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WooCommerce Vs Shopify

I recommend everyone to commence their e-commerce journey with Shopify. But many e-commerce veterans are seen siding with WooCommerce instead. From the data available, it seems that WooCommerce is more widely used than Shopify. I wanted to compare the two based on my experience.

You will likely find much more detailed reports on this comparison, however, many of those are written by web hosting companies which are biased towards WooCommerce as Shopify comes pre-hosted while WooCommerce is self-hosted and requires a hosting plan. I recommend that you read those reports since they are very detailed, but for the ones written by the hosting providers or by the affiliates of the hosting providers, please take what they say with a grain of salt.

Let’s explore.

Cost

Let’s begin with the cost. Shopify’s basic plan starts from $29/month but you will also need to pay 2% of the order value as transaction fee to Shopify. By upgrading Shopify plan, you can reduce this to 1% and 0.5% depending on the plan you choose. You also need to pay a monthly subscription for most Shopify apps.

WooCommerce in comparison is free and has many free apps available as well. But since you need to host it yourself, there will be a hosting cost of roughly $10/month. You will also require SSL certificate which you can get for $50-$100/year or for free using Clouldflare or a similar service. WooCommerce ‘seems’ to be cheaper in most cases but Shopify is also only expensive when you’re doing large volumes. For someone who’s just starting out, Shopify is going to be very affordable as well.

In addition, since WooCommerce is self-hosted and self-managed, there could be outages, security issues, hacks etc which may cause you monetary losses. In order to avoid these issues, you may require a technical resource. So after assuming these costs or losses, I don’t think WooCommerce is truly cheaper than Shopify. It may or may not be depending on who is using it.

Ease of Use

Ask anyone you like, including the ones who are using WooCommerce as their goto solution, and you’ll likely hear that Shopify is easier to use. It truly is. You don’t need to know anything about domains, hosting, SSL, security, integration, customization etc. Everything comes pre-configured and you can start a store in a jiffy, literally.

I recommend everyone to begin their journey with Shopify for this very reason. You’re likely working on your products, developing and frequently iterating them. If you’re a dropshipper, you’re likely constantly hunting new and trending products for your store. You’re likely figuring out a marketing plan. You or your team need to have A game when it comes to Facebook ads. If you can do Google, Snap, TikTok and emails, you could literally add at least as much revenue as you do from Facebook. All of this needs your attention. When your attention deserves all of this, you shouldn’t be wasting anytime looking into non-issues such as whether the hosting can take enough traffic, or whether part of my traffic is getting stolen from malware etc.

The ease of use is huge.

In addition, you don’t need to know much about how to optimize your conversions. Or how to have a perfect sales funnel. Free Shopify themes are VERY nicely done and have high conversion rates. They are perfect for inexperienced sellers looking to start a store on a budget.

Features & Customization

WooCommerce is light years ahead of Shopify as far as features and customization is concerned. It is why I think many advanced store owners eventually need a WooCommerce store. The amount of customization that you can do with a self-hosted platform is unthinkable.

I was listening to this podcast of a founder of a large D2C brand, and he said he hates the fact that you’ve to manually put in Zip Code, City, State and other information on your Shopify store. This became the reason for him to switch to WooCommerce since he wanted to just take in Zip code, and auto fill City and State info which wasn’t possible with Shopify. When your brand requires conversion optimization on that level, your hands are tied on Shopify.

Hence, it makes total sense for the advanced users to go with WooCommerce.

Conclusion

As a general rule, I think that new and small e-commerce businesses should start with Shopify while large business doing larger volumes should use WooCommerce so they can avoid transaction fee, hire a technical resource if needed, and get unlimited flexibility and customization.

At Socialoholic, we’ve been doing 7-figure e-commerce for a while, but still have found ourselves using Shopify. For 8 figure and beyond, I think one should definitely be using WooCommerce.

Artisans of Pakistan, E-Commerce & Government Plans

In 2017, a software company in Pakistan reached out to us for support in a project that they were building for the government. The government wanted to provide an end-to-end e-commerce solution to the artisans of Pakistan so they could easily export their product on D2C basis. This means access to e-commerce software/platform, payment gateway, training on how to sell etc. The budget was over a billion Rs. I don’t know the exact budget but I do know it was more than 1 billion Rs. Here’s how I saw the project evolve.

The government required of the software house to build the e-commerce platform in-house in Pakistan. I saw it, it wasn’t bad. But I’m sure it wasn’t and can’t be as good as Shopify – a $100B company, with over 5000 employees. Majority of the billion Rs budget went into the development of this software, which could have been offered to artisans for $29/month with an existing solution or for free with the likes of WooCommerce. For the payment gateway, the government wanted the software house to setup a company in US and setup a payment gateway e.g Stripe that could be shared between all the artisans. And the last stage was to train artisans to enable them with e-commerce skills.

The correct distribution of funds, in my opinion, could be to have the least amount of money spent on the software/platform, slightly more for access to payment gateway, and the most to enable artisans to sell.

In reality, almost all the funds were spent on creating a Shopify clone, that may never see the light of the day with no budget left for payment gateway and training.

This was either yet another attempt of action faking by the government, or a complete lack of strategy despite having good intentions. Whatever it was, it was a disaster, and we quickly saw ourselves disassociate from the meetings.

Facebook Announces “Shops” – Native Shopping Experience on Facebook Family of Apps

Only 2 days ago I wrote this piece about e-commerce being the real fuel of the internet. I feel more confident about it today than I’ve before as Facebook diversifies away from ads and inches closer to the e-commerce space.

When we ran our network of content sites that leveraged Facebook’s influencer marketing, I realized that we were working against the force. That each day, Facebook would do something to cap, limit or control our business or business model in a certain way. I knew that they will take over the business model. So much out-bound traffic making tons of ad-revenue all outside the Facebook platform.

They let us run for a while, for a long while, because their users engaged very well with the content. But eventually they launched instant articles to get a piece of this pie. A native facebook article reading experience where Facebook serves the ads and also takes a cut.

They did the same with the videos. In the early days of Facebook, Youtube videos appeared as embedded content on the platform and not as links. As they started to prioritize their videos on the platform, they started treating Youtube videos as regular links. Eventually they launched in-stream ads, a video monetization program just like one for Youtube.

Now they are doing this for e-commerce. Every day 100s of new D2C brands are launched. Their primary source of customer acquisition has been Facebook. It is estimated that most indie e-commerce brands acquire over 50% of their customers through Facebook advertising. While Facebook already takes a massive chunk of the revenue generated (often 40-50%), having more control by hosting native e-commerce experience on the pages could mean more revenue for the company, better user experience & higher conversion rates.

Just like instant articles, each product would need to be approved by Facebook now when you import the catalog.

How do I perceive this news? troubling. I know this will improve user experience but Facebook already practices more control than I appreciate and the counter-party risks continues to increase.

While you practiced full autonomy over your woo-commerce and Shopify stores, now you’ll be on the mercy of Facebook. In the worst case scenario, which by the way is often the normal case scenario for me, no longer will I only lose ad accounts, I could also lose my “shop”, because of course my “shop” has to adhere to Facebook’s TOS. If the AI, which isn’t very fond of me, constantly throws ban hammers for allegedly violating advertising policies, why wouldn’t it do the same for the shops.

Here’s how Facebook’s Shops look like