop, Just Kidding! But you get my point, You can spend all the remaining funds on your website marketing campaign which is more beneficial then paying $3500 a year just to keep your store running.
Reason 5 : Shopify SEO vs Woocommerce SEO
WordPress platform has literally hundreds of plugins to manage on page SEO of your website. This is one option where i can rate both woocommerce and shopify as equals since shopify also has a lot of free SEO plugins. So both of them get a 5 start ratings when it comes to SEO benefits.
So who wins?
It is little unfair for shopify that woocommerce is backed up by most popular blogging platform making it really powerful. It is like a fish(woocommerce) that is protected by big shark(WordPress), while big fish(shopify) is able to survive on its own. So because of the free themes, cost factors, management factors, we give the crown to Woocommerce!
I hope you like the article, if you have anything to add then feel free to leave a comment!