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Struggling with how to choose between WooCommerce vs Shopify? If you’re planning to launch an ecommerce store, we’re almost certain that you’ve come across these two ecommerce platforms as they are, by the numbers, the world’s two most popular ecommerce platforms.

Both platforms have their merits, which makes it a tough decision, especially for something as serious as an ecommerce store. To help you choose the solution that’s right for your store, we’ll spend this post digging into each platform and comparing and contrasting the two so you can be confident when you make your final decision.

WooCommerce vs Shopify: How Each Platform Approaches Ecommerce

Just like when comparing website builder platforms such as Squarespace and Wix to WordPress as a whole, WooCommerce and Shopify take two different core approaches to creating and managing your store:

• WooCommerce is self-hosted. That means your store’s files are located on your own server and you’re free to modify everything on your store as you see fit.
• Shopify is hosted. That means Shopify hosts and manages the software for youand, while you do have a lot of flexibility, you’re limited to only making the changes that Shopify allows you to make.

What’s the practical difference between these approaches?

WooCommerce is more flexible, but not as beginner-friendly. Shopify is the opposite – it’s very beginner-friendly, but has some hard limits that you won’t encounter on WooCommerce. As we go through some more specific comparisons, you should see this theme play out over and over.

Ecommerce Market Share

It’s also interesting to take a look at the ecommerce market share. Of course, you shouldn’t pick a solution simply based on popularity, but it can help to see trends on what your competition might be using. According to BuiltWith, as of December 2018, of the top 1 million sites, 21% of the web uses WooCommerce to power their stores. That’s followed in second by Shopify at 18%.

However, if we look at the top 10k websites, only 6% use WooCommerce, while 23% use Shopify. So it seems that Shopify is more heavily used on higher authority sites. But this also means there is still a lot of room in the enterprise space for both of these platforms to grow.

Looking at Google Trends for the past 5 years, we can see that both have had pretty steady growth, although Shopify seems to have slowly surpassed WooCommerce.

How Easy Is It To Launch a Store on Each Platform?

In terms of how easy it is to go from nothing to a fully-functioning store that’s ready to process payments and accept orders, Shopify is the definite winner.

WooCommerce

When you create a WooCommerce store, you kind of have to do two separate things:

• Install WordPress and learn the WordPress interface (if you’re not already familiar with WordPress, that is)
• Install and configure WooCommerce and learn the WooCommerce interface

In general, before you can start accepting orders, you’ll be responsible for:

• Finding hosting
• Installing WordPress
• Installing and configuring WooCommerce
• Finding a WooCommerce theme
• Configuring nitty-gritty details like payment gateways, tax calculations, and more (though something called WooCommerce Services has made some of this simpler)

Now – none of this is too daunting, and the massive WordPress community makes it easy to find help (like our tutorial on how to install WooCommerce). But there’s a definite learning curve – especially if this is your first WordPress site. Make sure to also check out our massive WooCommerce guide to help boost your sales.

Shopify

With Shopify, there’s very little getting in the way of you creating your first product and starting to sell it.

Basically, all you do is:

• Create a Shopify account
• Select and Purchase a domain or sync an existing domain name
• Choose your theme

And assuming you’re using Shopify’s own payment gateway, it’s easy to start accepting credit card payments right from day one.

It’s tough to beat the simplicity of Shopify.

How Much Control Do You Have Over Your Website’s Functionality?

As far as hosted platforms go, Shopify is actually one of the more flexible solutions. But it still can’t come close to the control that you get with a self-hosted WooCommerce site, which is why WooCommerce is the clear winner in this section.

WooCommerce

With WooCommerce, you have a few ways to customize your store’s functionality:

• Your theme
• The 50,000+ WordPress plugins, including a bunch that are specifically designed for WooCommerce
• Custom code (one of the benefits of a self-hosted solution)

So what does this let you do? Well, you can, for example, do something like Qüero Handmade Shoes and sell personalized products on a scale that would be pretty much impossible with Shopify.

Similarly, WooCommerce’s flexibility is also evident when it comes to things like product variations. With WooCommerce, there’s no hard limit on the number of product variations that you can use, while Shopify puts a hard cap of 100 variants per product and 3 total options per product no matter which Shopify plan you’re on.

Shopify

You already saw one limitation of Shopify above – product variations.

But how flexible is the rest of your Shopify store? Like WooCommerce, you can customize your Shopify store with:

• Themes – you can find both third-party themes as well as themes at the Shopify Theme Store.
• Apps – these are similar to WordPress plugins in concept and are all collected at the Shopify website.

Shopify also lets you add custom HTML but only to your store’s homepage, which is obviously a limiting factor.