In E-commerce Development
Shopify Vs WooCommerce 2021 - which is the best ecommerce platform for your business? - read the full article about woocommerce 2021, E-commerce Development and Online store creation from The Fastnet Agency on Qualified.One
Youtube Blogger
now there are so many decisions that you need to make when starting an ecommerce store but one of the most important ones is what platform to build your store on now the two most popular platforms at the moment are shopify and woocommerce so in this video were going to dig deep into shopify and into woocommerce to see which is the best option for your business so for the best advice on how to grow your ecommerce store quickly and profitably subscribe to this channel and hit the bell as well so youre notified i get a new video out every week [Music] so im sarah im founder of the fastener agency and we help exciting up-and-coming ecommerce stores to promote themselves online and to gain new customers so follow me for more great advice on how to grow your ecommerce brand so shopify and woocommerce are definitely the two biggest players at the moment in the e-commerce marketplace in terms of the platforms that you need to build your ecommerce website on now both of them have scaled to huge e-commerce stores both of them are good options when it comes to building your ecommerce site but actually which one is the best for you now like most things in life there are pros and cons to both of these platforms so were gonna really dig deep into what these platforms have to offer to see which is the best fit for your business so lets just start with a bit of a basic now what exactly are these platforms well to start off with shopify is effectively more of a service than a website builder so what shopify do is they offer you a ready-built store service which you subscribe to on a monthly basis you pay a fee every month and that gives you a platform on which to to build your store now theyve got the basic store already there its already built all the functionalities in it but you can customize it to your brand and to your to your needs so its really a ready-made option straight out of the box and you can do some customization to make it your own woocommerce on the other hand is what we call a self-hosted platform that means that the makers of woocommerce deliver the software as an open source so anybody can access it you dont have to pay to download woocommerce you run it on your own wordpress website so this means you can plug this straight into your wordpress site now wordpress is also self-hosted so that means that you can effectively host your own e-commerce store by yourself without any third-party interference now there are advantages and disadvantages to both of these options so lets dig deep initially into the main pros and cons of both shopify and woocommerce now before i start to dig into this do you run an ecommerce store are you looking at whether to use shopify or woocommerce or maybe youve tried them both id love to hear your experience pop a comment down below and lets get the conversation going so yeah lets start by going through the pros and cons of shopify so the first thing is that shopify is a hosted software as we mentioned before this means that shopify own it control it they run all the servers they run the platform all you do is you sign up and you set up your own store now this is both an advantage and a disadvantage the advantages is that if you havent got any development experience if you dont know what youre doing it means that you can get up and running very quickly without any um need to understand things like coding and hosting and other things like that the disadvantage is that it means that shopify have much more control over your site they set certain parameters like for example um transaction fees um with various other things it means that its less flexible than woocommerce so thats both an advantage and a disadvantage of shopify another advantage of shopify is the fact that they have 24-hour support so because its a hosted platform because its a service theres always somebody there behind the scenes ready to help you out if something goes wrong which of course if youve got your woocommerce website isnt necessarily the case now one of the big advantages of shopify if youre looking to sell elsewhere as well as on your actual website is the fact that it has multi-channel integration so you can tap into things like amazon and ebay so you can control stocks between various different locations now this is also something that you can do on woocommerce um but its a little bit more difficult to set up and well go into some of the reasons for that later what are the main cons of shopify well i would say the number one conrad in many ways is the fact that they uh have a standard transaction fee over and above anything that you would pay to your payment gateway provider this means as well as charging a monthly fee shopify take a percentage or whatever your transaction fee is at the cart which can be costly if youre looking to build a bigger store with a large number of transactions also because shopify is is very much controlled by shopify it controls what sort of apps you can plug into that store now that means that some of these apps can be quite expensive youre a bit more limited than you are with more of an open source solution like wordpress okay so now lets dig a bit deeper into woocommerce so looking initially at the pros now one of the big pros of woocommerce is that there is limitless customization literally the sky is your limit because its open source because you can plug lots of other things into woocommerce and into wordpress you can literally do whatever you like with it provided youve got the development skills to do that so another pro for woocommerce is the scalability again because its open source you know you can really grow your site as as big as you want um you know providing you can get good server integration so your server is capable of dealing with a larger site you can effectively have unlimited products unlimited transactions using your woocommerce store and finally its its excellent value for money you know woocommerce is effectively free to use of course youve got other costs associated with that you need you need to pay for somebody to host your site um you might well need to pay for plugins you might wont need to pay development costs especially if youll come into this without any sort of development knowledge at all but effectively is a very very comprehensive completely free of charge system to use uh which of course is a is a big advantage so what are the cons of woocommerce well the biggest con is that its not particularly user friendly in terms of getting it up and running now the actual i would say the actual dashboard so once your your site is set up and ready to use the actual dashboard is relatively easy to use you can control your orders you can tour your products all of the things youd expect to see in an e-commerce store but in terms of actually getting it set up you do need a reasonably high level of knowledge of coding and wordpress and hosting and security and all of the other things that you need in order to set up your your ecommerce store successfully so that is a big con um if youre not in that position okay so now weve covered the main pros and cons im just going to go through each of the individual features