Shopify or Wordpress?

Getting ready to start another ecommerce website. I have a seemingly good wordpress/woocommerce person i have used for past projects. The wordpress sites have performed well (great seo), but seem riddled with glitches and require fixing after every update. Seen some nice pro built Shopify sites lately, but havent used shopify for anything bigger scale.

I plan to pay a pro to set it up either way.

Real world Pros/cons of each for small biz?

Ballpark of gross revenue you hope/expect to see come through that site? I "think" Shopify has higher fees, so that may be a consideration, so if you expect a lot of sales maybe seek the lowest possible transaction rates.

If you're going to do ecommerce, then you need to go Shopify. If your volumes are low, then it's not too expensive. You may find that Shopify is somewhat limiting if you want to do more than just sell a widget for $5. If there are options to the widget, customizations, bulk discounts, etc., then the cheap version of Shopify is somewhat limiting. These limitations can usually be overcome by using another ap just to handle something that Shopify doesn't.

LOTT said:

Ballpark of gross revenue you hope/expect to see come through that site? I "think" Shopify has higher fees, so that may be a consideration, so if you expect a lot of sales maybe seek the lowest possible transaction rates.

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I don't think gross would exceed $300k.

"If you're going to do ecommerce, then you need to go Shopify."

Why? Lots of us use WordPress/Woocommerce, pretty sure it's the most used platform in the world.

Garwood said:

I don't think gross would exceed $300k.

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Shopify actually has good card processing fees at the higher priced plans, should offset most of the fees it has over WordPress. What's the cost difference for your developer to build the site, between the two?

I'm in a similar boat of WP/Woo working well, but there always seems to be a little something not cooperating just right.

LOTT said:

Shopify actually has good card processing fees at the higher priced plans, should offset most of the fees it has over WordPress. What's the cost difference for your developer to build the site, between the two?

I'm in a similar boat of WP/Woo working well, but there always seems to be a little something not cooperating just right.

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I'm waiting to speak with a friend of a friend who has a custom Shopify site exactly like what I think I want. I don't know price range/difference yet. Still in the researching whether shopify is better or not phase.

The wordpress problems have turned me off from it some, but it could be the person I'm using. She seems very capable and fixes stuff immediately, but there's something wrong frequently. Stupid stuff like all the fonts change. Or I notice orders are way down for a few days and figure out something is goofy in the merchant settings so payments aren't going through. Had half the site just disappear once. Could be the website gal made some mistakes somewhere, but I hear similar from other people too and frequently lately I keep hearing how great Shopify is. I have found some custom shopify sites (not standard themes) I really like and their SEO is good too.

If Shopify can deliver the design I want with good SEO and reliability I think I will try it.

I'd be suspicious of that first developer. I built our current site with no prior training, and the stuff I'm referring to is minor things like a button color here or there. Some of the external linking is a hassle, like ShipStation not wanting to import orders, but I don't know which side the problem is on.

While waiting with cash burning a hole in my pocket for website builder people to get back to me I played around with Shopify some more. I was waiting for an appointment so I loaded it on my phone, and this is so stupid, but the mobile version of the site builder is easier to use/more intuitive than the fullscreen site. I got the start to a good looking site in a few minutes. I'm pretty happy with that. I think I saved myself a few thousand bucks!

a topic of interest, I'm also looking at that choice. My genius programmer, soon to be software engineer, says Shopify (probably will mean less panicked calls to him). I'm learning toward woo just because its on the WP platform. I want my site to do a lot more than just e commerce, i.e. e commerce is just section of the site, and WP makes it so easy and cheap to build great sites. In the past, a site was like a static brochure, now I want it more like a news reel - constant updates, whats new, tied in with social media post etc. (yeah, we all think a lot of that is BS, but its the way of the world now). I can do all that on WP in minutes myself. its why I learned WP so I wouldn't have to call an IT guy every week. So far I've done everything using the free stuff and really like that aspect!

While perhaps biased because its by Elementor, this write isn't bad Shopify vs WooCommerce: Best Ecommerce Platform in 2021? | Elementor

Shopify is very easy and intuitive to use.

We recently put an e-commerce project out for bid and received quotes in the $20k range. This seemed incredibly high and we still had to organize the content.

My last experience with web development was writing HTML and Java. I just assumed it would be an overwhelming task to take on a store build.

After some research, we bought a Shopify subscription and chose a “free” pre-made template. We then used it built something better than I had envisioned possible. Anybody can use the builder tools and there are plugins available to do just about anything.

I got rough estimates of $6000 to $7500 for a basic site setup with me doing all the populating. Both Woocommerce and Shopify were about same price. I can't really see how that's justifiable, but I was getting ready to pay it just to keep things moving forward.

8 years ago I paid $3500 for a pretty nice woocommerce site.

I'm going to see how it works with shopify for a bit.

