WooCommerce or Shopify: Finding a Fit for Your Online Store

So, you’re at the digital crossroads, staring down two paths: WooCommerce or Shopify. Shopify is a sleek, no-nonsense e-commerce powerhouse, and WooCommerce (by WordPress) is a versatile, do-it-all content chameleon. It’s like choosing between a high-speed sports car and a Swiss Army knife—each with its own allure, quirks, and potential to make your online store dreams come true. Shopify is the kind of platform that whispers sweet nothings like “plug-and-play” and “no coding required” into your ear, perfect for those who prefer to keep their hands clean of HTML grime. On the other hand, WordPress, with its trusty sidekick WooCommerce, beckons to the tinkerers and customization enthusiasts, offering an open-source playground where the only limit is your imagination (and possibly your patience).

The face-off

 

It’s time to build your company’s online store. You’ve narrowed your choice to WooCommerce or Shopify. Now it’s time to weigh the pros and cons of each.

In one corner, we have Shopify, designed for entrepreneurs who want to get their store up and running faster than you can say “conversion rate.” It’s an all-in-one package that handles everything from hosting to security, leaving you more time to focus on the important stuff—like picking out the perfect product photos and crafting witty product descriptions. Think of Shopify as the dependable partner who’s already done all the heavy lifting for you.

In the other corner, WordPress stands proud, a titan of flexibility and SEO prowess. It’s like a giant box of LEGO bricks—if you can dream it, you can build it. With a vast array of plugins and themes at your disposal, you can tailor every pixel to your heart’s content. But beware: with great power comes great responsibility (and perhaps a few extra headaches). WordPress is perfect for those who aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty and have a knack for taming the wild beast that is website customization.

Shopify – if you prefer “click and go”

Shopify is considered a platform-hosted website builder, meaning you buy a subscription that includes hosting, data storage, automated software updates, marketing integration, and drag-and-drop features all in one tidy package. Shopify is Canadian made, and its two main markets are the U.S. and Canada. In 2023, Shopify held 10.32% of the market share for e-commerce systems.

Shopify is used by millions of small businesses worldwide, including some of the world’s biggest brands like and Netflix, Penguin Books, Fitbit, and Tesla. It helps businesses build a flexible and customizable online storefront quickly and easily. With a wide variety of professional themes, you can tailor the look and feel to reflect your brand’s unique style.

Their “Basic” plan starts at about $60/month, and this package includes more features than you really need starting out. However, they offer a price break if you pay annually (the equivalent of a few free months). You will need to upgrade your account if you need more than one staff account, but the more advanced plans include reduced payment processing fees.

The plan gives you access to a variety of free templates, which are fairly customizable, as well as paid themes which are far nicer and run anywhere from $20 to $400 CAD. They’re most expensive if you buy them directly through Shopify – we prefer the prices and selection at Envato Market (themeforest.net). Even after installing a theme, most store owners still need to hire a web designer if they want to customize the website’s default structure.

If you opted to build your own Shopify site, you will soon discover that their customer service can be spotty, depending on the agent you get. They offer 24/7 live chat and email support, but no phone support. And when you write to them, you may not know which questions to ask if something breaks, and if you purchased a template from a non-Shopify developer, Shopify’s agents likely won’t be able to help you resolve any issues that arise. However, if you hire Fairwind Creative to build your Shopify site, we will work with you on any troubleshooting you need.

For payment processing, Shopify conveniently comes equipped to connect with many types of payment gateways, such as PayPal, Stripe, Moneris, Bambora, and more. It includes inventory management, highly customizable shipping options, and a tidy checkout experience.

It’s also important to remember that website builders like Shopify (via a subscription) ultimately lease you temporary use of their platform. Your website can only be built onto their framework and will only work if you maintain your subscription. Comparatively, WordPress websites can be moved from one web host to another.

WooCommerce (WordPress) – if you want scalability

WordPress is the “full meal deal”. It’s been the global leader for content management systems (or CMS’s) since 2009. It holds the lion’s share worldwide as the most popular CMS (content management system)—representing about 63% of websites online—and its e-commerce platform, WooCommerce, held a staggering 38.74% of the market share in 2023 for e-commerce software platforms and technologies (Statista).

WordPress is used by hundreds of large companies worldwide, such as Sony, Time Magazine, Meta, CNN, Disney, and Spotify. Approximately 478 million websites are built on WordPress. (WOW!)