of both shopify and woocommerce and do a bit of a compare and control so you can get a better idea of exactly what each has to offer now as we look through these well see if there are any clear winners between woocommerce and shopify and then at the end well do a little summing up to see which is the best solution for what type of business so as weve already discussed shopify is a ready-made system so when were looking at ease of use shopify definitely wins hands down over woocommerce when it comes to getting you set up in the first place with shopify you literally you set up account you log in you choose your theme and unless you really want to customize your site very finitely its basically ready to go youre ready to start trading so definitely ease of use shopify wins hands down when it comes to controlling your over the longer term so managing products managing inventory um you know processing customer orders et cetera et cetera so the day-to-day running of your shop i would say that shopify and woocommerce are pretty evenly matched in terms of even ease of use so initial setup definitely shopify if youre just looking to get something off the ground very quickly is the winner day-to-day theyre pretty even so second point build time how long does it take to get your store up and running well as weve already covered shopify youre pretty much there the minute you set up your account depending on how much customization you want to make depending on how much you want to optimize your store to around your branding and around particular requirements you can basically be up and running within a few hours really once youve got your products uploaded um woocommerce much longer build time youve got other things to consider first of all you need to get your hosting sorted then you need to get wordpress installed on that hosting then you need to plug woocommerce into your wordpress install and then you need to start looking at any sort of additional plugins that you need in order to get up and running including getting things like payment gateway set up so definitely woocommerce a much lengthier more in-depth build process than building a store on shopify so yeah for build time shopify is a definite winner hands down so design um which store is easier to to design and to make your own um now really for both of these platforms to an extent the sky is your limit when it comes to design with shopify if you know what to do if you know how to customize themes you can have a fairly infinite range of design features on your site and the same goes for woocommerce the reality is that if youve got a good developer that knows what theyre doing in terms of building out a design that you want then you can pretty you can do infinitely different things using both shopify and woocommerce however i would say that if you want a nice design just out of the box you just want to be able to log in and select a theme that you quite like and then just upload your logo and your colors and your fonts and so on and so forth to make it feel like your brand then shopify has the easiest option to do that so if youre not working with a specialist wordpress or sorry especially this website developer um and youre looking to get this up and running yourself and you just want to be able to style an existing design to fit around your theme then shopify is a definite hands-down winner on that one so features now this is an interesting one because again it so much depends on your development knowledge and experience so in terms of out of the box features shopify again is a definite winner it has all of those things that you really need as part of an e-commerce store it has abandoned cart sequences it has discount systems and codes it has pop-up features already in there it has a certain level of email marketing integration it has a certain level of social media integration all of these things that you need to run a successful ecommerce store are already built in theyve already thought about it and thats great so you know in terms of getting everything you need up and running very very quickly shopify definitely has you know that all built in and ready to go woocommerce will be able to do all of those things and much much more there is so much out there you can plug into woocommerce its almost infinite as to how much you can plug into woocommerce but it does involve you actively going out there and doing it its not just an out of the box solution so you need to go and look for those various plugins that will give you additional functionality and quite a lot of the time youll need to pay for those additional plugins so woocommerce themselves have a range of paid plugins that you can buy and install and there are numerous third-party plugin providers that will do the same so again in terms of features as a purely an out of the box solution shopify is the hands-down winner so what about plugins and integrations if youre looking to do something a little bit different if youre looking to do something a little bit more bespoke which is the best option to use now shopify all of those advantages of being an out-of-the-box solution kind of come to a bit of an end here because it is an out-of-the-box solution its designed to be fairly generic and applied to most store owners which for most stores is absolutely fine but if youre looking to do something a bit different if youre looking to do something really a bit bespoke with your store for whatever reason that might be youll find that there are more limitations with shopify with woocommerce on the other hand you can plug in numerous different plugins you can create your own plugins you can create your own integrations because its all self-hosted you have no limitation in terms of features and integrations that you can plug into your site so definitely in terms of extending your sites functionality and creating bespoke features for your website woocommerce is a definite winner now marketing tools of course every e-commerce website needs to plug in certain tools in order to ensure that youre successful with your marketing and these mainly involve social media and email marketing now as we previously discussed shopify has some brilliant out of the box features uh for things like email marketing and social media so shopify again as an out of the box solution is definite hands down winner woocommerce has a very comprehensive open api system you can plug in numerous different things into it you can build your own bespoke functionality with woocommerce so again in terms of more sophisticated marketing solutions where youre maybe looking at a number of different triggers and reactions youre maybe looking to build in crm systems and tracking systems then woocommerce can be a winner in this sector provided you know what youre doing so for more comprehensive marketing where you need to have that sort of level of bespoke functionality then woocommerce comes out stronger so payment gateways now both woocommerce and shopify offer over 100 different types of payment gateway the most common being things like paypal and stripe um and square and theres a few others out there im sure you can name your favorites um so both of these platforms allow you to plug in numerous different payment gateways they both have that functionality fairly well out of the box so theyre pretty evenly matched from that perspective i would say the main quite fundamental