Shopify vs WordPress: Which One to Choose for E-Commerce Store Development?

It’s one of the best decisions to launch an E-commerce Store. Now, the question arises how do you build it?

When it comes to E-Commerce, there are two big trade names, namely Shopify and WordPress. Today, these two platforms are considered to be the most popular platforms to build an E-commerce store, which might be a wonderful essence for you!

Mostly, people get confused when choosing between these two giants, Shopify vs WordPress had been a fierce rivalry in the technological world that exposes reasons to build an E-commerce Store.

There’s no right or wrong rule here – apart from that, it’s all about researching which platforms suit your business needs at the best place.

To help you similarly do just this, we’re going to compare Shopify vs WordPress to help you decide to prefer the right platform. By the end, you should know the basic differences between the two platforms, as well as which platform seems to be right for you.

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Shopify vs WordPress: The Basic Difference

• Shopify

Shopify is a hosted E-commerce platform, this means Shopify handles the hosting, maintenance and security of your online store. Perceptibly, that’s pretty convenient and lets you focus on growing your store instead of technical issues.

Although convenience comes with a tradeoff, this is because Shopify is merely hosting the software for you, this always have somewhat limited access (you can only do what Shopify lets you do). This means that if there are some special features you are going “absolutely need”, you might struggle to implement it to the next level.

• WordPress

WordPress is a self-hosted platform that means you can install the WordPress software on your web hosting and use that to power your online store. As a result, you can interfere because you have access to everything across the globe.

It’s quite difficult for any hosted platform that comes close to the flexibility and controls you get with a self-hosting platform like WordPress. But flexibility comes with a tradeoff, and that tradeoff is that it’s no longer as convenient, suitable and comprehensive, as depicted in this fierce battle of Shopify vs WordPress. Now, you’ll be the one responsible for security and maintenance purposes, which means you need to do it yourself or hire someone to do it cost-effectively.

How to Build Your Store with Shopify vs WordPress?

If you’re looking for the easiest and cost-effective way to build your E-commerce store, in this way, Shopify wins on the simplicity front, especially for stores selling simple straightforward products and services. WordPress will require a bit more upfront setup, but again, the benefit of pushing through is that you get more flexibility if you need it.

We recently published Beginners Guide: 6 Phases of Website Development Process?

Shopify

Creating a Shopify store is as simple as signing up for an account. Yes, this goes to be some configuration afterward. But you can start getting your store ready for the public in just a few minutes per second.

After you’ve signed up, you can manage most of the aspects of your store from the Shopify dashboard that includes:

• Add Products
• View Orders
• Manage Your Customers
• View Analytics

If you want to change how your store looks, you can choose from several free and premium Shopify themes and you can also extend your store by using the Shopify app store. This makes it easy to add new, pre-evaluated functionality:

What you can’t do, although, is directly edit all the underlying code at your store. You do get certain access – for instance, you can edit your Shopify theme’s HTML/CSS and JavaScript. However, you cannot say that it can directly access your store’s database or use server-side code like PHP.

Check our Beginners Guide: 6 Phases of Website Development Process?

WordPress

WordPress itself is a comprehensive content management system. If you want to turn it into an E-commerce store, you’ll need something called a “plugin”. The most popular E-commerce plugin so far is known as WooCommerce.

Because it’s such a dominant player, we’ll exclusively focus on WooCommerce – but there are other E-commerce plugins, most notably easy digital downloads, this makes a great choice if you want to sell digital file including photography, images or music.

This results that whereas you just sign up for an account with Shopify, the overall process for WordPress seems to be more like the following features:

• Sign up for WordPress hosting
• Install and configure the core WordPress software
• Install and configure your chosen E-commerce plugin (i.e. WooCommerce)

Yes, it’s indisputably more time consuming than Shopify, but here’s the payoff.

If you want to add more functionality to your store, there’s an enormous ecosystem of other WordPress plugins that you can use well over 50,000. These plugins can help you to do everything needed to add abandoned cart emails to your store to set up a knowledge base or FAQ for your store’s shoppers to run real-time auctions at your store.

And if you want to change your store’s design, you can take benefit of thousands of WordPress themes, many of which provide dedicated E-commerce supportability metrics are:

See How to Build a Website Development Project Plan: Step by Step Guide?

You have 100% access to your store’s underlying code. In particular, to modify basic HTML/CSS, you can also include:

• Execute your personalized server-side code
• Access your store’s database and many more.

In this strategic competition of Shopify vs WordPress, You must remember that if you’re not a developer, we understand that might not mean much. So, let’s put in real terms and conditions, it might just mean the difference between being able to add that important new feature or not?

Which One You Should Choose: Shopify vs WordPress?

In a nutshell, if your interest lies to find simple concerns and other relevant aspects, On the contrary, you should choose, WordPress if your main desire is flexibility and control over all the strategies related to E-commerce stores.