So, you have an awesome product that you want to sell online… and there’s lots of marketing and planning that needs to happen in order to launch it. The biggest challenge you’ll face with selling online is that your potential buyers can barely interact with your product before making the decision to purchase or keep on scrolling. You can follow a perfect marketing strategy to a tee, but if you get visitors to your website and they don’t have a good experience, you can kiss that conversion goodbye. Before we get to one of the most searched questions, “Shopify vs WooCommerce: Which is Better?”, let’s talk a bit about the purpose of your site. As the digital experts we are here at Siva, we say this over and over again: “Your website is your foundation for the online world”. Putting in the time and effort to make sure your e-commerce store is solid before promoting it will save you time and money in the long run.
Think about it – if you want your users to:
- Find your website on Google
- Spend time on your website learning about your brand
- Find all the answers they need to make a purchase decision
- Purchase from your website
- Become a come-back customer
- Recommend your website and brand
– your goals are in the right place, but it’s going to take some time to figure out which platform works better for you. As your first step in the right direction, you need to get potential customers to your website and navigate them through a memorable, easy-to-use experience that makes their shopping fun and easy.
Shopify and WooCommerce have a lot of similarities, both acting as E-commerce platforms. Here’s what you can expect from both:
- Similar payment fees
- Customer support
- Trusted brand
- Easy store management
- Safe and secure
Shopify
Shopify is an alternative to WooCommerce. It includes a lot of features upfront, and requires users to pay a monthly fee based on what they need. They offer almost 60 themes to choose from, and it’s quickly becoming a known and trusted brand in Canada. Shopify is great for people who have no design or development skills and functions on a consistent monthly budget, which is their biggest selling point. That being said, it’s an easy way for your users to see that your Shopify website was made with minimal skill and next to no custom assets. Whether you’re comfortable with that or not, is your decision to make.
Shopify advertises that its themes are fully ‘customizable’, however the word customizable gets tossed around often in the world of web design. The question is, how customizable? Custom to what extent? The option to simply change the background colour would technically deem a site to be customizable, but (at least in our opinion), your creativity is restricted. More importantly, these sites are embellished templates; when search engines read their code, they recognize it as duplicate content along with other Shopify sites, which would land you potentially blacklisted from search results. There are more than 420 000 stores powered by Shopify – that’s a lot of duplicate content to compete with.
WooCommerce
WooCommerce is the most customizable E-commerce platform that exists. As development and web design experts, we’re huge advocates of authenticity which is why we love using WooCommerce. Here’s why:
We Build Custom
We believe in high quality and being able to create and design exactly what’s in our heads. We don’t like having our hands tied, and get excited to meet the challenge of a completely custom site, every time. Our sites strive for the best user experience and attaining the overall goal of our client, which is usually to sell.
It’s Versatile
WooCommerce is open-sourced which means it is supported by many different developers, and has the capabilities to integrate with multiple other technologies. It is extendable and adaptable. WooCommerce supplies more function than design, which is the beauty of the platform. The possibilities of what your website can look like are endless. Your brand is unique – your store should be too.
It’s Free 99
The best part? Just like WordPress, WooCommerce is free. So despite its premium feel, it’s completely free for anyone to download, use and modify. With WooCommerce, anyone can set up and run a professional online store from their WordPress website.
So, Where Does That Leave Us?
At Siva Creative, WooCommerce is our tool of choice over Shopify or any other shop builder. We build our websites on WordPress since it lets us bring our client’s vision to life. Our clients pay for their custom e-commerce website upfront and after that, they’re only responsible for paying hosting and domain fees, and for added plug-ins after the initial build depending on what they choose to use. Just like Shopify, WooCommerce offers thousands of free plugin solutions. Many of our clients who have a current Shopify site come to us for help with simple website updates since Shopfiy is difficult to use and comes with a serious learning curve. Not knowing how to upkeep your website can get costly – with WooCommerce, updating your website is a breeze thanks to the intuition of the platform.
We definitely suggest that you do your own research on both of these platforms to ensure you pick the right fit for your brand or business. Ask family, friends, and those in your network who have their own e-commerce businesses what tools they’ve used in the past to give you an honest, unbiased review.
Don’t hesitate to reach out to the team here at Siva to talk about which platform would be best for you, or for any other questions you might have!
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