Insights, Web Development

Shopify vs WordPress – Comparing The Best eCommerce Platforms

10-factor detailed comparison review of the best eCommerce platforms to help you decide which one is the right for you.

The purpose of this Shopify vs WordPress review is to help you decide which platform is right for your eCommerce project in 2023.

When it comes to eCommerce platforms, although the choices are unlimited, you will always end up with Shopify and WordPress on the list of selections. If a business is in a very specific niche BigCommerce might be the one, or if something simple is needed Squarespace can do the job. But when it comes to a custom professional online store, the choice is always between Shopify and WordPress.

In this article, we’ll take a closer look at two of the most popular platforms on the market, while focusing on what they both bring to the table for eCommerce. We’ll compare the two solutions based on key features, SEO tools, CMS tools, extensions, eCommerce functionality, ease of use, and pricing.

Shopify vs WordPress Review 2022: Table of Contents

1. Overview

Before we make an in-depth comparison between Shopify and WordPress, we’ll first go through some quick introductions, statistics, and what makes them similar. Please note that these statistics refer to WordPress as a whole, not only in the sense of eCommerce. For example, WordPress CMS powers 64.2% of all the websites that use CMS, however, 20.3% of these WordPress websites use WooCommerce.

Comparison of the usage statistics of Shopify vs WordPress for websites by W3Techs. These reports are updated daily.

 

Shopify was built for eCommerce specifically

Shopify is a website builder specifically designed for users to easily build and launch their own online store. Using the platforms doesn’t require any technical background, or knowing how to design or code as it comes as an AIO solution with ready-to-use templates, apps, and integration options.

  • Shopify is a SaaS (Software as a Service) tool based on a subscription.
  • It’s an out-of-the-box solution for users to run a fully operational store quickly.
  • Focuses on the quick start: It takes 3 minutes to set up an online store on Shopify.
  • It’s an entire ecosystem that gives an opportunity for app developers, theme designers, agencies, and merchants to make money off the platform.
Shopify Statistics 2022
  • 6.4% of all the websites whose CMS we know, use Shopify. This is 4.3% of all websites, according to W3Techs.
  • More than 1.75 million businesses from around the world sell on Shopify.
  • The company reported a total revenue figure of $4,611 M for 2021, which is a 57% increase compared to 2020.
  • In 2021, Shopify businesses sold $175 billion on Shopify’s platform, which is a 47% increase compared to 2020.
Visit Shopify

WordPress is an open-source platform for every web project

WordPress.org is an open-source full-service CMS that can handle any type of website from business websites and eCommerce stores to personal portfolios, blogs, and directories. Its entire gimmick relies on the ability to use themes and plugins for everything and get full control over the design and functionality of your website.

WordPress has two available versions: hosted WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress.org. We’ll focus on the self-hosted version since most professional WordPress eCommerce setups involve the self-hosted version.

  • WordPress is an extremely flexible platform in terms of customization, suitable for every web project.
  • It requires installation.
  • The platform caters to users of all technical backgrounds and for all budgets.
Official WordPress Statistics 2022
  • Two (2) out of every five (5) websites use WordPress. According to the latest data by W3Techs, 43.2% of all websites on the internet are powered by WordPress in 2022, in comparison to 39.5% in 2021.
  • WordPress CMS powers 64.2% of all the websites that use CMS, followed by Shopify with 6.6%; Wix with 2.8%, Squarespace with 2.7%, and Joomla with 2.6%.
  • WooCommerce is used by 20.3% of all the websites that use WordPress, followed by Elementor with 15.9%, and WPBakery Page Builder with 15.3%.
Visit WordPress

Main Similarities Between Shopify and WordPress

Both Shopify and WordPress have all the tools you need to build a custom website for eCommerce, so let’s take a look at the features they have in common:

  • Pre-made customizable themes ✔️: You can select a pre-made theme to work with and customize as you wish.
  • Full-service CMS ✔️: You can create and manage your content.
  • Drag-and-Drop editing ✔️: The option to use a visual editor.
  • SSL certificates ✔️: You can secure your data with SSL certificates.
  • Performance optimization ✔️Controls and features that will help you optimize your website’s performance.
  • SEO optimization ✔️: High level of control over your SEO markup, indexing rules, redirects, etc.
  • eCommerce ✔️: Both platforms are suitable for eCommerce websites and offer the necessary eCommerce features to run your store.

