If you’re looking to set up an online e-commerce store, you may be interested in using either Shopify or WooCommerce. So what are the benefits and differences of each, as well as their long-term marketing performance possibilities?
Shopify claims it has you covered for every eventuality, whether you want to sell your products online, in store, on social media, or from the boot of your car. You don’t need any design skills to launch a Shopify store. Instead, to get started you just need to buy a custom domain name and set up your online store. You’ll then be able to access hundreds of different themes, and will be able to create a unique, stylish business. It’s quick and easy to get selling online.
Some of the key perks of Shopify include the fact that you can completely customise your online store, you’re able to add new sales channels quickly and easily, you can manage unlimited products and inventory, have access to unlimited bandwidth and customer data, track sales and growth trends, sell on channels such as Amazon and Pinterest, and fulfil orders very simply.
You can accept credit cards instantly, and automate the shipping process through third-party shipping apps – all with 24/7 customer support if needed. It’s also stress-free for you, as Shopify handles everything from core marketing to payments, secure checkout to shipping. There are over 1 million active users, and 400,000 businesses powered by Shopify. It has seen more than $34 billion sold through the sales platform.
Having first started in 2006, the simplicity of Shopify has helped it gain plenty of traction. You can come to the platform very much as a beginner and be up-and-running in next to no time. The payments for Shopify varies depending on what you want to offer, including extras such as abandoned cart recovery, real-time carrier shipping and gift cards. They do, however, take a percentage of the sale as a transaction fee, so the amount you pay Shopify will increase if you are selling more. It is able to handle plenty of orders, making it ideal for all kinds of e-commerce stores, big and small.
Shopify’s marketing potential
When it comes to SEO, search engines love the clean software structure of Shopify. It also enables you to add meta information. However, the fact it is missing multi-language support can make it tricky if your business works in certain locations. Another limitation Shopify has is with tracking with Google Analytics.
Shopify is able to handle any of your technical PPC requirements, which means you can market your business effectively. Using PPC for your website can help you get a good return on your investment when done correctly, and can get your e-commerce store seen by the right people who will then go on to buy from you.
WooCommerce can also be easily customised to help you build your online business. It has been downloaded over 28,110,599 times and is responsible for powering over 28% of all online stores. It’s one of the most popular e-commerce platforms on the web. As well as being possible to control WooCommerce efficiently and sell anything anywhere, it is also an extendable, open-sourced, adaptable platform for you or your developer to integrate into your website and develop.
WooCommerce can be extended in many ways, both for free and with payments required. It’s available in 18 countries with a 30-day money back guarantee. The major benefit of WooCommerce is the way it is connected with WordPress, as many people use this for hosting their websites. The ‘free’ aspect makes it particularly popular. Like all e-commerce platforms, the payment processors will take a small fee on transactions, but this is standard practice.
However, you will require additional plugins in order to access the essential functionality that will help you run a successful e-commerce platform. Unlike Shopify, which comes with a free SSL certificate, you also need to pay extra for speed, security and hosting with WooCommerce.
WooCommerce’s marketing potential
WooCommerce is great for SEO and is perhaps even better than Shopify because of its comprehensive blogging features. Through using the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress, you can easily get effective content analysis and can optimise your page titles, meta descriptions and content. There’s not a huge amount of difference in the SEO performance between Shopify and WooCommerce, although the fact the latter can offer multi-language support and has a better blog feature gives it a bit of an edge.
One of the greatest advantages to WooCommerce is its blogging capability, which can be supported using PPC across social media to attract targeted visitors to your site. This is a particularly great way of making your website and e-commerce store SEO-optimised and ensuring search engines are picking up on your content to send potential customers your way. You can also incorporate this with traditional e-mail and banner advertising for maximum effect.
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