Are you considering moving your store from Shopify to WooCommerce?
When you’re starting or scaling your eCommerce business, it’s important that you keep as much money in your pocket as possible. WooCommerce helps you invest your money in the areas that will grow your business and make it the most successful.
Changing eCommerce platforms may seem like a big hurdle to overcome, but it’s easier than you might think to move your products, customers, and orders to WooCommerce.
Here are a few reasons you might want to switch from Shopify to WooCommerce:
More control over your store
WooCommerce allows you to have full control over your website. It’s open-source, which gives you the power to customize it as much as you’d like. You can create exactly the store you want without limitations. With WooCommerce, you have full control over:
Search engine optimization
While your search engine rankings are largely based on the work you put into your site and content, WooCommerce allows you to edit every single aspect of your SEO, no matter how technical.
You’ll also benefit from its seamless integration with WordPress, which enables you to easily publish consistent, high-quality content.
Payment gateway integration
Both Shopify and WooCommerce offer integration with major payment solutions, but WooCommerce allows you to connect to lesser-known, niche payment gateways that might be necessary for an international store.
Or, choose WooCommerce Payments, a seamless solution that simplifies the entire process for you. Manage payments, disputes, deposits, and recurring revenue from the same place you handle the rest of your site. Reduce cart abandonment by accepting payments directly on your site, along with Apple Pay for one-click checkout. Plus, you can even take advantage of instant deposits, so your money ends up in your bank account within minutes (unlike Shopify’s two-day minimum). When it comes to money, you want something that’s simple and easy to understand — WooCommerce has you covered.
And, unlike WooCommerce, Shopify charges additional transaction fees for all third-party gateways. After you’ve worked hard to create fantastic products and market them to new customers, the last thing you want is to narrow your profit margins. Even for small stores, additional transaction fees can amount to thousands of dollars in lost revenue.
Backups
While Shopify allows you to export customer data and orders, you have to pay a fee to back up your website design and settings. WooCommerce, however, has a variety of excellent, free backup options.
Endless flexibility and customization
One of the biggest benefits of WooCommerce is its flexibility. Both WordPress and WooCommerce are open-source, which means that anyone can copy, modify, or change the source code however they’d like. In contrast, Shopify is closed source; they retain full ownership over their core code.
An open-source content management system, like WordPress, also means that there are endless customization options because developers can create plugins or themes to serve any number of specific functions.
If your products are complicated or unique, you can set up your store however you’d like with WooCommerce. Here are a few ways to do that:
- Accept deposits from your customers or offer payment plans.
- Allow shoppers to mix and match products.
- Sell your photographs online in a visually-pleasing way.
- Add, edit, and remove fields on the Checkout page.
- Offer product add-ons, like upgrades, gift wrapping, and customization.
Of course, you can also sell everything from products and services to downloads, subscriptions, memberships, and bookings.
More control over pricing
Both WordPress and WooCommerce are free, so you’ll just be responsible for your domain name, hosting, and any extensions that you’d like to use. You can choose any provider and mix and match extensions based on your needs. This flexibility prevents you from paying for functionality that you don’t use.
If you use Shopify, you’re charged for the following:
- Monthly plans. Depending on which Shopify plan you have, you could be paying between $29.99 and $299 a month. The more features you want, the more you have to pay. For example, if you’d like to offer live shipping rates, you need to use the Advanced Shopify plan.
- Add-ons. Many Shopify add-ons that provide additional functionality require monthly fees. For example, if you want to offer waitlists for your products, you would need to pay an additional $14.99 a month ($179.88 a year). This can quickly add up! Many WooCommerce extensions are free, and paid extensions often charge a yearly fee that can save you money. For example, waitlist functionality would cost just $49.00 a year.
- Transactions. If you use an external payment gateway, Shopify takes between 0.5% and 2% per transaction, in addition to any fees your payment gateway charges. It doesn’t take long for these fees to add up! Even if your store only processes a few transactions a day, you could lose thousands of dollars in profit each year. With WooCommerce, however, you’re not charged any additional transaction fees. This means you keep more money in your pocket.
Shipping costs and tools
Shopify does allow merchants to charge shipping fees and print labels from their account. It also includes discounted pricing from USPS, UPS, and DHL. However, in order to show live rates from carriers, you must have an Advanced plan, which comes at the hefty price of $299 per month.
WooCommerce offers an extension — WooCommerce Shipping — that also allows for easy label printing from your dashboard and negotiated discounts with USPS and DHL.
Unlimited product variations
Product variations are the options offered to customers for each product. For example, if you sell t-shirts, you might offer red, blue, green, and yellow in sizes XS – 3XL. The combination of colors and sizes would create 28 variations.
Depending on your products, variations can quickly add up. After all, you want your customers to be able to choose the right product for their needs!
Shopify limits variations on each product to 100. If you sell men’s shoes that are available in three widths (narrow, regular, and wide), standard sizes 6-15 (including half sizes), and three colors, you’d have 153 variations. This would exceed Shopify’s limits. However, with WooCommerce, you can offer as many product variations as you need.
Conclusion
When you’re starting or scaling your eCommerce business, it’s important that you keep as much money in your pocket as possible. WooCommerce helps you invest your money in the areas that will grow your business and make it the most successful.
WooCommerce and WordPress are all about community over competition — they all want one another to succeed. So come and join the WordPress family. You’ll love it here!
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