 

2. There are 4 Main Differences

2.1. Different Software Solution Types

The first big difference between Shopify and WordPress is the software solution type: SaaS or open source.

Shopify is a SaaS application

Shopify is a SaaS application (Software as a Service) that handles the hosting and maintenance of your websites. This means Shopify deals with everything, including in terms of security. Costs and efforts related to upgrades for security, speed, and hosting are also lower or nonexistent as the provider takes care of it.

WordPress is an open-source platform

WordPress is an open-source platform that you install on your own hosting server and maintain manually. It’s free to install, set up, and manage. However, you still need to consider expenses such as hosting services and, depending on your website, some premium functionalities in the form of extensions.

2.2. Different Core Audiences

To start with, Shopify and WordPress aim at different types of users.

Shopify targets users who lack web development skills

The platform makes it easy for everyone to create an online store in minutes without writing a single line of code unless they want something custom.

WordPress targets a broader range of users

It targets the full range from novices to web developers.  Although you can surely create and maintain a WordPress website with little to no web design and coding skills, thanks to visual editors such as Divi or Ememetor, in most cases you will need to learn how to configure your website before publishing it.

2.3. Hosting

The biggest difference when it comes to Shopify and WordPress.

Shopify is a hosted solution

Shopify doesn’t require the trouble of buying web hosting or installing the software. You will host your website on Shopify’s servers. This means you will just need a web browser and an internet connection in order to manage your store.

WordPress is a self-hosted solution

WordPress.org, on the other hand, doesn’t come with a hosted solution. You will need to take care of hosting, maintaining, and installing updates. However, this also means there are no limits to the amount of control you have over your website.

2.4. Focus

In terms of built-in tools, WordPress gives you the basics, however, you can add everything you need with plugins. This way you can customize your own workspace that has the exact functionalities you need. Including eCommerce. Which is another key difference between the two platforms.

Shopify is a dedicated Store builder

Shopify is amongst the leading eCommerce platforms for small businesses and it didn’t take too much time to go there. Since it was built for eCommerce specifically,  it has pretty much everything you need to get your store up and running provided out of the box.

WordPress handles all types of websites

WordPress doesn’t come as an AIO solution for building online stores. Instead, you will have to add eCommerce to your WordPress website by installing an eCommerce plugin of your choice.

The most popular eCommerce plugins for WordPress websites include WooCommerce, Ecwid, and Easy Digital Downloads. For the sake of today’s review, we will focus on WooCommerce as the most popular one.

 

3. SEO Features

SEO optimizes your visibility online. After all, the more people see your website, the more your online traffic increases, which gives you greater chances to provide your services to a greater number of people. Now, let’s see how Shopify and WordPress handle SEO.

🔎 Shopify for SEO

Shopify gives you the ability to edit meta tags, and place products and descriptions in a very well-optimized and user-friendly way. You can add custom titles, descriptions, and metadata, add 301 redirects, and change page URLs.

In addition, Shopify websites have a fast loading speed due to the reliable infrastructure and optimized software and hardware.

On the downside, Shopify has a predetermined ordered structure that your website and URLs have to follow. In addition, it’s very hard to create clean URLs. For example, you’ll get “/pages/” before the name of your page in the URL.

Even so, Shopify is still SEO-friendly and there are quite a few apps available in Shopify’s app store to help you, including everyone’s favorite Yoast SEO.

🔎 WordPress for SEO

Is WordPress good for SEO? Absolutely yes. In fact, it’s considered to be one of the best content management systems for SEO. One of the platform’s biggest advantages is that you can configure your website’s technical SEO set up exactly the way you want.

Flexibility

The fact that WordPress is a self-hosted solution has some benefits. It gives you the flexibility to host your website on any server you want. Some servers are extremely fast and will grant you crazy page speed. In terms of SEO, faster websites get preferential treatment from Google.

Fast Load Times

Speaking of speed, you can make your WordPress website even faster with certain plugins, such as the WP Super Cache plugin for website speed optimization.

Automatic Alerts to Google

WordPress automatically alerts Google each time you update your website, a certain post, or page. As a result, Google treats your updated paged as recent and moves them up the ranks.

SEO-Ready Themes

WordPress also offers themes specifically built for SEO. You can combine them with SEO plugins for even better results.

Optimization Controls

You can customize each page for SEO with unique tags, custom URLs, and meta descriptions, as well as add custom excerpts or plugins for further optimization.

