Deciding between WordPress and Shopify is a big decision. Both do can e-commerce, both allow you to customise almost every element of your site, both have multiple options for payments, stock control and integration with other business systems such as POS and marketing.
So, is there any real difference between them? In this blog, we’re going to take a look at the pros and cons for each platform so you can make an informed decision on which best suits you and your business.
WordPress and WooCommerce
There are plenty of benefits to choosing WordPress to run your website. While WordPress out of the box can’t handle sales, the free WooCommerce plugin turns any website into an online shop with just a few clicks.
WordPress is well known for being very very very customisable. You can adjust every element in the design and user experience, which is helpful when fine-tuning SEO and really making your brand stand out online. It can also be very cheap to run, which is a huge plus if you are starting a side-hustle or new business and cash flow is tight. All you need to pay is the hosting and domain costs for the site. You will need to pay a processing fee for the payments, but this is generally the same or cheaper than other platforms – WordCommerce charges 1.5% + 25p for cards, compared to Shopify’s standard card rates at 2% + 25p. This cost only comes in when you make a sale, so if you have months where not much happens, you aren’t going to be hit with lots of fees.
WordPress also has a lot of free or low-cost plugins and themes that allow you to customise your site and provide extra features and functionality. These include discount codes, bundles, appointment bookings, and subscriptions. This is perfect if the main point of your website is to tell customers about you, with a side goal of selling the odd thing. For example, a restaurant which sells selected merchandise, or a service business that offers a small number of paid downloads.
Another great benefit is that there are unlimited staff accounts. This is so handy if you want to grow your site or orders are piling in. The number one cause of security breaches online is password sharing, so being able to set up every member of your team with their own account means everyone can help without compromising the safety of the site and risking your precious data.
Finally, as a backend user, WooCommerce is very powerful when managing multiple products. You can export and import huge inventories, and it’s relatively easy to create highly customised products. For example, if you run a clothing company, you could have t-shirts in sizes XS, S, M, L, and XL, and have short sleeve and long sleeve. You could then have 5 colours to choose from, and 5 designs printed on the front. This doesn’t seem a particularly complex set of choices, but leads to 250 possible products. WooCommerce lets you set those 4 options, and create 250 variants of your t-shirt product.
However, WordPress does have some drawbacks, and not everything is as straightforward as it could be.
As mentioned before, to do sales via WordPress, you will need the free WooCommerce plugin. This can be complex to set up, especially if you have no previous experience with eCommerce. As it is built for a global audience, you often get options for things such as taxes that don’t apply in your country, and it can be confusing to know what to select if you’ve never encountered it before. Also, the default template can be slightly clunky and difficult to adjust, especially pre-built bits like checkout. If the whole point of choosing this route is to get everything beautifully customised and on brand, it’s annoying to suddenly send users to a slightly amateurish checkout out page.
Another issue is that it is increasingly common is that the best plugins to extend your site are no longer free of charge. Again, if you are looking to keep costs down, it’s frustrating to find you need to pay for additional software, and your costs can go up higher than expected as a result. Doing your research is key to avoiding these extra charges. I’d always opt for a plugin with a one-off cost over one with a monthly subscription, as these can mount up to thousands in fees over a relatively short period, whereas a one-off cost often offers better value long term.
The last downside is that to get a really sharp-looking WooCommerce site, you will almost certainly need to hire a WordPress developer, which is also likely to have an upfront cost. This can be justifiable, as a developer will undoubtedly save you time and stress. They’ll know exactly how to get the taxes in WooCommere set up, they can figure out how to connect to the API of your preferred payment provider and how to make your checkout pages feel on-brand. However, if budget is a driving factor, then development costs do need to be accounted for.
Shopify
The most appealing feature of Shopify is that the payment systems are built in, and the checkout process is super slick and already optimised to help convert users through that final part of the buying journey. Technical problems, password leaks, and security concerns make e-payment mechanisms one of the most complex aspects of setting up an e-commerce site. Shopify is incredible at making this process stress-free, efficient, and smooth; 3 words that any business owner loves to hear.
The templates are also designed to convert shoppers, which can boost your e-commerce success, as user-friendly and appealing page designs are more likely to result in sales. Shopify makes it easy to set up something that works well and looks good with minimal tech or design skills, which is great for small companies who are just starting out on their e-commerce journey. You can also create extra pages and blog posts alongside product pages, which can help with website expansion and improve your SEO.
Another big tick for Shopify is that it integrates with many other business systems. Most email marketing list providers have an easy way to add customers from Shopify, and you can also link up to your social media feeds to create sales leads on other platforms. Many POS systems and stock control systems can also be connected to your Shopify account. Shopify allows you to create different stock locations, multiple shipping zones and product types to ensure your costs are covered. The in-built analytics are very good, and it’s simple to connect customer accounts across online and in-store purchases to give you really useful insights into customer behaviour, as well as the opportunity to create bespoke reward schemes for your most loyal shoppers.
