WooCommerce vs Shopify – to put it simply, these two are the most popular and easy-to-use eCommerce platforms available on the market. As you have decided to set up your own dropshipping store and can’t decide which is the best eCommerce platform for you.
Both WooCommerce and Shopify have their own set of strengths and can possibly be the perfect solution for you to build an eCommerce store with. And the best part of these platforms — you can do so all on your own, without any help from professional experts like web design and development experts or eCommerce experts.
I know you have a lot of questions in your mind related to the Shopify WooCommerce Dropshipping & eCommerce platform? and few are:
So, STOP THINKING and find your all answers to the above questions in this article with an in-depth comparison for WooCommerce vs Shopify for dropshipping. After reading this, you will know exactly which one is the best fit for your dropshipping business needs. So, let's start comparing Shopify vs WooCommerce to finalize which one is the best for dropshipping.
let make it easy to understand, I will break this WooCommerce vs Shopify comparison into six different components to help you decide the best for you:
Let’s begin the search for the best eCommerce platform for your dropshipping business now.
SHOPIFY PRICING:
Shopify is the most popular and lovable eCommerce platform in the market, Shopify provides you a single, out-of-the-box eCommerce solution with a single pricing package. You need to just sign up for Shopify, and then you can create your own Shopify store in few steps and you can launch your store on the same day.
and the best part, Shopify provides you a 14-day free trial, and if you like this platform, you need to pay after 14 days and then a monthly & yearly basis, depends on you choose your billing cycle.
Shopify plans start from $29/Month and it comes with Free Hosting, Free SSL, Free Facebook Shop option, but you need to pay $14/yr for a domain name.
WOOCOMMERCE PRICING:
WooCommerce is one of the most popular open-source eCommerce plugins. It's Free with WordPress CMS Platform. and obviously, WordPress is also a free open source cms platform. both are free!!! but there is no hosting included with WooCommerce. so you need a Best Hosting Plan for your WooCommerce/WordPress Store and a Domain Name.
If you want to use WooCommerce/WordPress, First, you need to buy a hosting plan and a domain name. You can buy hosting from any trusted hosting company, like Siteground provides WooCommerce hosting in $3.95/Month and Hostinger provides WordPress hosting @ $0.99/Month.
Most of the hosting companies provide a Free Domain Name and Free SSL Certificate with hosting plans. and you can use Facebook for Business plugin to create a Facebook shop.
SCALABILITY & MULTIPLE STORES:
If you want to scale your business, then WooCommerce is a smart solution for you in comparison with price and functionality. Like if you scale your business with Shopify and you upgrade your plan, then the next plan is $79 and $299 per month.
For multiple stores, If you want to create 10 dropshipping stores for different niches:
In short, here is the tabular comparison of Pricing for Woocommerce and Shopify:
| Pricing | WooCommerce | Shopify |
| Plans | Free with WordPress | $29 Per Month |
| Hosting | $0.99 (Hostinger) Check All Hosting Comparison >> | Included in plan Start Your Store>> |
| Domain | $8.99 (Hostinger) $3.99 (GoDaddy) Most Hosting Plans Provide FREE Domain | $14 Per Year |
| SSL | Included with most hosting | Included in plan |
Design and theme is the first impression of your online store and for eCommerce websites, the design is everything! No one trust in those websites who don't have a pleasant and clear design with promising features. That's the only reason, every website owner wants a beautiful looking website with trust features. and obviously speed is also mandatory features of any theme.
Woocommerce and Shopify both provide free themes. WooCommerce provides 500+ free themes on the WordPress dashboard. and Shopify provides only 10 Free themes. but free is always free with limited features.
and If you are looking for a premium theme, then WordPress/WooCommerce themes start with $35 and in the Shopify store, the cost is around $100 to $180, which is very high.
Before purchasing any premium themes must check these required features:
If you already selected a premium theme with all the above stores, It's great, otherwise, we have selected a few premium themes for your dropshipping store. Click here to check Best WooCommerce Dropshipping Themes and Best Shopify Themes for Dropshipping Stores.
Talking about features, Shopify has an App Marketplace where you can purchase apps and plugins that make Shopify a feature-rich eCommerce platform.
Shopify has over 1200 Apps. Most of the apps come with a free trial of 15 days, after which you pay a fixed amount every month for the app.
WooCommerce has over 75,000 plugins to choose from. As open-source software, WordPress is renowned for allowing third-party developers to create various extensions and plugins.
WooCommerce taps into that further by offering a myriad of interesting and exciting additions. Whether you want to easily edit aesthetics, sell on Facebook, ramp up email marketing techniques, understand user behavior or quite frankly do anything else, you'll be able to do so with this dynamic eCommerce platform.