Familiar Structure

WordPress websites have a simple framework and link structure that search engines are familiar with. Google crawlers can easily find, index, and rank your pages.

eCommerce SEO

There’s no short answer for this one, as it strongly relies on your chosen eCommerce solution. WooCommerce websites, for example, have a really high SEO performance as the solution integrates perfectly with other WordPress plugins, including some great choices such as All in One SEO, broken Link Checker, MonsterInsights, and TrustPulse.

There are also themes for WooCommerce optimization you can combine with the plugins.

 

4. CMS Tools

When it comes to managing your content, both Shopify and WordPress are very similar with a few differences that we’ll mention in this section.

🖥️ Shopify CMS Tools

It’s very easy to manage and configure your settings in Shopify. The platform gives you a nice visual editor, the ability to schedule posts, and automatic SEO for the title and description.

Online Store 2.0

Shopify’s new “Online Store 2.0” theme format lets you use it to edit template layouts that are then applied to pages. So far the new editor is enabled on 70 of the 76 premium, and eight of the 17 free themes, starting from Dawn, the very first source-available reference theme with Online Store 2.0.

Theme app extensions with app block

Developers can build UI components that can be added, removed, and configured directly through the theme editor without the need to touch the code.

Meta fields improvement

You can add the exact content you need on your product page and anything that is unlikely to appear in the core store editor, via meta fields. No need to use APIs.

Meta field file picker

You can insert all your images and PDF files that you save in Settings/Files in the file meta field on your theme.

Files API

This enables apps to access the admin area Settings/Files to use the content for media meta fields.

Tree View

The editor displays a tree view of the page’s content in the sidebar. It also has a liquid setting to reduce the need to manually change the code of a theme.

Other features
  • Shopify Github integration (including in combination with Git subtrees)
  • The Shopify CLI includes themes
  • Theme check new code editor

🖥️ WordPress CMS Tools

WordPress was initially built for blogging, so it’s no surprise it offers advanced CMS tools.

Dashboard

Unless you opt for a fully customized professional website with a specific brand identity, you don’t need any coding skills to build a website in WordPress. The platform gives you an intuitive and straightforward dashboard to work with.

Two Editors

WordPress has a classic editor and the Gutenberg block editor.

The old editor for creating content in WordPress that we all know from the inside out was a text formatting editor with buttons, very similar to Microsoft Word.

Gutenberg, on the other hand, offers blocks as content elements that you can add to the screen and create content layouts. In short, each item you add is a block: paragraphs, images, video, galleries, embeds, audio, columns, lists, spacing, etc. It works like a page builder plugin and allows you to drag and drop items into a post or page.

Manage Unlimited Pages Directly from your Dashboard

You can add as many pages as you like, there are no limits to the size of your website.

Collaboration Tools

WordPress is also good for cooperation as you can add users and assign roles and permissions for each: admin, editor, author, contributor, and subscriber.

Revisions

WordPress was originally created for blogging, so it’s no surprise it has revision history functionality. You can review older versions of your pages and roll back to any of them whenever you like.

 

5. Extensions

In this section, we’ll focus on the themes and add-ons that both platforms offer for professional online stores.

➕ Shopify Extensions

Themes

Shopify focuses on quality rather than quantity. Its theme store offers 17 free and 76 premium themes, usually in 2 or 3 variants each. You can easily search for a theme by industry or theme features (for example, search by “FAQ page”). You can also buy themes from third-party Shopify theme designers.

In terms of quality, all themes are customizable and offer professional responsive design for optimal user experience on all devices.

And last, Shopify also allows users to access and edit the source code using Liquid, an open-source template language. It’s different from the HTML/CSS languages and will take some time to learn for developers who aren’t familiar with it. However, you can always hire a Shopify expert to change your existing template or to add some cool tweaks and functionalities that the default Shopify toolset hasn’t included yet.

Shopify App Store

While WordPress relies on third-party plugins, Shopify has its own in-house eCommerce tools. In fact, you’ll have the main inventory, shipping, marketing, and analytical tools already built-in, however, you’ll also have the option to expand your website’s functionality, depending on your business, with official Shopify apps.

The store has over 2400 apps available, free and premium, ranging from $15 to $50 per month.

➕ WordPress Extensions

WordPress offers over 14K official themes and over 60K official plugins for any type of customization and functionality. However, since we focus on eCommerce, let’s talk about WooCommerce specifically.

