Deciding Between WooCommerce and Shopify

Welcome to the 10 Days to a Better Shopify Store Series! To see the rest of the series, click here.  If you’re in the process of deciding between WooCommerce and Shopify, be sure to keep reading!

When I decided to open my own store, I had no idea it would even do well. It was a chance I took. I jumped in head first, not knowing a thing about running my own store.

It’s been a FUN learning curve and I am amazed at all of the things I have accomplished over the past year. My store is my baby. I feed it with new products, pay attention to its weaknesses, and work on it every day to build up my empire.

After coaching many people with WooCommerce and Shopify alike, as well as having my own business, there is a CLEAR winner in my book.

If you are deciding between WooCommerce and Shopify, I hope this comparison post helps you to understand why one is DEFINITELY better than the other!

Deciding Between WooCommerce and Shopify

WooCommerce sounds so nice. Doesn’t it?

Think about it, you have your own blog and store platform to sell your products in. Lovely right?

Well, in my opinion and experience I’ve realized that WooCommerce isn’t that great and I don’t personally feel like you can reach great success on this platform because of its massive limitations.

Let’s take a closer look at some of the reasons why Shopify is clearly lightyears ahead of WooCommerce

1- Your store can get hacked with WooCommerce

WordPress accounts get hacked all the time, and there’s not really any one-on-one support unless you decide to pay lots of money. So, one thing to consider is your blog getting hacked. But, can you imagine having your store be a part of that hacking? Your customer lists, emails, orders, they can get in there, see it all, and do some REAL damage to not only YOUR stuff, but your entire customer base as well as all your products you’ve set up in your store.

With Shopify, you are paying for a SERVICE and they will take care of those stressing needs. I sleep in peace every day, knowing that my customers information is very WELL protected. I don’t have worry about a security breach or anything like that like I would a hacker. With WooCommerce, I wouldn’t be able to feel that peace.

2- Your site runs slowly because of WooCommerce

Now, lets talk about plugins! Not only are they a pain with every update that WordPress does, but they also make your website run VERY sluggish because of the amount of plugins you have to install to make WooCommerce work. And what customer service are you really going to have with a slow site?

People expect FAST service, so you want to have a fast website. Otherwise people are going to leave and there goes your revenue, walking right out the door. Every plugin you add to your blog adds a weight on how fast your blog will display and load content. Imagine adding another 30-40 plugins just to have a decent looking WooCommerce store! Seriously, don’t shoot yourself in the foot.

3- Updates don’t work right with WooCommerce

Along with having those plugins slow down your site, they also don’t always play well together. One person I know, had over 65 plugins, and 45 of them were for WooCommerce.

Whenever WordPress sent out an update, their whole blog broke.

Come to find out, after going through and uninstalling one plugin at a time to see which one it was that broke their blog (which took them days!), it was a WooCommerce plugin. The plugins don’t always play nice and have seamless integration with each other. Sometimes there are glitches and with so many plugins, you’re asking for trouble.

Now let’s say they didn’t know how to fix their own problem? Most people don’t! If you don’t, you will be spending a long week with your technician to find and solve the problem, and a technician at their cheapest rate is like $60/hour. It’ll take a good 3-4 hours to find the problem. You’re looking at $240. Shopify pricing is $30/month and doesn’t slow down your site, have glitchy plugins to deal with or anything like that.

As a general rule for your blog, whether you use WooCommerce or not, keep your amount of plugins as low as you possibly can. Every 6 months, I go into my plugins and make sure I have ONLY what I need and what I’m using.

4- Outside forces cause your blog to crash

Let’s talk about blog crashes, outside of WooCommerce.

Let’s face it. It happens to everyone, because things fail from time to time.

This month, my whole blog crashed! It was down for several hours before getting it back up and running again. Had my store of been on Woocommerce, I would have been without not only revenue from my blog (ads, affiliate income, etc.), but also from my store!

Having my store on Shopify, didn’t cut that portion of my income at all. It goes without saying, we should never have all our eggs in one basket.

5- You won’t see as much success

To be completely transparent, I don’t know why.

Maybe it’s because Shopify is a more professional platform with a more professional checkout system.

Maybe it’s because it’s a separate site.

Maybe it’s just trusted more or customers like the set up better.

I’m not really sure, but across the board, all those I’ve coached have made more sales with Shopify over WooCommerce, many seeing immediate results without changing anything else, EXCEPT the platform.

At the end of the day, I want you to succeed. And that’s why I highly recommend that if you’re going to open a store, you do it right! Go with a platform like Shopify over WooCommerce.