difference as we mentioned before between uh woocommerce and shopify when it comes to this feature is that shopify unless you use their payment system which is i think called shopify payments unless you use their system they charge you an additional two percent fee at the checkout um for any transaction that you that you use using your shopify store whereas woocommerce do not charge you a transaction fee youll pay your pr payment gateway provider a fee but you wont pay a transaction fee director woocommerce so again if youre processing a lot of transactions here that will be a big factor to consider in terms of your subscription settings uh shopify has a number of different levels of subscription and i know that for the highest level of subscription they do uh waiver the transaction fee so if you get to a certain size that fee will be waived but you are then paying quite a large monthly fee to be using shopify so its its a bit of a chicken and egg sort of scenario so in this instance in my perspective from the point of payment gateways i would say that woocommerce was a winner there because of that lack of transaction fees okay so lets have a look at seo now as you probably know seo search engine optimization its really important for ensuring that youre building a profitable e-commerce store um because it means that people can find your products online both woocommerce and shopify offer a range of plugins for seo the most popular one on woocommerce is yoast which is widely known for being a very effective seo plugin there are a couple of other ones um available on shopify as well theyre pretty evenly matched in this sector to be honest with you shopify has a good level of setup from an seo perspective as does woocommerce um so i would say in this theyre 50 50 theres no real difference in terms of seo optimization between woocommerce and shopify in my opinion okay and finally we get to security obviously a big thing if youre dealing with customer data and information you want to make sure that your site is secure now shopify here is going to be the hands down winner if you dont know what youre doing shopify has those security parameters built in its all controlled by shopifys or managed by shopify it means that they have responsibility effectively for your sites security so if you dont know what youre doing in this sector and you want to hand that responsibility over to somebody else then shopify is a really good option here and theyve got a very high level of security built in ready made straight out of the box when you set up an account now woocommerce that security is down to you so youve got to make sure that you choose a secure server that youve got an ssl certificate in place um that youre regularly updating your plugins and that youre scanning your site for any malware and bits and pieces like that now that means that its all in your own hands so you know if shopify had a mass hacking attempt you know they could well take your website down while they well they sorted that out and you would have no control over that whereas if youre running your own security you have complete control over that you know you can make sure that youre set up to the best possible way and you can keep that monitoring in place but it means that its its your responsibility so youve got to know what youre doing and youve got to make sure that youre on top of it so again pros and cons but i would say that if youre concerned about security and you dont know what youre doing in terms of keeping your site secure then shopify is an obvious winner so with all that said which is the best shopify or woocommerce so i would say that shopify is for you if you want 24-hour support from a customer care team if you want security and other things like that taking care of it for you if you dont know what youre doing in terms of site development or if you do know what youre doing but you want a fairly out-of-the-box solution that you can just customize to your own needs and if you want um really good out-of-the-box templates that you can just sort of slightly customize to make um into your own brand and your own theme then i would say shopify is for you its a great out-of-the-box solution it will cost you potentially a little bit more because youre obviously paying for somebody else to build and maintain all that infrastructure for you but it is definitely a really good option if you want to get set up yourself you want to get up and running quickly um and youve got a fairly standard e-commerce store that doesnt need any sort of bespoke unusual functionality however you should consider using woocommerce if youve got particular functionality thats a little bit unusual um something that you want to set up thats not quite your standard e-commerce and you need to create a bespoke kind of level of functionality for that and woocommerce gives you plenty of flexibility to do that its also really good if youre looking to scale your store online infinitely you know shopifys plans go up incrementally as you scale as you add more products as you add more customers so youre kind of very much reliant on on their charges scaling as your store scales now with woocommerce that doesnt quite directly relate i mean youve obviously got to make sure that youre maintaining a server and you might need to upgrade your server as your store gets bigger and busier and youll certainly need to potentially look at upgrading things like security and so on and so forth but the reality is that thats all within your control and if you know what youre doing you can definitely reduce your costs by having a woocommerce site so basically if youre technically more competent or if youve got somebody that is technically more competent a good web developer that youre used to working with um and youve got some bespoke requirements then definitely woocommerce is the best option for your business so what is my personal preference well my personal preference always depends on the situation if one of my clients comes to me and says look i want to get this set up myself or i want to get it set up quickly or i dont have any particularly bespoke requirements and im happy to pay the monthly transaction fees then i tend to recommend shopify if somebody comes to me with a bit more of an unusual um example of how they want to build their ecommerce site if it looks like theyre going to need better functionality later on down the line if they want to really start building a blog around their um around their e-commerce website as well so they want those blogging features or if theyre looking to build an e-commerce site into a wider website i would generally recommend woocommerce to do that so thats it thats my summary of woocommerce versus shopify id love to hear your opinion pop a comment down below so if youre looking to advertise your store on facebook or instagram then i did a great video all about this you can check that out over here and if youre looking to scale your ecommerce store quickly then i did a great video all about e-commerce growth strategies so check that out over here so i released a new video all about growing your ecommerce fan every thursday so hit subscribe hit the bell and that means youll get notified every thursday when i release a new video thanks for watching
The Fastnet Agency: Shopify Vs WooCommerce 2021 - which is the best ecommerce platform for your business? - E-commerce Development