Themes

By the time you read this, WordPress has over 1000 themes for eCommerce. WooCommerce alone offers 49 themes in total (3 free themes, 14 Storefront themes, and 38 responsive). At first glance, this doesn’t sound much, especially compared to the overall WordPress official theme store.

However, WooCommerce is an open-source WordPress plugin that enables you to use all your already existing plugins and the WP command-line interface and inherits the strengths and reliability of WordPress, and offers a solid foundation to build a world-class eCommerce store.  And let’s not forget WooCommerce Storefront.

Storefront

Storefront is a free WP theme deeply integrated into WooCommerce, meaning there won’t be theme-plugin conflicts. This also means the theme grants max speed and website performance. You can use Storefront with default settings or customize it. In addition, you can also install a child theme to customize your store’s look even further.

Plugins

WordPress offers thousands of plugins specifically build for Woocommerce. Depending on your work, you can expand your admin panel’s functionality easily and add plugins for SEO, shipping, and delivery, payments, merchandising, store content and customizations, marketing, conversion, customer service, store management; or browse curated essential collections to get you started.

 

6. eCommerce Functionality

Let’s finally address the elephant in the room. If Shopify is already a dedicated platform for eCommerce, why would you even consider using WordPress? There are a few instances where choosing WordPress over Shopify seems more logical, so we’ll go through each of them.

When should you use WordPress for eCommerce?
  • You already have WordPress experience: If you already have experience with WordPress, adding and working with Woocommerce will be a piece of cake. It uses the exact same admin panel organization, which eliminates an additional learning curve.
  • You already have a WordPress website: In case you don’t want to invest in a new platform, which will minimize your costs.
  • You want to experiment with the source code: Shopify doesn’t give you access to the source code, but WordPress does.

 

🛒 Shopify for eCommerce

Shopify has its own in-house eCommerce tools that serve as the meat and bones for any online store.

Unlimited amount of products

You can sell an unlimited amount of physical and digital products no matter the plan you choose to subscribe to.

Abandoned cart recovery

You can set up your online store to send emails to customers who have left your website with items in their cart before checking out.

Discount codes

You can also create unique codes for your customers so they can use them at your checkout for a discount.

Multi-channel integration

You can sell directly from your website, as well as across major social media platforms and marketplaces.

Customize user experience

You can set up personal customer accounts that allow users to share personal details and receive customized suggestions on products they might be interested in.

Shopify Oberlo

The pre-installed platform Oberlo allows merchants to search and add products they want to sell, directly to their website. It does so by connecting the online store with the right suppliers, relieving the users from storing, packing, and shipping duties.

Now, the primary feature is that Oberlo adds a button that allows you to import products from suppliers while browsing. They go directly to your store alongside the photos, descriptions, and pricing.

When it comes to the suppliers, they come from two categories: Oberlo Suppliers and Oberlo Verified Suppliers. The first group represents regular suppliers from around the world, including Aliexpress. The second group, however, are suppliers hand-picked and verified by Oberlo based on performance, quality, and shipping time.

The Shopify POS system

The thing that is most unique about Shopify is its fully-integrated POS system, built specifically for retail. It can work as a stand-alone product, or in synch with the platform by taking the back-end role. This system itself comes with a handful of features such as handling transactions in physical stores; handling the process of finding products, taking payment, producing receipts, and swiping credit cards.

It integrates with Shopify so you can manage it from any device or browser.

Other eCommerce features
  • Free SSL certificate
  • Built-in marketing, shipping, inventory, and analytical tools
  • Ordoro, Inventory Source, and eCommHub integration
  • Integrates with PayPal and over 100 other external gateways
  • Automatic carrier shipping rates
  • Flexible shipping rates
  • Free shipping
  • Automatic taxes
  • 50+ languages available
  • Coupon Codes
  • The ability to create additional blogs and web pages
  • 70 different payment processors, as well as the option for multi-currency process calculations.
  • Multiple staff login options.
  • International pricing support with cross-border selling.
  • Local pickup allows you to query for product availability at a particular location via location ID.
  • Selling plans that allow merchants to enable subscriptions, preorders, and create custom policies.

🛒 WordPress for eCommerce

WordPress is an extremely flexible platform that gives the basics to any user to create any type of website, including online stores. This means it doesn’t come with any eCommerce features by default, and you will need to add them via third-party plugins.

Each plugin offers different eCommerce features, so it’s impossible to make a specific list. This is why we’re going to focus on a specific eCommerce build, such as WooCommerce.

