PRICING & FEATURES MATRIX
| Shopify | Woocommerce | |
| Monthly Fee | $29, $79, $299 and Shopify Plus | Free |
| Hosting | Free | Shared Host $10/month, VPS $40/month and up |
| SSL Certificate | Free | Free – With Let’s Encrypt |
| Credit Card Processing Fees | 2.9% – 2.4% + 30 cents | 2.9% + 30 cents |
| Multi Currency Payments | Yes – With Multiple Stores | Yes – With Custom Development |
| Multiple Languages | Yes – Apps or Multiple Stores | Yes – Variety of Options |
| PCI Compliance | Yes | Yes – With Certain Processors |
| Design | Free Themes + Custom Options | Free Themes + Custom Options |
| Blog | Yes – Limited Compared to WP | Yes |
| Uploading Products | Yes – via CSV | Yes – via CSV, XML |
| Discount Codes | Yes – but only 1 code per purchase | Yes |
| Shipping | Yes – Requires Customization | Yes – Requires Customization |
| Cart & Checkout Page | Cart Editable, Not the Checkout | Both Fully Editable |
| Developer Options | Yes – Experts Program | Yes – Experts Program |
| Quickbooks Integration | Yes – with Apps | Yes – with Plugins |
| Salesforce Integration | Yes – with Apps | Yes – with Plugins |
| Taxes | Yes | Yes |
| SEO | Yes – with limited Apps | Yes – plenty of Plugins |
Hosted Platform vs Self Internet hosting
Let’s begin the comparability off by discussing how internet hosting works with each Woocommerce and Shopify. We are speaking about Shopify vs Woocommerce, this article will compare both. With Shopify the reply is straightforward, they may host your web site for you and it’s included within the month-to-month value you pay of $29, $79 or $299.
With Woocommerce you have to to discover a internet hosting firm to your new web site. We advocate getting a digital personal server (at a minimal) as a result of when you go for a shared host (these are usually cheaper like $10/month or much less) there’s a stronger probability your website might get hacked.
SSL Certificates
What’s a SSL certificates? SSL certificates permits you to transmit encrypted transactions through the HTTP protocol, it provides the “s” on the top in order that your URLs all change into HTTPS. Shopify features a SSL certificates with their hosted retailer so there isn’t a want so that you can set one up by yourself.
When establishing Woocommerce you’ll want to buy a SSL certificates. These usually value about $70/12 months, however only in the near past a brand new firm sprang up known as Let’s Encrypt that means that you can set up a free SSL certificates and automate it in order that it will get renewed every year (it is a large plus!).
Credit score Card Processing Charges
Each Shopify and Woocommerce provide comparable charges for fee processing. With Shopify you should use Shopify Funds to course of bank card transactions until you wish to pay an additional .5% – 2.zero% to make use of your personal exterior funds gateway. You need to use your individual fee processor and pay zero% for gateway charges with Shopify in the event you improve your account to Shopify Plus, that’s a a lot greater stage month-to-month plan that we are going to focus on additional on on this comparability.
I’m going to decide on Stripe for the Woocommerce fee processor. Stripe could be very simple to work with, has good charges and a robust API (which turns out to be useful if you wish to do customized growth work). You would additionally use Paypal, however working with their API isn’t any picnic and accepting bank card funds through Stripe is far simpler than doing the identical factor with Paypal.
| Shopify | Woocommerce (Stripe) | |
| Credit Card Rates Online | 2.9 – 2.4% + 30 cents | 2.9% + 30 cents |
| Credit Card Rates in Person | 2.7% – 2.4% + 0 cents (using Shopify POS) | 2.9% + 30 cents (using Stripe app) |
General you possibly can see the bank card processing charges are in the identical ballpark with each Shopify and Woocommerce.
Shopify vs Woocommerce
Multi Foreign money Funds
Shopify doesn’t have a sublime resolution right here. The best means to do that is to setup a number of “clone” shops within the nations you need to promote in as a way to present the native foreign money value in your checkout web page. It’s essential to notice that Shopify will solely present one forex per retailer in your checkout web page and you’re unable to edit your checkout web page. For those who improve to Shopify Plus you may add clone shops to promote in a number of nations and you too can edit your checkout web page.
A technique to assist mitigate the multi foreign money downside in Shopify is to arrange geo IP location and pop up a discover to direct your buyer to your different Shopify website. For instance for those who decide that a Candian buyer is in your US website you possibly can create a popover that may allow them to know they need to navigate to your Canadian retailer to see your retailer within the correct foreign money.
