The process of opening an online shop is easier than ever before, and so is the experience of shopping online. You’ve probably given some thought to what you’ll need if you’ve ever considered opening an internet business. There are a number of e-commerce platforms available, but Shopify and WordPress continue to dominate the market.
Create your own online shop with the help of Shopify, a specialist e-commerce platform. It offers website hosting and gives you access to the tools you need to run your site. However, WordPress is free and open to anyone. To achieve your e-commerce goals, you’ll require web hosting and the installation of plugins like WooCommerce.
Let’s compare these two choices to determine which one is ideal for your e-commerce website.
Shopify vs. WordPress: Know the Basics
Let’s get an overview and foundational knowledge of Shopify and WordPress before we start comparing the two.
Shopify
Shopify makes it easy for people to set up online stores because it is a cloud-based software as a service (SaaS) shopping cart solution. Simply put, Shopify makes it easy to sell things online. You can set up your online store on the website, and Shopify will host it for you.
But there is a learning curve if this is your first sale on Shopify. In this dropshipping on Shopify tutorial, you will learn step-by-step how to set up your online store on Shopify. But before we do that, let’s talk quickly about this strong platform and its most important parts.
Shopify is an e-commerce platform that makes it easy to set up your own online store. If you don’t want to deal with the hassle of building a website, you should set up a Shopify store for your business.
It lets you host your business and helps you grow it in ways that are unique to you. It has easy-to-use design templates that let you change the look of your site without having to write any code. Shopify gives you a website where you can show off your products and make secure purchases.
WordPress
WordPress is a website builder that makes it easy for people to make websites and put content on the web. Since its start in 2003, it has become the most popular website-building platform in the world.
People like WordPress because it can be used in many different ways. It can be used to make blogs, directories, forums, galleries, business sites, online stores, and more. Today, about 35% of all websites on the Internet are run by WordPress, and its popularity keeps going up.
The WordPress Editor is the heart of WordPress. The editor is called Gutenberg. It has a formatting toolbar and a drag-and-drop page builder that let you make and style pages. You’ll love how easy it is to use the WordPress editor, whether you use it to write daily blog posts or to add static pages.
If you’re new to WordPress, the fact that there are two versions on different domains might be confusing. WordPress.org is a self-hosted version, and WordPress.com is a hosted version. The version of WordPress that you host yourself at WordPress.org is more popular because it gives you more freedom.
There are no limits on how you can use it, so you can change your site however you want and still have full control over the content. To use the self-hosted version of WordPress, as the name suggests, you need to buy a web-hosting package from a company that offers hosting services. This will make sure that your site is always online, 24 hours a day.
WordPress.com, on the other hand, is a service for people who don’t want to deal with the original WordPress software themselves and would rather have someone else do it.
So, what you get with WordPress.com is the ability to create an account (your user profile) and then use a simplified version of WordPress that has already been installed on the platform’s servers. You can make websites faster than with standard WordPress, but you’ll lose some features (unless you’re willing to pay between $300 and $15,000 per year).
Which Is Better, Shopify or WordPress as a Website Builder?
Now that you know the fundamentals of each platform, we can explore the characteristics that set them apart.
Shopify
The primary distinction between Shopify and WordPress is the coding process. Shopify makes it possible to open and tailor your own online shop without ever having to learn to code.
Because it is a store management system, Shopify’s customer base is mostly comprised of business owners and online merchants. Shopify is the preferred e-commerce platform for those who either have or are considering opening an online store. Except for those in the retail industry, Shopify has no real advantage. Hence, Shopify is recommended over WordPress if you’re planning to launch an e-commerce website.
Shopify makes it easy to set up an online store and start selling right away. Users only need to disclose a subset of their business to the system, and it will handle the rest.
- SEO: Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process of changing parts of a website so that it shows up higher on search engines like Google and Bing. You can do this in a number of ways with Shopify. For example, you can add specific titles and product descriptions that show up in search results on every web page (called “metadata”). You can also change your URL and the way your site is set up.
- E-commerce: Shopify is a well-designed platform for online stores and other e-commerce businesses, while WordPress is good for a wide range of interests. Because of this, Shopify has a stronger advantage over WordPress when it comes to e-commerce. Shopify gives you all the tools, themes, and other things you need to make a fully functional online store. And e-commerce isn’t the only thing WordPress does.
- Payment Gateways: More than 100 payment gateways, like Stripe, PayPal, and Mastercard, work well with Shopify. It also has a payment gateway called Shopify Payments that makes setting up and managing online payments easy.
- Themes: Shopify comes with eight free themes and 64 advanced themes that cost between $120 and $180. You can also find a lot more Shopify themes made by people other than Shopify. Shopify’s main idea is to help sellers think outside the box.
- These themes are responsive and optimised for mobile devices. This means that they automatically change to fit the size of the screen being used to view them. Also, Shopify’s theme editor is very easy to use and understand.