 WooCommerce Storefront

is a free WP theme that is deeply integrated into WooCommerce. It eliminates the possibility of a theme- plugin conflicts and grants max speed and website performance.

Featured products

WooCommerce gives you the ability to designate featured products by adding a special column to your products before publishing them. It’s very convenient for highlighting new products, discounted items, or promotions.

Product variations

You can add images to each variation of a single product, allowing customers to actually view the exact item they’re interested in. This is very useful, for example, if you sell t-shirts in different colors.

Advanced search and filtering

This feature in the form of a navigation widget, allows users to search and filter products by attributes: colors, sizes, ratings, etc.

Shipment Tracking

This is a very advanced plugin for tracking orders supporting more than 80 shipping carriers. It can import tracking details for bulk orders, handle tracking IDs via FTP, and even send emails with tracking details to users. It’s fully integrated with ShippingEasy.

Remove features

WooCommerce allows you to disable features on a case-to-case basis, such as disabling reviews on particular products, removing checkout fields, and even disabling purchasing of particular products.

Other eCommerce features
  • You could add custom thumbnail labels to particular products such as “Out of Stock”, “Free Shipping”, etc.
  • Unique Instagram tags for your best products that show your happy client’s posts directly on your product page.

 

7. Ease of Use

Another important aspect when comparing Shopify vs WordPress is the ease of use, especially if you’re planning to create and launch your online store on your own.

Both platforms have similar layouts and take similar approaches to content editing and publishing. You work on your content in the back-end and then you can preview and publish, unlike the real-time view of your edits that you see in Webflow or Squarespace.

📓 Getting Started with Shopify

Since Shopify targets mainly users with no technical knowledge, the platform is extremely easy to set up and get working within minutes. At its core, it aims to let you focus on your business rather than building your website.

3 Minutes to Start

You create your store by submitting an email, password, and name for your store. Your next step is to choose the type of service you are selling and your current revenue from a drop-down menu. This will redirect you to a form where you add information such as the address you can get paid to.

That’s it. Your online store is all set and you can start adding your products and services.

When it comes to creating content, Shopify has an intuitive interface specially designed for eCommerce. This means users will easily manage products, collections, and sales channels.

📓 Getting Started with WordPress

In order to get started with WordPress, first, you’ll need web hosting to install the WordPress software. Most hosting services offer tools for installing and configuring WordPress in a few clicks.

In case you start from scratch without an existing WordPress website, there are a few things you’ll need to do prior to setting up your store in WooCommerce.

  • Acquire hosting services.
  • Install and configure WordPress CMS
  • Build the design of your pages and add the features you need.
  • Install and configure WooCommerce.

Woocommerce is very versatile and suitable for users from any technical background. Beginners with zero experience with code can easily build a website by themselves, while advanced users can access the website’s front- and back end.

 

8. Pricing

Now, when it comes to pricing, we need to consider initial pricing and additional expenses. On one hand, Shopify is a SaaS platform with paid plans for using the platform and subscription fees for additional features. On the other, WordPress is a free open-source platform that needs hosting and relies on plugins, some of which are premium. Depending on what you’re building, here’s what to consider:

🏷️ Shopify Pricing

Shopify Lite $9 per month: Best for small businesses to sell on social media, in person, or on an existing website. Only one staff account.

  • Basic Plan $29 per month: Best for new eCommerce businesses with occasional in-person sales.
  • Shopify Plan $79 per month: Best for growing business selling online or in-store.
  • Advanced Plan $299 per month: Best for scaling businesses that require advanced reporting.
  • Shopify Plus $2K per month: Enterprise-grade solutions for high-volume merchants, and large businesses that need a more powerful service and extra support. This plan makes sense for businesses usually after they reach $1-2 million in annual revenue.

You should also consider credit card fees and transactional fees (0.5% – 2% per transaction). On the bright side, they decrease with the higher tiers.

Additional functionalities cost additional fees per month. The final monthly price depends on what exactly you will need for your store.

🏷️ WordPress Pricing

Initially, WordPress and WooCommerce are completely free, however many add-ons aren’t. Sooner or later, you will inevitably need some of the paid functionalities, so you’ll want to consider additional costs.

  • Hosting: Since WordPress is self-hosted, you need to pay for hosting services so you can install your CMS and store your website’s content.
  • Themes: You can surely go with a free theme. However, for bigger and more ambitious projects that require custom design that fits your brand, you might want to consider hiring a developer.
  • eCommerce Plugins: More professional eCommerce projects will require specific premium plugins.
  • WordPress Maintenance Service: In case you need a professional to do it for you.

