Having a website presence for your eCommerce store or business online is more of a necessity than an option. While ideally, you would get a website developer to build your website from scratch. These days, there are lots of website builders that can help you to create a personalised website. Among these, Shopify and Wix are the best known platforms used for building eCommerce websites. They help to easily create online platforms for business of all scales. By creating a website through these website builders, you can save time to focus on other aspects of your business like marketing. But when comparing Wix vs Shopify for eCommerce, which one should you choose? Both have their pros and cons. Let’s compare Shopify versus Wix to find out which is best for your eCommerce business.
Wix Vs Shopify for eCommerce
Before we dive into the details, let’s learn more about the two platforms.
What is Wix?
Wix provides drag-and-drop features to build your website. This tool was originally built to make the process of designing and building websites quicker and more efficient, perfect for anyone even without the knowledge of coding. And it did exactly that with more than 10 million websites made using Wix.
It offers more than 800+ themes for any type of website with plenty of customization options. You can build blog websites with more than hundreds of customizable themes or you can hire experts to build custom websites for your business.
Though Wix was not originally built to cater to eCommerce stores, it has plenty of eCommerce themes.
What is Shopify?
Shopify exclusively focuses on building eCommerce store websites. Every component and feature of Shopify is built to enable a better eCommerce experience. With more than 90 customizable themes, it offers visually appealing and practical store themes to build any kind of online store.
It powers more than 5.7 million stores and the numbers are only growing. If your business sells products and you operate in the retail industry, no website builder offers a better solution than Shopify.
Another good service is the Shopify POS which integrates with your brick-and-mortar stores. The app is also a good inventory management system and allows you to track inventory on your Shopify site and also accept payment through Shopify cards. Even if your brick-and-mortar store uses other POS systems, Shopify offers integration with them.
So what is better? Wix or Shopify?
Compare Shopify and Wix
Plans and Pricing
Shopify Pricing:
All plans of Shopify come with 24/7 support through email and live chat support. Other benefits of the plans include:
- Basic Shopify: $29.99/ month
- Basic reports
- 2 staff accounts
- Up to 4 inventory locations
- Shopify: $79/ month
- Professional reports
5 staff accounts
- Up to 5 inventory locations
- Advanced Shopify: $299/ month
- Custom report builder
- 15 staff accounts
- Up to 8 inventory locations
Wix Pricing:
Wix offers plans categorized under three types:
- Website plan: $4.5/ month to $24.5/ month
- Business and eCommerce plan: $17/ month to $35/ month.
These plans are required to enable online payments on Wix.
- Enterprise plan: $500/ month
These custom plans cater to individual business needs.
Support
Shopify Support:
Shopify provides 24/7 support and has tactics to help you successfully run the online store.
- The documentation provides very useful information and ‘how-to’ guides to help you learn the cores and implement different features on your own.
- Shopify has an active community with discussion forums and groups. You can learn about the problems people are facing and also the good solutions they have implemented.
- Learn with Shopify is an official Youtube channel with some great videos where industry leaders dive into aspects of Shopify and running your online stores.
- Experts Marketplace offers services from professionals to solve your business problems.
Wix Support:
Wix has excellent content that helps you make the most out of your website. It also provides the following supports:
- Wix Help Center stores FAQs about problems and solutions. You can get valuable insights from here.
- Wix Learn has courses, webinars, and other wonderful content relating to building Wix websites and more to help your business succeed online. They also offer various certification courses.
- The Wix Status Page offers a real-time overview of the health of your website.
- Wix marketplace is there for you to implement complex solutions to your website or get professional help.
Integrations and Shopify Apps
Both Wix and Shopify offer good third-party integrations to help develop your eCommerce store even better. If you compare Wix vs Shopify for ecommerce, both have third-party apps that you can integrate into your site. With these apps, you can collect analytical data, improve user engagement, improve shopping cart functionality, manage inventory, collect reviews and anything else that you would require for online shopping.
Wix was originally created as a platform for blogs and other websites. So, it can help you create good “About Us”, and other descriptive pages. Wix is easier if you have a small store with limited products and good storytelling is your main selling point. However, Wix also has many apps that you can integrate into your website. Some of these apps include, Wix Chat, Comments, Site Booster, Wix Forum, Site Search, Countdown Timer, Visitor Analytics, AdScale, and Modalyst.
Shopify has a lot more apps than Wix. There are over 7500 Shopify apps dedicated to enhancing the visitor’s shopping experience as well as making it easier for the store owner to operate daily activities. While it is difficult to list all of the best Shopify apps, here are a few of them: Shopify Inbox, Stock Sync, Smile, Helpful Product Reviews, UpPromote Affiliate Marketing, Aftership Order Tracking & SMS, Trustpilot Reviews, Wishlist Plus, Hotjar, and Printful.
Experts Marketplace
Both Wix and Shopify have excellent marketplaces to list the services offered by third-party experts. These freelancers and agencies provide the best services and know the ins and outs of the platforms. The experts provide all kinds of solutions to make your websites more successful. These experts may specialize in one or more fields and provide services under the following categories:
Website development
It is the first step of developing an eCommerce store. Experts like web designers and web developers work together to make the website according to your business requirements. When choosing the experts you need to consider their experience in your niche business. You can hire Shopify experts to build your website for you from the marketplace. Same goes for Wix as well.
Wondering whether you should hire a Shopify expert? Check out the blog and read about the 7 reasons why this is a good idea.
Marketing and branding:
The marketing professionals provide services including marketing strategies like SEO, SEM, and SMM. They can create landing pages that convert. They can also help you make sense of the performance and analytics of your website or marketing campaign.
Content development:
These experts are proficient in utilizing mediums like blogs, videos, infographics, and other forms of content to drive business goals forward. Graphic designers, content writers, and SEO experts are some of the professionals involved in content strategy planning and implementation.
Custom solution development and more:
If your business has particular requirements that have no solution available, you can hire experts to implement custom solutions. The solution can be customized designs for your eCommerce site, or it can be app development to help solve your business problems.
Scalability and Migration
Both Shopify and Wix can be a good place to start for small businesses. However, websites need to be scalable according to the business growth. For that, Shopify offers scalable stores, so you don’t have to worry about accommodating more visitors as y our store grows. Other solutions like Magento, which is an open-source e-commerce platform, may struggle with scalability issues as your business expands if not properly optimized. Magento is known for its flexibility and robust features, but it can become complex and costly to scale. Other solutions may crumble when your website suddenly gets thousands of visitors during Black Friday sales, but not Shopify. It is also easier compared to Wix to migrate Shopify store to another platform if you decide to switch platforms. Since Shopify is all out of eCommerce, they are able to function with large data loads.
When it comes to the Wix website vs. Shopify, you will face more issues with Wix in terms of scalability. If you want to transfer your website, you may have to manually enter the content into the website all over again. Wix is not very user-friendly in terms of scaling up your website. So, if your eCommerce store is growing, perhaps consider shifting to Shopify for convenience.
So to answer the question of Wix vs. Shopify for eCommerce, if you own an eCommerce store, Shopify is the best option for you. But for other websites, you can’t go wrong with Wix. Whichever platform you choose, they offer plenty of features to help your business.
Whether it’s a Shopify store that you need to build or a Wix website, Azency provides web developers who can build the perfect website for you. Our expert developers are experienced in building both websites. So, if you require an expert for building websites, contact Azency today!
