Carl Addoumieh
Tuesday, June 22, 2021
In 2020, many businesses shifted to eCommerce to make up for the drop in sales in their usual brick-and-mortar stores or launched their business entirely online. However, one question remains, what is the eCommerce platform that fits your business and its needs best.
This article will compare Shopify and Wix, two of the most popular eCommerce platforms. To do that, we analyze them separately by looking at their advantages, disadvantages, pricing, and features and answer the question of which is the right platform for your eCommerce business.
What's in this post:
Common features of Shopify and Wix
Shopify and Wix target customers with no coding or design skills who want to build an eCommerce website. They both offer hosting, a user-friendly interface, different business plans, and a variety of themes to choose from.
However, scratching a bit below the surface, we understand that each platform is different and has its own advantages, disadvantages, and different target audiences. Let’s start by looking at Shopify.
Shopify
Shopify is the most popular eCommerce platform with +1,000,000 stores fully hosted. Shopify was started by a young man who wanted to sell snowboards online and has grown to a multimillion-dollar enterprise. Let’s look at the most significant advantages, disadvantages, features, and pricing of Shopify.
Advantages
User-friendly interface: Shopify has a highly user-friendly interface for the needs of both skilled developers and newcomers. Shopify also provides extensive guides and documentation to get you started.
+100 payment processors: Shopify is the market leader with its payment processors, offering processors to help you run your business locally and internationally.
24/7 support team: Shopify takes pride in providing excellent customer service to its users.
Offers hosting: You can use Shopify to host your website directly from their interface. However, this would limit you to other non-eCommerce-related services.
Variety of themes: If you’re not sure how you want your website to look, Shopify has your back with a variety of free themes to choose from. You could also create your own themes or purchase an already existing theme.
Different plans: Shopify offers three plans depending on your business size and needs and the services you require.
Abandoned cart recovery: Shopify gives your customers the option to recover their abandoned carts when they return to the store.
Disadvantages:
Limited functionality: Shopify is made for people with close to no coding skills, limiting the freedom that developers and designers look for in their websites.
Hard to customize storefront themes: Shopify themes are harder to customize for your different needs. Lack of drag and drop functionality might also prove to be a difficulty for non-experienced personnel.
URL structure: Shopify’s URL structure makes SEO more challenging because Shopify uses subdirectories such as /blog, /news, /pages.
No multi-language stores: Multi-language stores are not a standard feature for Shopify. There are apps and templates available, but they tend to be expensive or limited in functionality.
Transaction fees: Shopify charges transaction fees for non-Shopify Payments users such as PayPal or Stripe.
Features review
Payment processors and fees
Shopify offers more than 100 external payment processors such as Stripe for credit cards, PayPal, manual options, and BitPay for Bitcoins. The various payment processors give your business the ease of not worrying about receiving your payments.
However, unless you use Shopify Payments, you will have to pay a transaction fee on top of the payment processor fee, which could be rather expensive. Fees are subject to change based on your location and currency used.
Online and offline marketing
Shopify store builder offers you a variety of tools you can use to increase your sales and implement your marketing strategies. Such tools include discount codes and abandoned cart recovery. However, the inability to thoroughly structure your links, the automatically generated uncustomizable robot.txt, and the lack of subcategories could negatively affect your overall SEO performance.
On the other hand, Shopify offers you the chance to sell offline as well as online by creating an offline Point of Sale (PoS) that allows you to integrate your store directly with your Shopify backend and card readers, a solution that helps you boost your omnichannel strategy.
Here are other ways you can boost your omnichannel retail strategy.
Content Management System (CMS)
Shopify has a good CMS that is fully integrated into your store site with easy tagging and the ability to customize SEO parameters. It also allows multiple authors. However, Shopify does not allow you to categorize your content, forcing you to use tags.
Also, Shopify does not offer a related post feature. Most importantly, they do not allow you to embed products in blog posts, which is an essential part of commercial copywriting.
Shopify App Store
Shopify App Store offers over a thousand free apps and also many other paid apps. However, it is essential to note that most of these apps are not developed by Shopify, and you will have to do your own research to find out which fits your business best.
Local delivery option
The local delivery option allows you to reach your local customers based on the radius of your choice. It is a great feature that helps your business success within your local community. Shopify’s research shows that online shoppers spend 23% more and have a 25% higher cart size when a convenient ordering option is available. Mainly click and collect and local delivery.
Packaly is a sustainable last-mile delivery service that offers express and scheduled last-mile delivery service that can easily be integrated into your Shopify store within minutes. Integrate your Shopify store with Packaly and reach your local customers within minutes.
Read how Lush boosted their eCommerce by reaching local customers.
Pricing, plans & features
Shopify offers 3 customer plans based on your business needs. The following plans are:
Is Shopify the right eCommerce platform for your business?
Shopify is a comprehensive eCommerce tool that offers website hosting and building, as well as many features based on your business needs. However, Shopify’s core service is its eCommerce platform.
If you’re a small, medium, or larger corporation looking for an easy solution for your eCommerce, then Shopify is what you need. On the other hand, if you’re looking to develop a website and manage it or have an SEO-based strategy, you might want to look into Shopify’s plugins and integrations rather than building your whole website on the platform.
Wix
Wix is an all-in-one platform that aims to fit general website needs. Their focus does not revolve around developing business or eCommerce websites. However, they do offer various plans and features to suit different needs. Let’s look at the most prominent advantages, disadvantages, features, and pricing of Wix.
Advantages
User-friendly interface: Wix takes pride in its intuitive drag and drop interface. It helps non-experienced professionals to design their websites easily.
50+ payment processors: Wix offers its customers more than 50 payment processors that can be used worldwide.