With Woocommerce you will have nearly limitless customizations and establishing multi forex websites is feasible. It is going to require customized programming to set every little thing up however there aren’t any inherent limitations.
A number of Languages
For Shopify retailers that need to arrange their retailer with a number of languages there are two main choices: select an current app or arrange a number of shops (as lined within the part above about currencies). Langify is a well-liked multilingual Shopify app that can do computerized language detection (primarily based on IP tackle) as effectively permit for language switching forwards and backwards.
Woocommerce can help websites with a number of languages and you’ve got a couple of choices. You could possibly set up Google Translate with a drop down possibility to modify languages and whereas that is the best implementation, Google Translate is notoriously inaccurate. The higher route is to have your content material translated by knowledgeable and setup your web site so there are drop down choices for customers to pick completely different languages. You’ll be able to put every of the languages on a separate sub area if you wish to preserve every of the totally different languages clear and separate from the principle website.
PCI Compliance
Shopify is PCI compliant and authorized as Stage 1 PCI DSS compliant. With Shopify your retailer is robotically PCI compliant and their certification covers your retailer.
With Stripe you’ll need to ensure you are compliant with the PCI Knowledge Safety Requirements (PCI DSS). The best approach to do this is to setup Stripe Checkout because it meets the necessities and safety constraints of the Self-Evaluation Questionnaire (SAQ), SAQ A, by performing all transmission of delicate cardholder information inside an IFRAME served off of a stripe.com area that’s managed by Stripe.
Design
There are oodles of themes in your Shopify retailer, each free and paid. In case you are simply beginning out with your online business, selecting a free theme may help you get rolling. In case you have an current enterprise and need to begin out with Shopify you’ll be able to rent an company to create a customized design and develop a retailer that matches precisely what you want.
Like Shopify WordPress additionally has a wide range of free and paid themes so that you can select from. Woocommerce would require extra customization of the acquisition path than Shopify and you will want a developer to assist with that, we’ll cowl that in additional element in a bit beneath.
Weblog
Shopify comes with a in-built running a blog engine that may be enabled and styled to let you begin creating posts about your enterprise. The wealthy textual content editor that Shopify makes use of isn’t as strong as what WordPress has setup and you can see many individuals have points with it. The HTML markup that Shopify’s weblog creates could make it tough to work with particularly if you’re coming from utilizing WordPress as your common weblog.
WordPress is nicely often known as a strong running a blog platform and could be very simple to make use of. There are variety of plugins and customizations you can also make to WordPress to get setup and running a blog together with your Woocommerce retailer.
Importing Merchandise
Shopify means that you can bulk add merchandise from a CSV file. You’ll need to incorporate the next data: Deal with (distinctive title for the product), Title, Physique (which is the outline of the product), vendor, kind, tags (these enable for extra search performance on the location), choices, value, pictures, skus, variants and rather more.
With Woocommerce you possibly can import merchandise through CSV or XML file and even CSV through AJAX. There are a selection of plugins that you should use that can assist you import your product catalog when you’ve got created it some place else or you’re migrating platforms. Woocommerce additionally has a CSV product import suite for importing merchandise with costs, descriptions, pictures, meta fields and you’ll even create customized fields relying on what attributes about your merchandise you need to retailer.
Low cost Codes and Coupons
On Shopify you’ll be able to create low cost codes for a greenback quantity, a proportion off or at no cost delivery. You possibly can create a number of low cost codes and keep them through your Shopify dashboard. Nonetheless a buyer can’t use multiple low cost code at a time on Shopify and this is usually a painful scenario. Say you need to supply free transport and 30% off as 2 totally different coupon codes a buyer can’t use each of these throughout checkout on the similar time.
Woocommerce has a dashboard for managing and including coupon codes. You may create cart reductions, for instance if the client purchases greater than 2 of 1 merchandise they get a reduction of 15% on the whole buy. You may arrange product reductions for mounted quantities ($20 off) and you’ll create share reductions. As well as you possibly can create free transport coupons (very fashionable) and you may restrict what number of instances a coupon is utilized in complete or per buyer.