Any feature you can think of, WooCommerce has a plugin for it! Shopping cart recovery? Follow-up emails? Affiliate program? You name it! Furthermore, almost all the plugins come with a free version.
The free version would be more than sufficient for us. Free for lifetime. If you want to buy the premium/pro version, you can buy it for a one-time fee.
Here are a few more features that come in the power-packed WooCommerce dropshipping platform:
WooCommerce has no monthly recurring charges like most Shopify Apps. Shopify comes nowhere close to WooCommerce when it comes to powerful themes and plugins as its backbone.
If you are a beginner and want to start an eCommerce business by own. then “Easy to Use” (also known as user friendly) is also a mandatory requirement, You need to choose a platform, where you can start easily and create a store without any expert guidance.
Here, Shopify and WooCommerce both are easy to use platforms, and thousands of courses & tutorials also available in the market.
Shopify is a 100% beginner-friendly platform, No need to handle hosting & domain issues, No worry about the updates of apps and plugins. It's fully automatic!!! but its a subscription-based model and The prices start from $29/month and go up to $299/month.
That’s a lot!
and if we come to WooCommerce/WordPress, WooCommerce is an open-source platform, it's 100% free with WordPress CMS. Further, it has a very easy and instinctive UI making it highly efficient even for a non-technical person. But You need to deal with Hosting & Domain, also you need to take care of CMS & Plugins updates.
Shopify is always the first choice for beginners. even you think about easy to use or setup time, Shopify is very easy to use and it takes less than 30 minutes to start a dropshipping store from scratch. You just need to sign up and you can set up your own Shopify dropshipping store.
For a step-by-step guide on how to set up a Shopify store, We have an amazing Shopify Dropshipping Course to create a Shopify store without any coding knowledge.
Or if you do not want to go through all the hassle of creating a store by yourself and setting up all the extra apps you will need for your store to run smoothly? You can always buy Shopify dropshipping store services and we will create a store as per your requirements.
and What about WooCommerce…
With WooCommerce, you can set up your WooCommerce store from scratch in just 40-50 minutes. Here’s another step-by-step WordPress WooCommerce Video Tutorial on How to Create an Ecommerce Store From Scratch.
Let's discuss more features of WooCommerce if you want to set up your second dropshipping store on Shopify, you need to start working on it from scratch again.
Whereas, on WooCommerce, you can duplicate the whole store with this plugin called Duplicator. Everything will be copied from one store to another in a couple of minutes.
That's Amazing!!! You have a new store in just 5 minutes!
Now at this point, both are winners, all depends on your requirement, budget, and future needs.
Just like the two sides of a coin, Alidropship and Oberlo have their own set of pros and cons. both tools provide 90% same task, Let's find the difference between both:
1. First, Alidropship is a dropshipping plugin for WordPress and WooCommerce. Oberlo is a Shopify app only for the Shopify platform.
2. AliDropship plugin is a one-time investment for the whole life. and also, the monthly expense is $5 per month for hosting and domain. Oberlo is also a free app with 500 products, but Shopify costs a minimum of $29 per month.
3. WordPress provides you all the required plugins for free with a lot more options to retain and gain more customers. But in Shopify, you will get a store and if you want more options, you need to pay for most apps.
4. Alidropship and Oberlo have 90% the same features, but Alidropship provides you some additional features like review import from aliexpress, multi-language switching and more…
5. As per my experience, Alidropship provides a more seamless process for importing products and auto ordering as compare to Oberlo. but it needs more setup time because of customization features.
6. AliDropship plugin allows you to have complete ownership of the store. This becomes very important if you want to move your store to a different web host or even if you wish to sell it.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the best way to increase the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results. No matter how good your storefront looks, no matter how reasonable your prices are, no matter how good your product is, if you can’t get to your potential customers, you are finished.
If you are thinking of long term planning of eCommerce business, SEO is the only way to get ranked in Google or search results.
WordPress provides lots of SEO plugins for free just like Yoast SEO. that helps you to make your WordPress site highly SEO optimized. It is easy to add and edit content as well as meta information to ensure that your pages have a high chance of ranking for specific keywords.
WordPress is much more SEO friendly than Shopify. This does not mean that you will suffer from an SEO point of view with Shopify.
Payment and Fees is also the most important factor of an eCommerce store. It all depends on the type of products or services you deal with, the end goal is always converting visitors and facilitating their subsequent transactions.
Shopify comes with its own payment processing capabilities, and WooCommerce, on the other hand, also happens to boast of a couple of distinct transaction privileges.
