Why choose WooCommerce over Shopify?

You want to publish a lot of content on the site

It could be blog posts, guides, documentation, and other content where you’ll be creating a lot of the same or different types. These pieces of content might have a lot of text, images, videos, or a combination of those.

Shopify is not designed as a content management system (CMS), so when you start creating hundreds of articles or extensive documentation pages, you may find Shopify limiting to your ability to be organized. If you reach this point with Shopify, you’ll likely need to buy additional apps to help manage the content, or purchase a separate CMS entirely.

For example, you may want to group the articles into collections, tag them, or display them dynamically throughout the site. This is going to require a lot more effort on Shopify than on WooCommerce, since WooCommerce is based on WordPress, a CMS.

With WooCommerce, it adds on to the WordPress CMS, so the abilities in WordPress to create posts, pages, tags, categories, and manage visual media like images and videos for the posts and pages is all available to you. Its drag-and-drop site editor also allows you to place this content on different pages of your site as you desire, without having to pay for extra apps.

You want to spend less money

How much you pay for your ecommerce store depends on how many add-ons you get. In both Shopify and WooCommerce, the stores come basic, and you have to buy add-on apps to add more functionality.

With Shopify, you have to pay a monthly fee depending on your plan.

WooCommerce is a little different, because if you want, you have the option to get WooCommerce through a variety of providers that may offer cheaper plans than both Shopify and WooCommerce. The trade off is perhaps poor customer service or no customer service at all, more technical setup, and slower sites. But, if you’re willing to deal with that, running a WooCommerce store will be cheaper than running a Shopify store, as long as you don’t get too many add-ons.

You have very custom needs

If your store isn’t the average store and does something that most ecommerce stores don’t do—perhaps a unique way of taking payments from customers or some kind of bulk orders—WooCommerce might be the better choice.

With Shopify, you can edit some of the code, or hire developers to edit the code for you, but Shopify restricts what exactly can be modified. For example, they have restrictions on how the checkout page can be modified. This is because they want to keep it stable for any customer on a Shopify store, which keeps Shopify’s reputation high.

With WooCommerce, there are no such restrictions. If you can dream it (and can edit the code or hire someone to do it for you), you can do it. For example, you can make the checkout page as custom as you’d like, unlike Shopify, like displaying the payment options in a non-traditional way.

You’re familiar with WordPress

Though not always the best way to make a decision, because perhaps Shopify meets your needs in some way that WooCommerce doesn’t, it can help you can your ecommerce store started quickly if you already know WordPress.

Since WooCommerce is built on WordPress, you’ll find WooCommerce very familiar, as it’s just another WordPress plugin.

You already have a WordPress site

This is similar to the above—if your website is already on WordPress, it’s going to be faster to set up WooCommerce, because all it takes is downloading the WooCommerce plugin onto your WordPress site. If you choose Shopify for hosting your store while you have a WordPress site, you’ll need to be okay with the designs being slightly different and the shop domain being separate from the main site, something like shop.mywebsite.com.

The domain thing is important if showing up well in Google is important to your website. It’s been said that when using a domain like shop.mywebsite.com instead of mywebsite.com, Google considers it like a separate website, so it doesn’t benefit from all the people linking to your existing website for how highly results from your site should rank in Google.

Conclusion

If more than one of these is relevant to you, WooCommerce is likely to give you less headache as you set up and run your store.

However, it’s also important to consider what you’re missing out from Shopify, as some of its benefits may outweigh the benefits of WooCommerce described in this article.

We want to keep the comparison fair, so watch the Dashify blog for a future article about reasons why you’d choose Shopify over WooCommerce!