24/7 support team: Wix currently offers its customers 24/7 support to ensure its customers have the experience they need.
Different plans
eCommerce and businesses plans: Even though Wix is meant for website development, they also offer separate plans for businesses and eCommerce.
Variety of themes: Wix is famous for the variety of themes and templates that will make building and designing your website even easier. They have also put them in industry, business, and style categories to make it easier for you to choose.
Abandoned cart recovery: Wix allows your customers to recover their carts after exiting the website.
Disadvantages
Limited plugins and apps: Even though Wix offers various Apps in their store, many of these “apps” are not true apps. You’ll get to add an intra-coded frame instead of a real functionality to your website. Even though this might not be the ideal solution, they are easy to install and work fine.
No unlimited storage plans: This might be irrelevant to small businesses, but as your business grows, your storage space grows with it. Wix’s biggest VIP plan offers a maximum of 35 GB storage and 5 hours of video storage.
SEO is rather challenging: If you are looking for long-term SEO results, Wix might be behind other market competitors. Wix offers their own SEO Wizard and understands that SEO is one of its weaknesses. The company is regularly rolling out updates and features to improve it.
Limited functionality: Wix is meant for people with little to no development and design skills. Which limits the freedom that developers and designers look for in their websites.
Ads: The starter plan does not remove Wix ads and Wix stamps from your website’s footer.
Transaction fees: Like other payment processors, Wix would charge you a nominal fee on every transaction going through their payment processor.
Features Review
Payment processors and fees
Wix offers their own free payment processor for payments. In some countries, you can offer Wix’s payment processor alongside other services such as PayPal and POS. Like all other payment processors, Wix charges per transaction.
Wix Payment Processor is easy to set up and use. It also accepts different payment methods, such as Visa, Maestro, iDeal, and most common methods. On the other hand, Wix’s payment processor does not give you back transaction fees on returns, and their non-English customer support is limited to working hours. Note that Wix gives you the chance to use other payment processes.
Content Management System (CMS)
Wix leads the market in its easy-to-use content management system. In its CMS and Website Builder, Wix offers various features and services such as drag-and-drop, fonts, tagging, and categorization. On the other hand, with all the features offered, Wix’s CMS could be overwhelming at first because of all the different features. Also, Wix’s CMS is not very convenient for SEO strategies and long-term content marketing. This is a work in progress for Wix, and major updates for SEO optimization are rolling in fast.
Templates
Wix offers +800 ready-to-use templates for your website. Templates are pre-designed websites with fill-in texts and visuals that you can edit based on your need.
Local delivery option
The local delivery option allows you to reach your local customers based on the radius of your choice. It is a great feature that helps your business success within your local community.
Packaly is a sustainable last-mile delivery service that offers express and scheduled last-mile delivery service that can easily be integrated into your Shopify store within minutes. Integrate your Wix store with Packaly and reach your local customers within minutes.
Sign up to Packaly’s Delivery Dashboard and join the world’s biggest businesses in leaving a green impact. Start reaching your local customers sustainably in a few minutes with our express and scheduled last-mile delivery services.
All-in-one marketing suite
A true all-in-one marketing suite, Wix Ascend offers all the marketing and customer management features you might be looking for in a tool. Wix Ascend helps you manage your digital marketing, from social media posts to SEO and email marketing. It also includes a customer management feature that enables you to create a contact list, automates emails, develops workflows, and creates site memberships. In addition, Wix offers financial features such as invoicing and price quoting.
Although you can use Wix Ascend for free, it is a separate subscription-based service. They currently offer:
Wix App Market
Wix App Market complements Wix’s limited in-built features with hundreds of different free and paid integrations. Its single-click installation helps improve Wix’s ease of use even further. Wix apps are similar to WordPress’s plugins.
They usually even hold the same name across different platforms, so if you have used a plugin on WordPress before, chances are you will find it on Wix App Market. Although, if you are looking for long-term scalability, you might want to keep an extra budget for paid third-party apps.
Pricing, plans &. features
Wix offers two different categories for its plans based on the website prupose. If you are planning on just building a website, they offer 4 plans:
For those looking for more business oriented plans and features, Wix offers three plans:
Is Wix the right eCommerce platform for your business?
Wix is an all-around website development platform that offers website hosting and development alongside other features. However, Wix understands that your needs might vary based on your business and offers separate business and eCommerce plans.
If you’re a small or medium business, looking for an easy solution to build a good-looking website, then Wix is what you need. On the other hand, if you’re looking to build an eCommerce website and are willing to put more effort and time, you might want to consider other options to help you with your long-term scalability.
Shopify vs. Wix: Recap
Both platforms are easy-to-use and developed for smaller to medium enterprises looking for an easy way to build and design a website. Furthermore, both companies have a platform app store, major payment processors and offer different templates and themes for your to use. They both share similar features, such as
Shopify is a market leader in eCommerce platforms, and it is difficult to catch up. It is made for businesses with limited design and coding experience but would like to use their skills to build a more eCommerce-oriented website. However, Shopify is highly focused on its eCommerce features and would come second after Wix for the ease of use and templates.
Wix is a market leader in website design and ease of use. It is also made for people with limited design and coding experience but who are looking for an easier option. However, their eCommerce features are not equal to that of Shopify’s, and their SEO optimization could be rather challenging.
However, a good eCommerce website is not enough for your business to succeed. There are different aspects of the business to complement your website choice. Learn more about Packaly’s integrations, last-mile challenges that Packaly can help you solve, and how can Packaly help you make your last-mile more sustainable.
Sign up with Packaly’s Delivery Dashboard in a few steps and boost your customer experience with our sustainable last-mile delivery solutions.