Compared to Shopify, WooCommerce is the best choice to sell products online with a highly-customizable eCommerce website shop that you actually own. On the contrary, Shopify is a popular eCommerce website platform for simple, cheaper, cookie-cutter, turnkey online stores.
WooCommerce & Shopify Differences
When developing an online store, it’s important to compare the differences between WooCommerce versus Shopify. Ownership, flexibility, and the customization ability for web design, functionality, and online store management are important factors to consider. The flexibility of custom design ensures proper branding, while generating unique content helps build organic website traffic. Everything that you create, you should own. But that’s not the case with Shopify.
Compare Ownership Terms
With WooCommerce, you maintain full ownership of your store, products, and content on your own terms . If Shopify decides that you’re in violation of their terms, they can actually remove your website and its products. Game over. This is why ownership is one of the most important advantages over Shopify and why WooCommerce (WordPress) is our top choice.
Compare Flexibility
Shopify has many limitations for both developers and less-tech-savvy store owners or managers alike regarding custom functionality and design. Conversely, WooCommerce allows endless flexibility for custom development and store management with a huge selection of extensions to choose from.
The freedom of customization is highly important for user experience design, which enables the ability to increase conversions, as well as search optimization for building organic traffic over time – two essential factors for generating sustainable website sales revenue
Utilizing WooCommerce for your eCommerce platform gives us the freedom to design and build practically anything that we can conceive. From product page templates and category layouts to custom admin panels, it’s all streamlined into one website via wordpress content management system (CMS).
Dropshipping For eCommerce
Dropshipping is a process between a customer-focused store and a supplier or manufacturer. There are several ways to streamline your dropshipping functionality with WooCommerce. They offer dropshipping extensions that can handle essential functionality within their plugin. The yearly cost of $79 for this WooCommerce extension can be compared the expensive cost of custom development. Custom eCommerce design has a much higher upfront cost and will incur maintenance expenses over time to keep up with compatibility and security updates. Other platforms charge monthly fees or worse – a percentage of all sales.
WooCommerce Dropshipping Functionality:
– connect to your fulfillment center to manage inventory and shipping
– notify suppliers after order is placed automatically
– assign specific products to each supplier easily
Dropshipping & Related Extensions:
1.) WooCommerce Dropshipping: https://woocommerce.com/products/woocommerce-dropshipping
2.) Syncee Global Dropshipping: https://woocommerce.com/products/syncee-global-dropshipping/
3.) Order Status & Shipment Tracking: https://woocommerce.com/products/order-tracking-for-woocommerce/
Scalability
As your business grows, WooCommerce provides everthing you need to build and manage an eCommerce store with unlimited products, categories, tags, customers, and sales. From my experience, WooCommerce has always maintained relevancy with timely updates for industry-standard functionality, WP core platform and plugin compatibility, and community support. WooCommerce offers live chat support for all paid extensions along with an active support forum for everything else, not to mention meetups, Facebook groups, Reddit, and Slack communities.