But, which of the two offers better payment processing options? Shopify or WooCommerce?
Shopify payments come with your own default payment processor, It's an inbuilt feature on your Shopify dashboard.
Shopify Payments a flexible processing solution, capable of handling a wide range of cards. In other words, your store should be able to accept pretty much all the major credit and debit card payments without any difficulties. Simply connect Shopify Payments to your bank account (This service is not available in India) and start accepting payments.
You have also lots of other options to use any other payment gateway like Paypal. and all payment process varies as per payment gateway you use.
WooCommerce also provides default card processing by availing the services by default. Just like Shopify, with WordPress, you have a lot more options to use any payment gateway like PayPal and Stripe.
WooCommerce provides a one-page checkout option that decreases your abandonment cart issue by removing your long checkout process.
You have 100's of free WordPress plugins to integrate any payment gateway, depending on your country or targeted audience.
when we compare Transaction fees on Shopify & WooCommerce, It's a little bit tricky because both are very flexible and reliable when it comes to handling transactions.
WooCommerce’s default selections, PayPal and Stripe. And the same applies to Shopify’s Shopify Payments is an incredibly powerful inbuilt service.
It's better to use Shopify built-in payment system (But its not available in India), then we need to use any other payment gateway like PayPal or other, But when we use other payment gateways, we need to pay an average of double Transaction Fees. like 2.0% to Shopify and 3.5% to Paypal.
But, when we use PayPal in WooCommerce, You need to pay transaction fees to Paypal only, there is no transaction fee in WooCommerce. That's a plus point of WooCommerce and I think this is a great reason to start with WooCommerce.
Shopify has great customer support. They are available 24×7 over the phone or chat to help you out if you get stuck anywhere.
On the other hand, WooCommerce has no official support for free products. that's the only reason most of the beginner choose Shopify. However, don’t be too quick to judge! WooCommerce has better support WordPress forums. Also, there are thousands of developers out there helping out people with their problems on various unofficial and official forums as well.
WooCommerce & Shopify both have own tutorials & knowledgebase for beginners. and also thousands of tutorials on Youtube and on Blogs.
If you stuck on any issue related to Shopify and WooCommerce. Just Google it, and you will find the solution to your problem in the top links.
As we are comparing WooCommerce vs Shopify, and you know that both have strengths and weaknesses. Let's explore which is the perfect fit for your dropshipping business.
Just to make things easier and faster to grasp, let’s take a closer look at the essential comparison of WooCommerce vs Shopify.
| WooCommerce | Shopify |
|---|---|
| Need Alidropship Plugin for Dropshipping (One-time payment for unlimited products) | Need Oberlo Shopify App for Dropshipping (Free up to 500 Products) |
| A free WordPress plugin and fully customizable eCommerce platform. | Subscription-based eCommerce platform starting from $29/month. |
| Free & Open-source plugin, you can modify and integrate your store freely without any limitations. | Less customization because of the Shopify restrictions & policies. |
| You are in complete control of your website data. | Shopify controls your site data. |
| Thousands of Free themes and designs available. | 8 Free themes and 65+ store designs available. |
| Forum support, ticket support, and many online blogs & tutorial. | Real-time email, chat and phone support. |
| SEO optimized and additional plugins like Yoast SEO | Limited SEO options. |
| 75,000+ plugins and extensions for creating a dynamic web store. (Free & Paid both options) | 1200+ apps which become paid after a free trial. |
| Highly scalable with reusable features and components. | Another dropshipping store has to be started from scratch. |
| You can create and maintain 2-5 dropshipping store in single hosting.* | You need to pay monthly fees for every store you create. Ex. for 5 stores you need to pay (5 x $29). |
Shopify is one of the easiest ways to start your online store. You can start your own store with just a few clicks. So, if you just want to create an online store as quickly as possible, go for Shopify.
However, for a successful dropshipping store I’d have to go for WooCommerce. Just because of AliDropship Plugin Features.
WooCommerce is an open-source plugin for WordPress CMS. It's a great choice for Dropshipping store and even for a big eCommerce web portal. It always gets the best of technology from the best developers in the market dedicated to improving it one step further.
WooCommerce gives you the huge benefit of SEO which is essential for long-term success in dropshipping business.
That's all about Shopify vs WooCommerce, and I think till now, you’ve got your answers and decided which is perfect for your online store.
Don’t forget to share your decisions and feedback about this blog! I really enjoy your thought and It motivates us to write more for you!!!
This post was published on March 24, 2020 3:19 PM
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View Comments
Great this post
Nice Vijay soni sar
Very informative and useful article. And an honest comparison.
Thanks for sharing valuable information.