Dropshipping is a way for online stores to sell items they don’t have in stock. It’s a type of e-commerce business model. This business model has worked well because of automation and outsourcing. There are more than 7,000 apps and plugins in the Shopify App Store, and more than 400 of them are specifically for the dropshipping business. If you look up “dropshipping,” Dropship Corporation is the first app that comes up.
WordPress
- User: Whether you want a blog, a magazine site, a membership site, or an online store, WordPress can help you with all of them. Because of this, WordPress has a wide range of users, each of whom uses it for a different reason. It also has a large ecosystem of themes and plugins, such as WooCommerce for e-commerce, that let you build any kind of website.
- Ease of Use: Shopify is easy to use, but WordPress is a little harder to figure out. Since it wasn’t made to make online stores, users need to add e-commerce plugins. Also, a new user might find the back-end dashboard hard to understand because it has so many options and tools.
- SEO: You won’t be surprised to find out that most WordPress SEO is done by plugins that come from outside of WordPress. Since WordPress is mostly used for blogs, SEO is one of the most important parts of it. This is likely why WordPress.com gives you Jetpack Essentials features with any plan, even the free ones.
- Themes: WordPress has more than 8,000 themes to choose from, half of which include e-commerce capabilities. WordPress themes often require a lot of tweaking and editing to get them to work the way you want them to.
- For this reason, you need some basic coding skills to manage them yourself, or a budget to hire a web designer. It’s also worth noting that most WordPress themes are created by third-party developers, so if you run into difficulties, you’ll need to contact a theme developer for help.
Dropshipping: WordPress also offers many dropshipping apps such as AliExpress Dropshipping and print-on-demand apps such as Printful and Printify. The good news is that Dropship Corporation also integrates with WooCommerce, making it easy to import products from AliExpress to your WooCommerce dropshipping store.
The pros and cons of Shopify vs. WordPress
Now that you know the main things that make Shopify and WordPress different and how they work, let’s take a quick look at their pros and cons.
Shopify:
PROS:
1. Built-in Tools: Shopify has the best built-in tools for startups to find products to sell, make trustworthy websites, market products with built-in marketing tools, and more. Free tools can help new businesses cut costs and improve their Shopify POS so they can get more customers and make more money.
2.Customization: Shopify’s Shopify Theme stores have many free and paid Shopify themes, most of which work well on mobile devices. The code for each topic can also be changed to make it exactly how you want it. So it’s easy to make online stores that are unique and great for your business.
3. Easy for beginners: Shopify makes it easy to open an online store without having to pay extra. The user interface is clean, user-friendly, and easy to understand because all of the functions are set up in a way that makes sense. During the 14-day free trial, you can learn about these features without having to know how to code.
4. Integration: The Shopify App Store is a great place to find different features and tools for opening an online store. You can add Shopify Payments, customer loyalty programmes, wishlists, delivery plans, dropshipping, payment gateways, social media profiles, and all the marketing tools available. Also, it’s easy to add third-party apps to the online store to give it more features and make it fit your needs.
CONS:
1. Less Control: You don’t have full control over your Shopify store. Your store is on a server that Shopify owns and runs. This means they can close your store whenever they want to. If you don’t break any licence rules, this might not happen.
WordPress
PROS:
1. Easy to Use: Right now, WordPress is the most popular content management system (CMS) because it is easy to instal and use. Its WooCommerce plugin makes it easy for people without a lot of technical knowledge to turn websites into online shops.
2.Customization: The WooCommerce plugin lets users change the look of their storefront to suit their needs. Even themes can be changed to fit the look and feel of the storefront.
3.Multiple Payment Gateways: WooCommerce supports geolocation, which lets stores accept many different currencies. Customers from all over the world are more likely to buy from a business that offers more than one way to pay and ship.
CONS:
1. Network analysis: WooCommerce’s WooCommerce Google Analytics extension helps with this. This extension can be used to track not only basic user activity, but also events, sessions, and important data, like product views and shopping cart operations.
2. There isn’t as much help for e-commerce problems as there is for the platform itself. Users have to instal a plugin to get their e-commerce store up and running. If they run into problems with their storefront, they need to contact a third party or an experienced WordPress developer to fix the problem.
3. Security Issues: Users need to rethink and change their policies when it comes to security and data privacy to make sure everything stays safe. Because WordPress is so popular, cybercriminals are going after it more and more. The problem is that you need to check WordPress, plugins, and themes from time to time to see if there are any updates available. If the site’s content isn’t kept up-to-date, it is still a bit vulnerable.
4. Themes and plugins that can’t be trusted: Online retailers can’t afford to have their stores’ data and security at risk. They must only use themes and plugins from trusted and well-known sources to make sure they are safe and of high quality. There are a lot of free themes and plugins out there, but not all of them can be trusted. If something goes wrong with a free or cheap theme or plugin, you won’t get any help.
Last Word
You may have found some key differences between WordPress and Shopify that will help you decide which one is best for you.
In short, use WordPress.com if you just want to start a personal project for testing, sharing ideas, hobby sites, etc. Shopify is a better choice if you want to build a whole online store or a large e-commerce business.
