Presently, a marketer or a business owner is introduced to several numbers of e-commerce development platforms. Among these platforms, Shopify and WordPress are wide in use and popular in creating the best e-store for you. But when you have two popular options on the list, choosing the ideal one could be a little tricky. Right?
Of course, yes! The more Shopify and WordPress have made building an online store easy, the more it turns out difficult to decide which one is right; after all, both are goliaths in the web building space. If we discuss Shopify, it is a dedicated e-commerce platform that hosts your site for you and provides all the necessary tools required to build your online store. On the other hand, WordPress is an open-source software platform that allows you to host your one site and install plugins as per your requirement. So, both have their pros and cons that give us reasons to choose the best one. They both cater to different needs.
Therefore, we have come up with this blog after testing these platforms, and now we are here with the answer to help you know which one is best- Shopify or WordPress. Here we have come up with the ideal differences and discussed why you choose one of them over the other.
So, let’s start with a quick review of what Shopify and WordPress are.
What is Shopify?
Shopify is a popular web application that allows merchants to build an online store. It is specially designed to meet the e-store needs of a merchant. It is equipped with a wide range of templates that can also be customized as per your branding requirements. The best part about Shopify is that it can be used by users who do not have any technical or design skills. No coding skills are required. Even it also allows you to edit the HTML & CSS of your website. So the person with coding skills can customize their e-store in their desired way with complete ease.
Shopify is a software as a service (‘SaaS’) tool, which means you don’t need to own a copy of the software. All you have to pay a monthly fee to use it.
What is WordPress?
There are two versions of WordPress available:
- Hosted WordPress: It is available at wordpress.com. It also works like Shopify, as you have to pay a monthly fee to access WordPress features and build a website. This version is considered an “all-in-one” solution, but at the same time, a user also needs third-party tools like Ecwid, Woocommerce to add e-commerce features to it.
- Self-Hosted WordPress: Another version of WordPress is self-hosted. You can download such software from wordpress.org and install it on a web server. It’s open-source software and is a flexible tool that can be adapted as per the requirements of any web design project.
What’s best for e-commerce development- Shopify or WordPress?
- Pricing & Value
Let’s start the comparison between Shopify and WordPress with its cost. For Shopify, one needs to pay a monthly fee that basically ranged from $9 up to $299. After paying an amount, you will get access to unlimited storage that allows you to add a high number of products to your store. Now, you don’t need to worry about storage space. Shopify also has add-ons and extensions for which a user has to pay extra.
On the other hand, WordPress is a free software for which you don’t need to pay any penny. All you have to do is download the WordPress software and install it on a web server. This way, you can easily bring your website to the ground. WordPress allows you to do whatever you want to experiment with it. It’s flexible and also free as it’s an open-source platform.
- Templates
Both Shopify & WordPress works great in making your website look good, and we all better understand the importance of a great look at the website in terms of increasing your sales and a lot more benefits. Ad
When it comes to making themes and templates, then WordPress is always considered the most popular CMS in the world. This e-commerce development is loaded with a wide range of template options to choose from. But at the same time, not every template works best with your e-commerce site plugin and all themes with your app tools.
Talking about Shopify templates, they are super-easy to use; hence even a user from non-technical background can customize it as per their want with no trouble. Creating a template on WordPress is not difficult too.
In the customization game, WordPress will always remain the winner. But make sure that you are choosing a safe template from a reliable source.
- E-Commerce Tools
Shopify and WordPress, both website development platforms, are equipped with features that help you establish your online business or your dream website. Both have a lot to offer in this sales department.
With Shopify, you can take advantage of several amazing features that are specifically designed for building commerce websites. Saying clearly, then Shopify offers-
- Shopify allows users to organize, track, and manage their inventory.
- It has additional features of inserting in-depth product descriptions, images, & pricing details.
- Shopify includes the feature of setting up personal customer accounts for users. This account allows clients to share personal details.
- Equipped with category organizing tools that help users find the services or products they are looking for.
- It also has an email marketing tool to boost your sales.
- It also gives the ease of creating additional blogs and web pages that can increase your online presence.
- Customer and order detail tracking.
- Multiple staff login options.
On the other hand, WordPress has
- Geo-location tools. It gives the ease of tracking customer addresses and sending packages automatically to the right destination at the right time.
- Loaded with shipping variant options and pricing.
- Automated email templates that send messages to customers when they abandon their carts.
- You can create discounts and coupons to attract customers.
- Product review functions.
- A host of fantastic analytical tools, including Google Analytics to track growth trends, etc.
When the question arises, which e-commerce website development platform is best in terms of selling tools, then WordPress is dependent on your plugin choice. On the other hand, Shopify offers the same features and provides flexibility. It is also considered one of the most flexible hosting service provider options.
- SEO
Another well-known concept is search engine optimization (SEO), which is an essential part to rank your business high in the search engine results. It works as a great strategy and helps increase your business visibility in the online world. SEO works as a wonder for many online businesses as it helps boost website traffic, earn profits, generate more leads, and increase sales.
This is the magic of SEO because your business gets a push to reach a new level. In short, SEO is the best strategy to implement if you want to shine in the digital world for the long term.
But now the question is how Shopify or WordPress helps in improving the SEO strategy?
Shopify has the basic features of SEO, but they are reliable. Features like SSL for the overall website security, automatic XML sitemaps generation, and a lot more are there in this website development platform. But at the same time, with the Shopify store, you can’t get access to leading SEO solutions like Yoast, but several SEO plugins also deliver great SEO results. The main drawback of Shopify for SEO is that it makes cleaning URLs a difficult task to do, which gives a second thought before you choose this for your e-commerce development platform.
On the other hand, WordPress welcomes users with excellent SEO options that you won’t find in Shopify. Yes, we are pointing towards the most popular SEO plugin, Yoast. WordPress offers a Yoast tool that analyzes your content from an SEO perspective and provides solutions to improve your website ranking. You can even build SEO-enhanced sitemaps and canonical URLs to avoid any kind of duplicate content on social media. WordPress is rich with SEO features that every user or marketer strives to earn a good score in SEO.
What is the Best Option?
Decision making becomes easy when you will have the ideal reason for choosing between Shopify and WordPress. Let’s take a look-
Reasons to Choose Shopify
- Easy to use and set up as compared to WordPress.
- Shopify features its own payment solution.
- No need to outsource the Shopify features separately.
- Managing your website is easy with Shopify as there is not much technical knowledge is required.
- Less risk of being hacked.
- Shopify is responsible for your website security, whereas, with WordPress, you need to manage your own security.
- It is a simple, quick, and better option than WordPress.
- Provide better customer service, support, and guidance for beginners.
- A 14-days trial period is available with Shopify.
Reasons to Choose WordPress
- Open-source and free to download.
- Users can build any website using WordPress. You can say that this platform offers more flexibility than Shopify.
- It features a more sophisticated content management system.
- A wide selection of plugins is available with WordPress, including both premium and free.
- Several e-commerce strategies in WordPress are available.
- In terms of SEO, WordPress is better than Shopify as it offers access to Yoast.
- For multi-site projects or multi-language stores, WordPress is always considered the best choice than Shopify.
About the author: Rio is the founder and CEO of Webomaze Pty Ltd. He believes in serving the IT industry by offering the best possible solutions such as – eCommerce design and development. He works with the best WordPress developer with lots of knowledge and skills.