Ease of use, the ability to scale your e-commerce business, and the quality of support are some of the considerations you’ll make when choosing the platform you’ll use to set up your e-commerce business.
On top of these considerations, eCommerce trends such as the quality of the buyer’s experience and the rise in mobile shopping mean that the platform you choose needs to get the basics right. It must be flexible enough to keep up with trends shaping consumer behavior.
For most entrepreneurs, Shopify is a household name synonymous with e-commerce. On the other hand, WordPress is synonymous with content management.
However, both Shopify and WordPress are popular e-commerce platforms. Each platform offers a range of features for businesses of any size and headless commerce capabilities.
As an entrepreneur who wants to start selling your products online, you will come across each platform presented as the favorite for setting up your e-commerce website.
In this post, we’ll compare the two platforms and see how they stack against each other. We’ll help you make an informed decision about what platform to choose for your e-commerce business.
Shopify is a comprehensive eCommerce platform that offers a range of features and tools to help you create an online store and manage your business.
Some of Shopify’s key features include:
- An ecommerce frontend with a drag-and-drop store builder simplifies the process of creating your online store
- Intuitive and powerful analytics dashboards make it easy to manage your store and inventory
- Built-in shopping cart and payment processing, offering a wide range of payment gateways and shipping options for your buyers
- Customizable website themes allow you to create a store that's responsive on different devices
- You can sell both physical and digital products
- Third-party apps that extend the functionality and customization of your ecommerce store to improve the buyer’s experience.
- Customer support via email, chat, a vibrant community, and a knowledge base
WordPress is a versatile content management system that offers a range of plugins and themes to help you create an online store and customize your e-commerce site.
Here are some of the key features that WordPress comes with to help you build an e-commerce store:
- Powerful shopping cart and checkout features, plus a range of payment gateways
- Easy-to-use content management system to help you use content to drive traffic to your store
- Thousands of free and premium themes which allow you to customize your e-commerce store
- Create multilingual sites with custom post types for each region
- Create custom taxonomies to organize your products easily
- Easy to use: The platform has an intuitive dashboard and user-friendly tools to customize your online store and manage your inventory, products, and orders.
- Customization: Shopify allows you to customize your store with themes, apps, and plugins. You can customize your store to match the look and feel of your brand and give customers a unique shopping experience, even on mobile devices.
- Affordable: Shopify is a cost-effective platform. The basic plan starts at $1 per month, the Shopify plan goes for $69 per month, and the advanced plan goes for $299 per month.
- Additional costs: Running an e-commerce store using Shopify means that you’re going to deal with extra expenses in the form of transaction fees, apps, and credit card rates, all of which affect your profit margin.
- Limited customization: Compared to how well you can customize your WordPress themes for your e-commerce store, Shopify’s themes are limited in terms of customization.
- Hosted platform: You are limited in terms of the third-party applications and plugins you can add to your store. You can only use the apps and themes that Shopify approves.
- Cost of scaling: Shopify is only sometimes the best platform for scaling your business, as scaling can become prohibitively expensive.
For example, paying $2,000 per month for Shopify plus might hold back a company that wants to scale and have more freedom when it comes to customization.- Limited use and functionality: Many features that Shopify offers are limited, and some users may need to upgrade their plan to access more features.
It means you end up paying more for an extra feature or two that you need, while you can get that from other platforms at a lower cost or pricing tier.
Shopify is typically easier to set up and use, making it ideal for small businesses that need quick setup and don't have technical expertise.
Besides, if you’re just starting with e-commerce, Shopify allows you to set up your store so you can focus on selling your products without having to worry about the technical backend work that keeps your store up and running each day.
Customization: With WordPress, you can customize your e-commerce store to fit your brand’s look and feel. You can also easily add plugins and themes to extend the functionality of your store to suit your needs and preferences.
- SEO: WordPress optimizes search engine optimization (SEO), which helps you get found online more quickly.