For example, a theme of the highest quality costs around $50, while important premium plugins cost between $500- $800.

Here comes the good news: the applications’ capabilities don’t always correspond to the price. To prove this, YoastSEO and PayPal & Stripe come for free, other important features like Bookings or Subscriptions cost around $200 each.

With so many variables, both solutions can be either very affordable or very pricy. We advise you to make a clear list of your specific requirements and price them against each platform.

 

9. Strengths and Weaknesses

In this section, we’ll make a final comparison based on the pros and cons we already discussed during this review.

Although Shopify is ideal for beginners and covers all the basics and many advanced tools you need to kick off your project and expand it further, it does have its weaknesses.

👍 Shopify Advantages:
  • It was built specifically for eCommerce and comes with all the sales tools you need.
  • Shopify takes care of the hosting, security, and maintenance for you.
  • PCI Compliance Level 1 security compared to the security of banks.
  • Quick and easy start: It takes 3 minutes to get your store ready.
  • All plans offer unlimited storage and an unlimited number of products.
  • Shopify payments for your credit card are compatible with PayPal and over 100 other payment gateways.
  • Fully integrated POS system built specifically for retail.
  • Pre-installed platform Oberlo allows you to search and add products you want to sell, directly to your website.
  • Fast loading speed
👎 Shopify Disadvantages:
  • You have to pay extra transaction fees (about 0.5% – 2% per transaction) unless you use Shopify’s own payment gateway.
  • You have to reformat your entire content if you decide to change your theme.
  • Shopify doesn’t have revision history functionality, in comparison to WordPress. As a workaround, you might need to purchase a backup tool from the Shopify App Store in order to save and access older revisions.
  • Key functionalities that you could expect to be already built in often require the installation of an app.
  • You can create up to 100 variants for a product, however, each product can have up to 3 options. (unless you purchase an app)
  • Adding custom fields is complicated.
  • Only the most expensive plans provide professional reporting functionality.

WordPress is the number one popular choice to build any type of website, however, when it comes to eCommerce, you might want to consider some of the disadvantages.

👍 WordPress Advantages:
  • WordPress is free to use. WooCommerce is also free in terms of the initial price so you won’t have to think about monthly license payments.
  • More powerful and flexible than Shopify which allows total customization.
  • Gutenberg allows you to drag and drop items into a post or page.
  • Thousands of plugins specifically built for eCommerce.
  • Huge variety of content management options.
  • Open-source, which means it benefits from a huge community of developers and active users.
  • WooCommerce easily integrates with Google Analytics as well as it has its own set of analytical tools as well.
  • Optimized for content without the need to write blog articles elsewhere.
👎 WordPress Disadvantages:
  • Complete customization requires coding skills/ or hiring a developer.
  • Additional costs for important functionalities can make things expensive pretty quickly.
  • You need to source the hosting, security and domain name yourself, as well as take care of the maintenance.
  • You need to have experience with WordPress before using WooCommerce.
  • Experience with coding will appear necessary in the long run.
  • No 24/7 support.
  • WordPress is not an eCommerce platform.
  • Using too many WordPress plugins can lead to many conflicts, site speed issues, and high maintenance costs.

 

Still can’t decide?

Already have a project in mind but can’t decide which platform is the best fit?



We’d love to start a conversation with you and discuss your vision. Let’s see if we’ll be a good match.

Conclusion

To sum up, if you’re looking for a fully-hosted out-of-the-box solution, then Shopify is for you. You can sell both physical and digital goods with minimal maintenance. It’s also ideal for beginners who want to build their own store without outside help and don’t require to have control over the core data. Of course, Shopify is not suitable if you don’t want to sell online.

On the other hand, with its huge choice of amazing tools, WordPress is the number one choice for building pages for online services no matter the type. When it comes to eCommerce, however, WooCommerce is great for content-heavy eCommerce websites with a huge variety of products. However, coding experience will be quite necessary in the long run.

The Verdict

To put it simply, if you already have a WordPress website running, it would be much quicker and cheaper to add WooCommerce or other eCommerce setups instead of investing in a new platform. However, if you don’t have a website yet, it will be much easier and more efficient to launch your online store with a dedicated platform like Shopify.

In the meantime, you may also be interested in some of these related articles:

Subscribe for our newsletter

We hate boring. Our newsletters are relevant and on point. Excited? Let’s do this!