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Shopify Vs WordPress: Which Is Best For Your Online Shop?
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November 9, 2022

Shopify Vs WordPress: Which Is Best For Your Online Shop?

Overview

Here’s a quick look at what each platform is for, what each does best, and some drawbacks to consider.

Shopify: For Sales-Oriented Businesses

Shopify is what’s known as a ‘dedicated eCommerce platform’, meaning its focus is on supporting online sales. Everything about the Shopify platform is designed to help businesses run their eCommerce business efficiently.

What Shopify Does Best

Shopify helps start-ups and small businesses quickly set up, launch, and run an eCommerce store with minimal effort. The platform has all the tools you need to sell on Shopify built-in, including:

  • Quick Start Online Store Wizard.
  • Built-in payments using Shopify Payments.
  • Built-in shipping label printing with shipping discounts.
  • Inventory, product data, and collection management tools.
  • Integration with dropship suppliers and print-on-demand suppliers.
  • Multi-channel selling on Amazon and eBay.
  • Social selling on Facebook and Instagram.
  • Built-in marketing tools for Facebook ads, email, and abandoned cart recovery.
  • Personal and in-store sales using Shopify POS.
  • 24/7 customer support to help you set up or troubleshoot.

Disadvantages

Because your site “lives” on the Shopify eCommerce platform, you’ll always have to deal with a few things, like Shopify’s monthly and per-transaction fees, weak blogging features, and other platform limitations.

Monthly cost: Shopify websites cost $29, $79, or $299 per month depending on your business needs, but a 14-day free trial lets you try Shopify risk-free.

Transaction fees: If you don’t use Shopify Payments to process payments for orders, you’ll be charged an additional fee per sale of 2%, 1%, or 0.5% depending on your store’s monthly plan. In addition, you must use Shopify Payments if you want to link in-store and POS sales to your Shopify eCommerce store.

Limited features: You can extend some of your store’s features using Shopify apps, but they often add to your monthly costs.

Blogging features: Shopify provides a basic blog with every Shopify store, but the options for creating, managing, and displaying content are very limited compared to content-centric platforms like WordPress.

WordPress: For Businesses That Want Versatility

WordPress is a content management platform that can be transformed into any kind of website. You can create an online store like Shopify’s eCommerce site, or you can create any kind of site you can think of. You can create a news and media website, an influencer blog, an education portal, and much more – then you can add a variety of online selling options using the WordPress eCommerce plugin.

What WordPress Does Best

A hallmark of the WordPress platform is versatility. WordPress itself allows you to create a content-driven website consisting of pages, images, videos, and blog posts. This can be extended through a variety of ‘plugins’ that add a wide range of features to any WordPress site, including e-commerce functionality.

Here are just a few of the many things you can do when you combine WordPress with an e-commerce plugin:

  • Create an online shop with a powerful, full-featured, single-user, or multi-user blog.
  • Add traffic-boosting features like online forums and video channels to your online shop.
  • Enable blog-based commerce and sell products directly from blog posts.
  • Turn any existing WordPress blog or website into an online shop.
  • Combine affiliate income and physical product sales on one website.
  • Sell both physical goods that are shipped and digital goods by downloading them.
  • Sell products through dropship suppliers and print-on-demand suppliers.
  • Sell access or membership to an education portal or members-only content.
  • Market events, take bookings, and sell tickets online or by download.
  • Market local services, accept bookings online, and request deposits or prepayments.
  • Offer partner advertising or guest posting to generate additional revenue.

Did you notice that some of Shopify’s most important features, such as a quick-launch website, built-in payments, in-person sales, and marketplace and social selling, are not included in this list? It’s not because these features aren’t available in WordPress – they are. However, unlike Shopify, they are not built into all WordPress eCommerce plugins. You need one that provides the sales features you need, and finding the perfect solution can take some work.

Disadvantages

The versatility that is WordPress’s strength also makes it a more complex platform to set up and maintain, especially compared to Shopify. Here are some things to consider when comparing Shopify and WordPress for your business needs:

Lots of moving parts: WordPress has more moving parts than Shopify’s tidy, all-in-one system. You’ll need to choose to host for your WordPress site, then install an eCommerce plugin, an eCommerce WordPress theme, and additional plugins for SEO, marketing, and other necessary features.

Variable costs: WordPress itself is free, as are many of the top-rated e-commerce plugins. However, monthly hosting, a good theme, and other plugins can add to the cost of setting up your site. You can certainly set up a WordPress online store for just the cost of hosting, starting from just USD 6.95 per month with dmt web hosting. However, most online sellers will eventually need plugins with advanced features, so expect to pay between $20 and $50 per month as your site grows.

Unlike Shopify, which manages its own secure servers, you need to ensure that your WordPress store is secure by using secure fork layer (SSL) encryption. This is provided by your hosting provider and is usually included in WordPress eCommerce hosting packages.

Ongoing maintenance: Every element of your WordPress site will need regular updates, including the WordPress and eCommerce plugin itself, other plugins, and the site theme. These are automatic, but updates and even the addition of new plugins can sometimes cause conflicts that you’ll need to resolve.

CONCLUSION

In this short review of Shopify and WordPress, Shopify is the clear winner in terms of ease of use, while WordPress beats Shopify in terms of versatility to build any kind of website you can dream of.