Shopify vs WooCommerce: which one suits your online shop?

Shopify or WooCommerce? Both sell perfectly well. The real question is who does the work behind the counter. And who you will be selling to in two years.

We build shops in both, and also headless or fully custom. Which one it becomes, we never choose first. First what you sell, to whom and how. Then the branding and the design of the shop, from product page to checkout. Only then the platform. And every shop comes with strategy, design and SEO safeguarding, whatever it ends up being.

The difference in one sentence

Shopify you rent, WooCommerce you own.

You don’t feel that difference on launch day. You feel it on a Tuesday evening, a year later, when something needs to change. With Shopify you log in and do it. With WooCommerce you log in, see updates for WordPress, WooCommerce and a handful of plug-ins, and hope they keep playing nicely together. That maintenance is no disaster, but it has to be someone’s job.

When Shopify fits

Shopify is built to sell, and you can tell. It fits well if:

• you want to sell quickly and reliably without arranging hosting yourself;
• you sell physical products with stock and shipping;
• you want to grow with apps, extra channels and marketplaces.

Take Stobe, a Dutch brand in portable mini projectors. Their old Shopify shop was dated: the theme no longer matched the brand, and every change needed a developer. We took care of the strategy, the design and the SEO safeguarding. Our build partner Hoort rebuilt the theme from the ground up, with sections and blocks that Stobe now drags and adjusts themselves. Products, customer data, orders and SEO settings all moved to the new shop.

Read the whole Shopify case of Stobe, or how we handle Shopify store development for a shop you manage yourself.

Shopify makes less sense if your shop has very unusual processes, such as custom quotes or complex configurations. Then you end up stacking apps on apps to make it do something the platform wasn’t built for.

When WooCommerce fits

WooCommerce lives inside WordPress. That is also its greatest strength: your website and your shop are one system. It fits well if:

• you already have a WordPress site, or want content and shop together;
• you want full control over hosting and data;
• your shop needs extra features that a plug-in already exists for.

Jebra is a brand of tools and building supplies for roofers. Their shop has its own category page per product group, products by the piece or by the set with the price per piece shown, a wish list and a knowledge base with blogs. Exactly that combination of shop and content is what WooCommerce is good at. Livar does the same with meat from the Limburg Monastery Pig: an online shop, a stockist finder and a site in three languages, all in one WordPress environment.

The flip side I always mention up front: WooCommerce demands maintenance on hosting, plug-ins and updates. That is why we build on a light base with only the plug-ins the shop really needs. More on that at WooCommerce store development.

Do you sell to businesses too?

This is where most platform comparisons fall silent. And in my view it is the most important question.

Many online shops focus entirely on the consumer. While the business market is often more interesting for earning your stripes and making good margins. Imagine you sell kitchen knives. A consumer buys one. A restaurant group wants sets, its own price and a quote before ordering. If your shop has no entrance for that, you email that customer back with a PDF. Or worse: they order from someone who has it sorted.

Both platforms can serve business customers, but each in its own way. Stobe got a separate entrance in Shopify for resellers, wholesalers and corporate gift companies. Livar got its own page in WooCommerce for hospitality and butchers, with business features such as a quote request. Jebra works with set prices for professionals.

How far you need to go with that depends on your customers. Read more about B2B ecommerce and how to give business buyers a place of their own in your shop.

Unsure whether that business entrance is worth it? Then first look in your own orders and your inbox. How often does someone order more than a handful of units? How often does an email come in asking “can we get a quote for this?” or “do you deliver on invoice?” Every one of those emails is a business customer who now has to work around your shop. See them regularly, and you know enough.

When neither fits

Sometimes Shopify doesn’t fit, and neither does WooCommerce. Then there are two other flavours.

Headless. Your shop system is separate from the front end your customers see. Behind the scenes runs Shopify or WooCommerce, for example, but the front end we build custom and it talks to the back end via an API. That pays off when your brand demands a design a standard theme can’t handle, when you sell through several channels from one shop system, or when speed and custom features weigh more than an off-the-shelf shop.

Fully custom. No standard platform underneath, but software we build for your shop, for example in Laravel. That is the answer if you sell with configurations, quotes or prices per customer, or if your shop needs to connect to your own stock, ERP or planning system. In short: if a standard platform forces you to change your process.

My honest opinion: most shops need neither. Headless and custom take more building and more maintenance than a standard Shopify or WooCommerce shop. That is why we always check first whether a standard platform will do.

How to choose

Still not sure after these four questions? Then we work it out together. Whichever platform your shop ends up on, we start with what you sell.

First know what’s in the display case. Then build the counter.

RK

Rubin Koot · Hoofdbakker

Rubin is the founder of Online Marketing Bakery in Roermond. You take the stage, we fill the room. And we make sure it buys.

[email protected] · More about the bakers

Further reading: Ecommerce website design · Shopify store development · WooCommerce store development

How we work: first the offer, then the room. Want to get going with a brief like this? We do that in the Sold-Out Session: your offer and your event structure in one half-day.