- Security: WordPress is secure and regularly updated, so you can be sure your e-commerce store is safe from malicious attacks.
- Scalability: WordPress is highly scalable, meaning you can easily add more products and features to your store as your business grows.
- Community of users: WordPress has an extensive community that includes forums, blogs, and online documentation that can help you quickly troubleshoot any issues you may have while setting up your store.
- Multiple payment options: WordPress offers a variety of payment gateways, such as PayPal, Stripe, RazorPay, and Afterpay. You can also use WooCommerce to accept payments in multiple currencies.
- Steep learning curve: WordPress is more complex to set up and manage than Shopify and may require some technical knowledge. While the platform allows you to write code and customize different aspects of your e-commerce store, you need to know how to code. If not, then you may have to settle for some pre-made themes and plugins rather than being able to customize the look and feel of your store completely.
- Security concerns: WordPress is an open-source platform, meaning anyone can access and modify the code. It can lead to a higher risk of security vulnerabilities and hackers targeting your store.
- Plugin compatibility: WordPress also offers plugins, some of which aren’t always compatible with each other, meaning that if you install them, your online store will slow down or crash completely.
- SEO issues: WordPress is not always the most SEO-friendly platform, despite having a powerful suite of plugins to support your SEO efforts. It makes it harder to optimize your store for search engines and rank higher in the search results.
- Hosting costs: Given that WordPress is a self-hosted platform, you will have to pay for managed WordPress hosting costs. It will add to the overall cost of running your e-commerce store.
WordPress offers more control and customization options. If you’ve already used Shopify and want to scale but want to control your spending on the tools you’re using, then using WordPress will give you more control and the ability to customize your online store for a unique look and feel.
Shopify is a hosted e-commerce platform designed to make it easy to create and manage an online store.
It provides a suite of themes and templates to help you create a professional-looking storefront, manage payments, and track orders.
WordPress, on the other hand, is a content management system that provides a platform for creating websites, including online e-commerce stores, blogs, and other web applications.
Unlike Shopify, WordPress is an open-source platform that is free to use and customize.
It depends on your needs and preferences.
Shopify is explicitly designed with e-commerce in mind, making it an excellent choice for entrepreneurs and small businesses looking to create an online store without a steep learning curve.
WordPress is a versatile platform that you can use for e-commerce, but it may require more technical knowledge and customization to set up your store.
Shopify is considered a more secure platform than WordPress due to its built-in security features, such as automated backups, fraud detection, and PCI compliance.
Additionally, Shopify offers dedicated support for security-related issues, which is not available with WordPress.
WordPress is a secure platform for e-commerce as long as you take the proper steps to secure your WordPress website through frequent updates, strong passwords, and reputable security plugins.
A good e-commerce plugin will also provide additional security measures. Besides, plugins that come with WordPress might compromise your store’s security if you don’t constantly update them.
Shopify is generally better than WordPress for SEO as it offers more advanced features such as clean URLs and optimized page loading speeds.
Shopify has built-in SEO features such as automatic redirects and automated meta tags. Shopify also allows for more customization for online store owners looking to optimize their content for SEO.
On the other hand, Wordpress is an excellent platform for SEO as it is highly optimized for search engines.
It has clean and SEO-friendly URLs, optimized HTML code, and built-in support for popular SEO plugins like Yoast SEO, All in One SEO Pack, Rank Math, and SEO Ultimate.
Wordpress also makes it easy to create and manage meta tags, titles, and descriptions. Finally, Wordpress also has several social media plugins, which help to increase site visibility and improve SEO rankings.
Ultimately, the best platform for ecommerce will depend on the unique needs of your business.
Shopify and WordPress are both great options for e-commerce, but it depends on the business needs and goals.
Shopify is a hosted platform that simplifies the setup and management of an online store. At the same time, WordPress is a more flexible, open-source platform requiring more technical knowledge and customization.