Should You Opt For A Free E-commerce Website? Here’s WordPress’ WooCommerce And Shopify Compared

If you want to sell online, you will need to set up a shop first. So, how do you do that? Hire a team? Actually, you can do it yourself. There are e-commerce solution providers who can help you set up your own online shop. There are two really exciting e-commerce store designing options in Shopify and WooCommerce.

Both are feature-rich platforms that can help you set up a great shop online. But which one is the best? Let’s compare the two. There are a number of different attributes that make up an e-commerce platform. Let us consider each.

Designing Options

The design is one of the primary factors that help attract customers to an online shop. You need an attractive and aesthetically pleasing website that can evoke interest in the visitor. Shopify can help design an e-commerce website for free and boasts of having 51 different templates.

However, only 10 of these 51 templates are free. Each of the designs has unique attributes and color options and are compatible with mobile devices. All the templates are contemporary, sleek, aesthetically pleasing and have been designed by the best freelancers. You can modify the color and style of the templates with the help of the ‘Theme Editor’ feature.

The Liquid language of Shopify allows developers the freedom to make more fundamental changes to their designs. However, the paid designs are costly. You may need to shell out up to $180 for a great store template from Shopify.

You can also get your free e-commerce website from WooCommerce, another e-commerce solution provider. WooCommerce does not have its own e-commerce store templates. However, you get a lot more flexibility to customize thanks to the WordPress plugin in WooCommerce.

You need to activate the WordPress Plugin Manager for this. There is a range of WordPress templates at your disposal. Among them, there are some which have been designed keeping in mind the unique attributes of WooCommerce.

Here too you can make suitable adjustments to themes and get the best one for your shop. There are many free templates too and the price for paid templates may not be as high as those in Shopify.

Hosting Price

Shopify seems to be ahead of WooCommerce in this aspect. Shopify has an integrated pricing system. So you just need to pay $29 per month for basic hosting services directly through Shopify. For this amount, you get an SSL certificate for free. You also get the opportunity to list your online shop in a top-level domain for a nominal payment of $9 per year.

If you are using WooCommerce, you may need to pay anything from $5 to $100 per month for third-party hosting. However, for an SSL certificate, you need to shell out a fixed sum per year. For top-level domains, you need to pay about $9 per year. This implies that the ultimate hosting price for WooCommerce may be more than the price you pay with Shopify.

Features That You Get

You will need to integrate various features with the e-commerce store. Features like mobile e-commerce optimization, multiple language support, adjustable shipping rates, and taxes are essential for an e-commerce website. In Shopify, you get these and more for free. Every free e-commerce website generator does not provide these services for free.

Mobile e-commerce optimization is an essential feature of any e-commerce website

Some essential online store features that you can get for free at Shopify are-

•  Unlimited products
•  Automatic fraud analysis
•  Manual order creation
•  Discount codes
•  Credit card payments
•  Customer profiles
•  Drop shipping capabilities
•  SEO-ready site structure
•  Individual product reviews
•  Facebook selling module
•  Social media integration
•  Daily backups
•  Product importing via CSV files etc

WooCommerce too has a range of free features like any other free e-commerce website generator. However, you may have to shell out around $500 for important features like Product importing via CSV files, dropshipping, booking etc. That makes WooCommerce a costlier option compared to Shopify when it comes to posting sales services.

Conclusion

While both are excellent service providers and have their own pros and cons, Shopify edges ahead of its competition when it comes to its hosting plans and the services offered.

On the other hand, WooCommerce is a WordPress Plugin where you need to host your store via third parties. When it boils down to cost, both are comparable. However, the cost of some essential features along with complete hosting price may make WooCommerce slightly costlier as compared to Shopify.

Bear in mind that this also depends on what features you would like to incorporate in your website. WooCommerce, on the other hand, offers more customization options if you have the requisite technical know-how. The choice is yours!

For more such articles, news, health & beauty, celebrity entertainment, biographies, be with SuperbHub.