Shopify Vs WordPress

Shopify and WordPress are two powerful platforms that anyone in business and/or the world of digital marketing should be familiar with. If you have been keeping up with our blog posts, you would know that we talk about these platforms from time to time and are adamant in discussing how incredible and valuable they can be.

Shopify and WordPress are two different platforms used for building a website. But they serve different functions and therefore, will each serve different types of companies better, also each helping to achieve different goals. We will break down their core purposes, similarities and differences here to help you gain more insight into which one would be best for your business. 

Let’s dive in!

WordPress

Starting a company? Want to build a website? You cannot find a more established and flexible platform for those needs than WordPress. How can we determine just how versatile it is? Well for one, WordPress allows you to customize themes and internal apps to build just about any kind of website your heart desires. It is up to you to determine and purchase the domain and website hosting account of course, but once that is done, you load WordPress and you have limitless options at your disposal for helping you bring your vision of your website to life. 

Additionally, WordPress has a plugin called WooCommerce which is commonly referred to as just Woo which easily turns any WordPress site into an eCommerce store. While this plugin is very useful and easy to use, if you are not experienced with some basic WordPress abilities then it is best to stick with Shopify. However, if you do already have some PHP background and understand WordPress, then this could be a good option for you. 

Other factors to consider with WordPress:

While WooCommerce is an amazing tool within WordPress, it does come with its standard CC and processing fees, which for a heavy online seller, may add up. 

But, as a platform that 26% of the internet runs on (for good reason), this is by far the best platform to use for blogging, and for amping up your content — and well all know how effective content can help your company stand out, position your company as a thought leader and drive traffic to your site, which will in turn help generate more sales. 

Shopify

Are you in the business of selling a tangible product(s)? Perhaps, something that you’d like to make available for online purchase? If offering products to your customers is the main purpose of your website, you absolutely need to check out Shopify. Shopify makes online sales easy — after all, this is exactly what it was intended for! 

So how does Shopify compare on some of the features we discussed on WordPress? Well, for ecommerce, and strictly ecommerce, years of experience have shown that Shopify is a hands-down winner. Shopify was built from the bottom up specifically to facilitate, drive, and optimize ecommerce sales. But as we mentioned the costs associated with using WooCommerce within WordPress, it’d be remiss of us not to discuss and compare the price associated with Shopify. Purchasing Shopify can turn out to be more expensive than its ecommerce alternative in WordPress, depending on the package you choose of course. But this may well be substantiated because the way Shopify is built to drive online sales is pretty much as streamlined as you can get.

What About Blogging? 

So, this matter is where many people differ in their opinion. There is a lot of talk about WordPress being the obvious winner for blogging and customizations to help yield more targeted SEO functionality and reach. At the same time, website developers have argued that its imitations are more speculative than real. For one, those developers who know how to build a good website have shown that there is pretty much nothing that can be done in WordPress that can’t also be done in Shopify. So whereas some widgets, add-on, functions may be simpler to design in WordPress, a proper developer will be able to do just about the same for your Shopify site, without any loss of functionality. 

The Bottom Line

Ultimately, your decision about which platform to invest in should be based on your company’s needs, which no one knows better than you and your team. If ecommerce is just one smaller part of the overall capabilities of your website you are building, then go with the more easily customizable, cheaper-to-put-together, and more flexible WordPress platform. On the other hand, if ecommerce is at the core of your business and you need a site that has stellar customer support with built in expert functionality to help you drive sales, and online tutorials available at the ready, then go for Shopify. Also, keep in mind that while WooCommerce and Shopify are highly comparable when it comes to ecommerce functionalities, to make the best of both we highly recommend working with expert developers, like our website development team at Firon Marketing, to make sure your company’s needs are fully met and that either of these platforms are built out to function optimally to your company’s success!