So you decided to try your hand at creating your own ecommerce store. But with all the options out there you don’t know which platform is right for you.<\/p>\n
Creating an ecommerce store is easier than ever but the number of options is dizzying. In this article I’m mainly going to cover two of the biggest options: Shopify vs Woocommerce. Although this store runs on WooCommerce, I originally set things up on Shopify, and I promise to give you a balanced view if you’re torn between the choices. I certainly agonized over the decision and in the end I chose to run with WordPress with WooCommerce.<\/p>\n
The deciding factor for choosing WooCommerce<\/strong> in our case was:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Now, a lot of these points are debatable and to be perfectly honest with you, Shopify is a great platform and probably ideal for many people who want to start their first ecommerce store. Here are some of the reasons you might want to go with Shopify<\/strong>:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n According to some recent research, the top 4 ecommerce platforms<\/a> are:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The main thing to note is that Shopify is growing the fastest. They do not have an open source or self-hosted version of their ecommerce platform. They are a publicly traded company with plenty of resources to invest in driving their offerings forward. Additionally, Shopify does an amazing job at incentivizing third party developers to expand their core functionality with freemium apps.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Ecommerce platforms come in a variety of packages too. The main flavors are managed and self-hosted. \u00a0The main advantages of managed (or as some call it, hosted) are:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n For most people, not having to worry about managing servers or keeping your software updated is worth its weight in gold. When you use a hosted solution you never have to lose sleep or worry about your site crashing. Of course, you are vulnerable to site-wide issues but you can see from Shopify’s status page<\/a> that things are remarkably peaceful and showstopping incidents are very rare. Many\u00a0people with a strong technical background choose a hassle-free hosting solution simply because they know the headaches involved and value their sanity and time.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Security wise, with all the sensitive information you handle running a store, a managed solution will usually be much more secure. Although it depends on the company in most cases, security is a life or death situation for a hosting company. A service provider will always be proactive about ensuring their platform is secure. Since Shopify doesn’t publish any of their source code, they are less vulnerable to that type of attack. However, they are a bigger target and growing so any potential security breach can be catastrophic.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Although WordPress\/WooCommerce is always getting better, there have been numerous security issues and scares in the past. Anyone who has experience with running a self-hosted WordPress site will certainly have more than a few battle scars from getting their site attacked by hackers. When you manage your own site you must always keep your WordPress installation and plugins up-to-date and pay attention to security releases and notifications in your dashboard. Most hosting companies, especially the smart ones, don’t even give you an option. They will force software updates to mitigate security risks even if it breaks your plugins or other customizations.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Now, the main advantage of self-hosting is absolute control over your servers. While it means more work and due diligence when running the software, it’s peaceful for the most part. Even when you’re going through growing pains, most issues are fixed by scaling up (using bigger and better servers). Hosting solutions whether it’s Amazon AWS or other providers are getting cheaper and better all the time. Some of the biggest technology companies are scaling their websites with commodity services and building their entire infrastructure on top of AWS or a similar cloud platform.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n With self-hosting there is always a greater risk, especially when handling customer information along with other sensitive information regarding your business (such as orders, revenues, and various api keys you integrate with including payment gateways and more). WordPress is definitely a huge target for hackers seeking to compromise websites and steal information because it powers so much of the web, is open source (so experts can scour the code for vulnerabilities), the source code is huge (meaning there are likely to be more undiscovered vulnerabilities), and many people running the sites are either lazy with security or not as knowledgeable as they should be.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n On the other hand, with self-hosted solutions you get absolute control over every aspect. You can easily relocate servers and there is less risk of getting shut down completely if there is a customer dispute (although, payment gateways and banking will always be your achilles heel no matter what platform you choose so long as you do ecommerce). You can control and schedule how often and how thorough you want to backup your data.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Now if you read all of the above, you might wonder why we would switch to WooCommerce. Shopify still seems like a great deal doesn’t it? The main reasons for migrating the store was better SEO options and lower running costs.<\/p>\n If you look at Shopify’s pricing<\/a> page, you’ll see that plans start at $29 per month. They have a lite option at $9 per month but that’s only for selling through existing websites, social media, or messenger. Even though $29 per month is very reasonable for most people, the unfortunate truth is that anyone creating a serious store will end up having to install several apps from the Shopify marketplace<\/a>. Even though there are many free apps, most of the good ones are paid or are freemium offerings where they give you limited functionality for free.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n All the paid apps\u00a0are billed monthly whereas most WordPress\/WooCommerce plugins are either one time expenses or yearly. While some apps are $10 per month or less, there are many that are much more expensive. This is understandable since the plugin developers\u00a0usually need to buy server resources to host their apps. This is the other thing about hosted platforms and third party apps, you will always be granting a certain level of access to your store to third party developers to use their apps.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Also, it’s very rare that you need a paid or premium plugin with WooCommerce since there are usually free options. Most of the time you’ll need to buy a plugin license if you’re looking for very specific functionality or more powerful pro features.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n By the time I was done setting up my Shopify store, my monthly bill ended up around $60 and that was before my first sale. I just couldn’t see myself paying this much money for something that seemed basic. Also, the truth is that most ecommerce sites fail after launching and never manage to get a sale. The single biggest factor in quickly launching an ecommerce store is figuring out how to effectively leverage paid traffic whether it’s Facebook ads, Google AdWords, or paying Instagram influencers for promotional posts with backroom deals. The other way is to build organic traffic with SEO\u00a0through regular blog posts or building up your social profile. If you already have a blog with a targeted audience, adding WooCommerce to your blog might be a no brainer.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n\n
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Managed or Self-hosting?<\/h2>\n
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So Why did We Choose WooCommerce?<\/h2>\n