Wix, Woo for Shopify for business, which is best?

With so many options these days for web building platforms, choosing the right one for your new business or side hustle can be a little overwhelming. So, rather than spend hours scouring the web to compare your options, we’ve done the research for you this month, comparing the top 3 most popular web builder’s for 2021, so you can start building your site faster, and with confidence.

The first thing to clarify in today's blog is why we’ve chosen to compare Wix, Woocommerce, and Shopify. Of all the web building options on the great-wide web, these 3 are some of the most popular. Why? They’re known as the quickest and easiest to build and use for, they're offering, support and speed powerful and pricing is affordable, not to mention their opportunities for easy expansion and scalability is fantastic.

As great as each of these platforms are, there are still pros and cons to each that can make them more or less suitable for your specific needs. Things to consider are coding opportunities, ease of use, design choices, and most importantly, what they provide compared to what you actually need. Before we start comparing the 3, let’s first break down what you’re needing for a website. Here’s the general rule of thumb for most businesses needing a website:

• Selling products (eCommerce)

• Selling services (pages with information about services)

• Providing business information (think landing page and about us)

• Providing customer or reader information (blogs)

Are you selling a physical product AKA creating an ecommerce website?

If so, all three offer solutions.

Shopify will immediately set you up to start selling. It’s a web builder and hosting service made with Ecommerce in mind.

Wix functions for multiple types of web needs. In order to have an ecommerce website with Wix, it’s as simple as changing your plan

WooCommerce is essentially a plugin under the WordPress umbrella. In order to start selling on here, you’ll need to set up a WordPress account and add your Woo plugin. Don’t worry, it’s easy.

Selling a service, sharing a blog, or simply need a strong landing page for your business? Read on to get an overview and compare the pros and cons of each.

Shopify

Shopify gets its name from its key offering - it has been created for those wanting to start selling, and quickly. This web building platform also hosts your website - this can be a bonus for some, and a negative for others so we won’t list this as a pro or con - it's really dependant on whether you as the user wants flexibility in coding. What you do need to know about Shopify’s own web hosting is that you cannot access 100% of the code powering your website. Again, a positive for some, negative for others! But essentially Shopify does this to create the easiest, hassle-free way for you standard new-to-web user that wants to set up an eCommerce website, fast.

For those not ready or willing to sell a product, Shopify does also offer a ready built-in blog space, and you can also use it for simple landing pages and has some excellent templates to choose from.

Pros

• Incredibly easy to use and setup

• Great functionality and performance

• Easy connection to payment gateways

• Great marketing tools for social media and offering discounts and promotions

• Great app range (over 1200) to manage customer service, inventory, accounts and much more

• 24/7 support options

Cons

• Difficult to customize and much less flexible

• Limited free templates

• Plugins and add-ons can add up costs and become expensive

• For phone call support, Shopify offers limited regions (US, UK, New Zealand, and Australia only)

Wix

Focused on user experience and design, Wix doesn’t shoebox itself into any particular category for a website build, instead offering more than 70 categories to cover almost every business type and/or website end-use (think restaurants, online stores and artists such as musicians and photographers). It offers powerful drag and drop editor tools for user-friendly design and boasts 100’s of free editor templates. Although slightly more complex than some web builders, Wix offers great design opportunities for the beginner right through to a seasoned editor and coder, with fantastic new, extensive editing capabilities through their Editor X product, and for serious coders, Velo X.

Pros

• Flexible and endless customisation for a truly unique website

• Many free templates

• Great tutorials and fast response time for help

• Competitive pricing

• Multiple apps for extended features

Cons

• Not automatically mobile responsive. This is something you need to edit yourself.

• Load speed can be slower than competitors for mobile websites

• Templates can’t be modified too easily

• Sites cannot be transferred

WooCommerce (WordPress)

Before we get into WooCommerce, let’s add a little *reminder* that Woo is a plugin extension to WordPress. So first a little overview of WordPress before we go into WooCommerce.

Built originally as a blog-focused website builder and hoster, WordPress has since grown to host around a whopping 35% of the world’s websites. WordPress software offers endless business use opportunities with 1000’s of templates and to build a website with WordPress, it’s free. Bear in mind costs come in with hosting, domains and plugins. One free plugin is our topic of conversation - Woocommerce (yay!).

Onto Woo - It's an open-source plugin, making it changeable and re-codable. Themes (templates) sit alongside WordPress, so you have lots to choose from and although additional plugins come at a cost, it’s arguably one of the best and cheapest options for eCommerce out there.

Pros

• Well-rounded suite of tools

• Competitive pricing

• Very fast setup process

• Great inventory management

• Good support

Cons

• Not super customisable

• User experience is not top-level

• Certain features require plugins that can add up costs

• Building a WooCommerce store can be technical for beginners

Our Summary: They're all great - it comes down to what you need.

As you can see, many features and benefits come with all three web-building platforms. We hope with this breakdown we’ve answered some questions and given you more clarity on which choice may suit your needs the best. One thing to always remember with web building is that A/ Yes it can be simple and B/ Regardless of how easy to use all web building software claims to be, there will always be glitches and technical issues that most of the everyday business owner might not know how to resolve.

Final things to consider:

• Does the UX (user experience) and design matter much to you? If yes, with less experience, lean toward builders with lots of template options, if yes with more experience, lean toward more customisable options.

• How much control or changes do you want or need to make in future? If yes with less experience, opt for simpler, easier to use building options, if yes with more experience, don’t be afraid to spend a little more time finding and building out your site for customisation.

• Are you planning to scale larger in the future? If yes, think about what that scalability will look like, and make sure your choice aligns with this.

We always recommend bringing on a third party (like Gecko Cloud!) to either build, collaborate or support you with your next website as experienced builders can give you a stronger professional opinion before, during, and after you build your site.

Want to start today? Why not give us a call!