WordPress is a highly popular choice for online store owners due to its scalability. It’s a “pay for what you need” type of service, and the volume of disc space and bandwidth required to run your online store efficiently depends upon the type of web hosting plan you purchased. Any small-scale online store should work wonderfully with a minimal hosting plan (about $30/month).

WooCommerce can dramatically decrease your total cost of ownership compared to Shopify. You don’t pay for features you don’t need, you don’t have to pay to customize your checkout, and you never have to pay to use your preferred payment gateways (unlike Shopify who charged an extra 2% per transaction for not using the Shopify gateway).

Compared to Shopify’s hit-or-miss customer service, support for your WordPress site is provided by the company that built your website—not by WordPress itself. Fairwind Creative provides friendly ongoing support for all of our WordPress clients. We also provide training to help you find your bearings.

In addition to WooCommerce’s features like inventory management, seamless checkout experience, and secure merchant accounts, they offer credit card payment options such as Stripe, PayPal, Google Pay, Square, Amazon Pay, Alipay, Authorize.net, and Apple Pay. But whether you choose WooCommerce or Shopify, there are lots of options for payment processing.

WordPress templates, themes, plugins, and integrations are much greater than found using Shopify. Want to add a cool event calendar, document repository, online store, learning portal, data visuals, photo gallery, and more? That’s a breeze with WordPress! Not so much with platform-hosted options like Shopify.

The open-source nature of WordPress also gives you control of the web hosting you use. Scale up or scale down.

Updating your website software

Shopify

Theme updates are released by the theme creator periodically (monthly, quarterly) and normally only include tiny bug fixes or new perks – nothing that affects the site’s safety (as that is handled by Shopify). It’s nice that these updates don’t need to be applied to the website right away and can even wait a year if needed. But eventually then need to be addressed, and if you perform these updates yourself, you will almost certainly break all the customization that was added when the site was built. And so, these updates need to be handled by a professional developer. This can be costly depending on the website and are typically only done once every year or two.

WooCommerce / WordPress

Because of its popularity, WordPress software has become a target for hackers. Updates need to be performed manually by a skilled web developer at a minimum of once per month. Even though “automatic updates” is technically an option, it’s a very bad idea to let software run itself if you don’t have a good understanding of all the components. If something breaks—which can happen when various WordPress components don’t play nicely together—it can be costly to repair. This is why Fairwind offers monthly maintenance, which can be bundled in with hosting to save you on costs and prevent stress.

Which platform is more eco-friendly?

As Shopify proudly displays on their website, they are “the first Canadian-founded company to sign a power purchase agreement (PPA) to power 100% of employee home offices across North America with wind energy.” That’s pretty darn cool, and one of the reasons Fairwind offers Shopify website development.

WooCommerce (by WordPress), being open source software, is only as “green” as the company that hosts the website. Fortunately, Fairwind Creative offers Green Web Hosting right here in Canada, so we’ve got you covered!

As for the energy consumed during the creation of your website, Fairwind offsets all of our office power with wind and solar energy. We also plant trees worldwide each year for all new projects!

Neither e-commerce platform can control the energy used by any of the third party gateways you choose to integrate into your site (such as Stripe or PayPal), but if the core of your website’s power is green, that’s definitely a step in the right direction!

WooCommerce or Shopify: Who’s the winner?

In conclusion, there really is no real “winner” here. Whether you go with WooCommerce or Shopify, it’s entirely up to your needs as a business owner. Both platforms are robust and versatile, and Fairwind will be your partner in crime no matter which direction you want to go.

If your website’s primary purpose is to sell products online, and you don’t need your website to do much else, then Shopify might be the best choice due to its “plug and play” capabilities specifically for e-commerce. You can still have an amazing looking homepage, and a fair amount of customization for other content-only pages, but the main focus will be the products.

If e-commerce is only a small portion of what you need on our site (for example, processing donations or selling a small set of products), and you need your website to provide a great deal of information and other features like calendars, advanced web forms, and photo galleries, then a WordPress website with WooCommerce is a much better choice, as it offers a lot more flexibility and customization.

Both platforms offer notable flexibility with regard to SEO, and so you will have all the tools you need to tailor your products to attract the attention of web surfers.

With either platform, there’s a good amount of initial setup required, some of which you will need to be involved in before the site launches (connecting your bank account, shipping options, etc.), but then you’ll be off and running!

 

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