However, if Shopify is so great, why isn’t everyone using it?
The absolute biggest issue with Shopify is that it’s expensive. With a charge of £230 per year at a minimum, plus high transaction fees at lower levels, it may be hard to justify spending such a large sum. You’d definitely need to sell a lot online to justify that level of cost. Getting additional staff member logins or full analytics data will also require you to pay for a more expensive pro-account – but these do have slighlty lower transaction fees to soften the financial blow.
However, the costs don’t stop there… If you want to include extra functionality, like bundles, loyalty rewards or memberships, you need to install extra apps. These almost always charge monthly subscriptions so could easily end up adding hundreds per year to your site costs. I’ve seen sites with so many paid apps that the yearly cost to run the site was well into the thousands. Just as it would be hard to justify the rent on a 100,000 square foot department store-sized shop on a prime high street for one or two sales a week, it’s hard to swallow such huge running costs for a website that is not making hundreds of sales per day. If you do sell a lot online, it may well be worth it, but it’s definitely a barrier for smaller shops.
Shopify also has its own code that you need to learn if you want to be able to make certain customisations. While the developer handbook for Liquid and the Shopify API is very in-depth, it assumes a certain level of technical knowledge. It’s one thing being told you need to parse the JSON data before it can be displayed via handles, but if you have never worked with code before there’s no step-by-step info on how to do that. Technical queries on the Shopify forums almost always result in a reply saying to download a paid app, or hire a Shopify expert, so you’ll need decent coding skills to even attempt basic customisations.
Another downside to Shopify is that while creating additional content such as blogs or About Us pages is easy, formatting them to look good can be hard. The default page builder is pretty basic so if you have a distinctive theme and/or branding on your site these pages can look very bland in comparison. Again, you’ll need to know code to add your branding/theme to these pages and really make them sing. If your plan is to make a blog and sell a bit of merch on the side, then the hassle of trying to input and design your main pages on Shopify is going to drive you mad, and you should definitely think twice before signing up to host your site here.
Lastly, while Shopify is great at handling smaller inventories, it can be surprisingly tricky to manage larger stores. The bulk editor is hard to use above 50 products, and an individual product can only have 3 options and 100 variants, meaning our t-shirt example above is no longer possible. Even splitting the listing into a separate “Long Sleeve T-Shirt” and a “Short Sleeve T-Shirt” doesn’t help, as each comes in 5 sizes, 5 colours and 5 designs, so we still need 125 variants for each product. There is currently a new release of Shopify available to developers, which allows up to 1000 variants as standard, but still only gives 3 slots for customer options. Even the built-in export/import function ceases to work on larger stores, which can mean trawling through pages of products, or paying for an app to allow you to download all your product listings in one file. I’ve also found the product import via CSV can be very patchy, which is frustrating when trying to get your store updated quickly.
So Which Is Better?
Creating a professional-looking WordPress+WooCommerce or Shopify site will likely require a developer to help you, or considerable time and effort on your part, so the initial setup costs of both systems are likely to be similar. While WooCommerce transaction fees are slightly less than Shopify, on a £10 transaction, you’ll pay 40p in fees on WooCommerce and 45p on Shopify, so hardly a dealbreaker. Therefore, the main consideration when comparing the two is the running costs and day-to-day usability.
A pro Shopify site with a custom domain, a couple of premium apps and transaction fees is likely to cost in the region of £1000 per year to run. However, the neat out-of-the-box designs, easy integration with POS, stock control and marketing systems and the user-friendly back-end interface is likely to save you considerable amounts of stress every single day. If you are expecting to make the majority of your income from online sales, then Shopify is an excellent choice.
A WooCommerce site is much cheaper to run, even with a custom domain and good quality hosting you’d struggle to spend more than £250 per year. However, it’s not quite as slick and easy to set up and manage as a Shopify site. If you plan to be online every day, processing orders and uploading new products, WooCommerce is a tiny bit clunkier, and over the course of a year, that lost time will begin to outweigh your savings. However, if online sales are not your main source of income, then WordPress is much better at handling other content and WooCommerce does a very respectable job considering it’s free to install.
Overall, both platforms offer a reliable and efficient base for your e-commerce business, and one is not clearly a better choice than the other. Shopify perhaps has the edge, but this is reflected in significantly higher costs. Ultimately, you’ll need to consider which platform feels more user-friendly for you, which suits your budget and which will help you best achieve your wider business goals.
Unfortunately, the only person who can truly decide on the best platform for your business is you, taking into account your current circumstances and future plans. However, if you do need more help to decide, please get in touch or book a free call to discuss your plans in more detail.
