WooCommerce vs Shopify

Over the last few years, it has been noticed that selling goods online is much more efficient as compared to traditional selling methods, so small startups, companies, merchants etc are interested in selling goods online. Online selling and purchasing can be done using an e-commerce platform but it is really difficult for individuals to make e-commerce stores as it requires a lot of skills and resources. Hence to solve this problem, many organizations have provided e-commerce building platforms which make it easy to create e-commerce stores with advanced functionalities. Two such platforms are WooCommerce and Shopify which provides different services to build e-commerce stores for selling goods online.

WooCommerce is defined as an online platform for e-commerce activities, it is designed on WordPress and provides highly customized features. It is an open-source platform and the company credited for the development of this platform is  Automattic. It was first launched in 2011 and its stable version was released in 2022. The authors of this platform are Mike Jolley and James Koster.

Advantages of WooCommerce

• It is completely free which makes it first choice for the customers who does not have enough budget.
• It provides a large number of pre built store designs which can be easily customized.
• It has better response time on front end as well as on back end.
• It allows the user to have complete control on flow of data and its features.

Disadvantages of WooCommerce

• It does not work with platforms other than hosted by WordPress.
• It requires payment for advanced features like using your own payment gateway.

Shopify can be understood as an e-commerce platform which is used to provide customers services to sell their products online without creating their own store. It is a paid platform where users can make their accounts and choose from a number of templates and can build their e-commerce website to sell their products. Shopify provides all the necessary tools and equipment needed to build an online store.

Advantages of Shopify

• It provides an easy interface to build e-commerce stores.
• Setting up and configuring Shopify is very easy and fast.
• It comes with robust tools for customizing templates according to the user’s needs.
• It has advanced SEO features which increase the indexing of the e-commerce store.
• It provides an in-built payment gateway.

Disadvantages of Shopify

• It does not provide free plans, everything is paid.
• It charges a transaction fee if used a payment gateway other than provided by Shopify.

Below is a table of differentiation between WooCommerce and Shopify:

	WooCommerce	Shopify
1.	It can be understood as an e-commerce plugin which provides e-commerce store building functionalities.	It can be understood as a platform for trading goods and services online.
2.	It is an open-source platform.	It is not an open-source platform.
3.	It was founded by Mike Jolley and James Koster.	It was founded by Tobias Lutke, Daniel Weinand and Scott Lake
4.	It provides thousands of free store designs.	It provides only 17 pre-built free templates.
5.	It provides free services to its customers.	It is a paid platform and no free service is available
6.	It mainly supports English, for other languages third party plugins can be used.	It supports a large number of languages.
7.	It does not provide any support to its customers.	24×7 customer support is available.
8.	It does not have any data analysis tools.	It provides performance and data analysis tools for better insights.
9.	It is not a beginner friendly platform as one requires the knowledge of coding to use it.	No technical knowledge is required to use this platform.
10.	The build time is slow as the user has to go through every detail for the online store.	The build time is fast in Shopify as the platform guides the user through whole process with its advanced features.
11.	It has plugins and extensions which are doing excellent work.	Though it has 3200 apps in it’s app store but still lacks in size or quality of WooCommerce.
12.	It does not have transaction fees for third-party gateway payments.	It is the platform to enforce its own transaction fee.
13.	It is code-optimized for SEO.	SEO features are good but still lacks behind WooCommerce.
14.	One has to acquire all the relevant sales certificates yourself.	It contains SSL Certificate and PCI-DSS Compliant by default.