I paid someone when I first started out a few thousand to develop a Wordpress / WooCommerce site. It was OK I guess. Anyway, after I paid them for lifetime hosting they magically disappeared and 6 months later the hosting platform they used expired meaning my website went down (turns out they only paid for 6 months at a time). I didn't really have the time to get a new developer in so I sat down over the weekend and managed to knock one up myself (with a little help from YouTube tutorials). What I realised was that most of the "work" they had done was using stock templates with a few small tweaks and mods. The site I knocked up with zero prior experience worked about as well as the one that was professionally developed and over time I've improved things along the way.

I was recently recommended Shopify due to the ability to have a DHL plugin that calculates accurate shipping rates and gives international customers the ability to pre-pay import duties and taxes but it's not available on WordPress yet. I did a bit of research into Shopify and the fees are probably not any worse than Wordpress by the time you take into consideration hosting fees etc. But I saw a few people stating Shopify had taken their stores offline for an alleged breach of some T&C's. I don't know the full details behind that but it was from a few separate sources. I figured I'll just stick with what I know for now.

Another option that's maybe not as popular is GoDaddy's online ecommerce platform. I use it for my first business and it's pretty user friendly. Again you can go from zero experience to a fully working online store in a matter of hours and adding additional non shop pages are pretty easy. I have found it limiting in the past as I don't believe you can get plugins to offer additional functionality but it is very easy to use.

I use shift4shop. I've been with them for 4 years and have had an ecommerce store since 2008. No monthly fee as long as you use their credit card processing at 2.9% plus 30 cents per transaction. Tons of themes and modules. Shipping calculations and label printing is integrated but you will get better shipping prices by linking your store to shipstation. UPS negotiated rates for a 1lb box was anywhere from $14-22 for me, with shipstation it's $6.50-$10.

In the 3 years since this thread started I've been using Shopify. I started out with the fancier plan that calculates shipping, but it didn't work very well so I just figured out average shipping cost for each product and dropped down to the $29 plan. I'm very happy with the $29 plan. Shopify has had zero glitchy shit. I've had no problems at all besides the shipping calculator sucking.

I am much happier with Shopify over Woocommerce/wordpress.

Shopify always seemed like a toy to me, and Wordpress/Woo has a ton of options, but man the glitches... we've been playing with getting the thing to auto-send order confirmations for years now. It worked perfect, then stopped working, and there's zero support for it.

Shipstation is great for the most part; straightforward, powerful enough to tweak, good tools. But the new generation shipstation release now messes up all our labels, so we have to hit print twice on each label (it throws an error the first time) and then we have to download the label and print from adobe because it will only print the label a 1/9th the size despite the setting being correct. Uninstalled, reinstalled, wiped files... no dice.

It's 2024. This should be extremely well fleshed out. Almost all consumer commerce is handled through a handful of solutions.

DethloffMfg said:

Shopify always seemed like a toy to me, and Wordpress/Woo has a ton of options, but man the glitches... we've been playing with getting the thing to auto-send order confirmations for years now. It worked perfect, then stopped working, and there's zero support for it.

Shipstation is great for the most part; straightforward, powerful enough to tweak, good tools. But the new generation shipstation release now messes up all our labels, so we have to hit print twice on each label (it throws an error the first time) and then we have to download the label and print from adobe because it will only print the label a 1/9th the size despite the setting being correct. Uninstalled, reinstalled, wiped files... no dice.

It's 2024. This should be extremely well fleshed out. Almost all consumer commerce is handled through a handful of solutions.

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Shopify works fine for me.

DethloffMfg said:

Shopify always seemed like a toy to me

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That would be the last word I would use to describe shopify. It has all the grunt you could ever need.

I liked woocommerce, but the constant maintenance was the deal breaker.

I started building my first woocommerce site a few weeks ago. I have zero experience with building a website. It's a big PITA but hey; no pain, no gain right? It doesn't feel much different than learning mastercam, Excell or any other software really.

Innitally I was going to pay someone to do it for me until I saw what it cost. $6k for a basic site is an absolute rip off, especially since everything is already pre-built and the "builder" is just dragging and dropping into a template and adding plug-ins. Youtube has a ton of videos giving step by step instructions.

I figure once I learn to do it, I'll be able to create an e-commerce site for anything I want in just a few hours.

Freedommachine said:

I started building my first woocommerce site a few weeks ago. I have zero experience with building a website. It's a big PITA but hey; no pain, no gain right? It doesn't feel much different than learning mastercam, Excell or any other software really.

Innitally I was going to pay someone to do it for me until I saw what it cost. $6k for a basic site is an absolute rip off, especially since everything is already pre-built and the "builder" is just dragging and dropping into a template and adding plug-ins. Youtube has a ton of videos giving step by step instructions.

I figure once I learn to do it, I'll be able to create an e-commerce site for anything I want in just a few hours.

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What made you choose woocommerce?