Delivery
You’ll need to determine which carriers you need to use to ship your product, UPS, Fedex, widespread carriers, and many others. When you resolve that you want to take into consideration how you’re going to handle your shipments (printing packing slips, monitoring stock, and many others). A lot of our purchasers are very pleased with Shipstation and use them to handle shipments throughout all their channels: Amazon, eBay, Walmart, Jet, their web site, and so on.
With Shopify you possibly can simply combine ShipStation (just remember to don’t your stock standing set to “fulfilled” in Shopify or ShipStation received’t sync) or you possibly can manually observe your shipments offline. Subsequent you should set your transport charges and that is the place Shopify begins to have some points. You may set your transport charges by state, however if you wish to get extra granular and set your charges by zip code you will want to put in an app and improve your Shopify account to the $79/month for the service calculated delivery characteristic.
With Woocommerce you’ll be able to totally customise your transport settings through third social gathering plugins or you’ll be able to customise your transport charges, charges, expenses and so forth by customized coding every little thing. You may get delivery charges from UPS, USPS, print transport labels and way more with Woocommerce.
Cart & Checkout Web page
Each Shopify and Woocommerce will allow you to customise the buying cart web page, customise buttons, colours, structure, and many others. With Woocommerce you may customise the checkout web page totally, however on Shopify you’re restricted from updating the checkout web page. This could be a drawback for Shopify shops that need to show totally different currencies (as described within the forex part). The best choice right here is to arrange “clone” shops in Shopify and even higher is to improve to Shopify Plus and you may absolutely configure the checkout web page the way you want it.
Developer Choices
In case you want a developer for Shopify, the perfect place to look is the Shopify Consultants web page. If you’re a big ecommerce retailer you’ll want to contemplate reaching out to a Shopify Plus Knowledgeable.
Woocommerce additionally has an skilled program, you’ll be able to search by company, their service and product specializations and the challenge scope.
Quickbooks Integration
Shopify retailers can set up the Intuit Quickbooks app to sync up Shopify with Quickbooks on-line. When you join the two, it can save you hours of labor every work coming into in gross sales, tax and buyer knowledge that may mechanically be ported over to Quickbooks. You’ll need to decide on a date vary for the orders you need to export from Shopify to Quickbooks after which you may set how usually you need to sync your orders, every day, weekly or month-to-month.
Woocommerce additionally has a Quickbooks extension to sync your accounting knowledge regularly. You too can matchup up prospects by identify and firm in Shopify and Quickbooks so you’ll be able to be sure to are sending over the proper info.
Salesforce Integration
If you’re seeking to maintain observe of your Shopify clients in Salesforce, you may think about using the Zapier app. You’ll be able to add prospects as contacts in Salesforce and observe the merchandise they’ve bought in Shopify. Little bit of warning with Zapier in that relying on how you might be utilizing Salesforce (and Shopify), the mapping could not work out easily. We had a buyer the place we needed to create a customized cron job to sync up the information between Salesforce and Shopify to ensure all the pieces was working appropriately.
Zapier additionally has a an app for Woocommerce that capabilities very equally to the Shopify one. You may create triggers and actions for various occasions: when a brand new account is created, new job constructed, new contact and so forth.
Taxes
Shopify will observe and present tax data primarily based in your retail location. Shopify doesn’t robotically arrange tax charges for international locations outdoors of your house nation, it’s as much as you to set that price up. In case you are a Shopify Plus buyer you may get entry to Avalara tax charges, that are rather more correct and complete than the usual Shopify tax charges.
Woocommerce has settings the place you’ll be able to allow tax calculation and the show of taxes in your checkout web page. There are a number of choices in Woocommerce for taxes, you may change the way you calculate the taxes, the way you show the charges, totals, and many others. You possibly can even add your personal tax charges with Woo, there’s lots of flexibility in the way you set all the things up.
website positioning
There are loads of issues that go into search engine optimization: web site structure, content material, photographs, video, social alerts, backlinks and rather more. Nearly all of your rankings will come from areas which you could management, including distinctive content material, getting hyperlinks and making a web site that’s worthy of being ranked by Google. So far as web site structure Shopify does all of the issues that you should create and rank a web site. WordPress has a head begin with general website positioning and particularly with their thriving plugin ecosystem. The Yoast search engine optimisation for WordPress plugin has tons of options, key phrase and content material evaluation, meta tag configurations, breadcrumbs, sitemaps and rather more. Shopify has some search engine optimisation apps, however none as complete and established as Yoast – in time it wouldn’t shock me if Yoast developed an app for Shopify.