Shopify VS WooCommerce for personal shop

How to create a WooCommerce shop site. Starting from today, I will write articles about WooCommerce novice website building with strong practicality and lowest cost.A few points this time:

1. What is WooCommerce?

"WooCommerce is an open source e-commerce plug-in attached to WordPress. It is suitable for small to large online merchants using WordPress. The plug-in was launched on September 27, 2011 and quickly became popular due to its simplicity of installation and customization and free basic products ."

It is a free e-commerce plugin attached to wordpress.

WordPress is one of the most widely used blogging systems in the world. It is an open source PHP software.

One out of every three websites in the world is built using wordpress. Because of the large number of users, the WordPress community is very active and has a wealth of plugin template resources. Use WordPress to quickly build an independent blog or website.

The above descriptions are all official, so as not to be too clear to everyone, let me make a simple analogy. Just like our computer windows system, WordPress can support many different software to run on it, and WooCommerce is one of the software specifically for independent e-commerce sites.

2. What is the difference between WooCommerce and shopify which I have introduced a lot before?

I compared four more important differences:

1) Monthly rental fee:

WooCommerce: 0
Shopify: Minimum $29 per month (the Lite package of $9 is too scumbag, so I won’t mention it)

2) Rake:

WooCommerce: 0
Shopify: depending on the monthly package you choose, the 29-dollar package will receive 2%, the 79-dollar package will receive 1%, and the 299-dollar package will receive 0.5%

3) The difficulty of getting started:

WooCommerce: Medium. It’s better to understand the code. Like me, I don’t know how to write code but I don’t see the code. If you are very reluctant to see the content of the code, it is not for you.
Shopify: Low, simple and easy to use, basically no code related content.

4) Strength of control over sellers

WooCommerce: Low, they are free plugins in the open source program wordpress. They don't make you money or trouble you, but that doesn't mean you can sell messy things. WooCommerce doesn't care about you, but collection tools, even hosting service providers and domain name providers may trouble you.

Shopify: High. Shopify is a star listed company. Its compliance pressure is very high. GDPR and infringement reports are strictly controlled.

In the United States, there are more websites built with WooCommerce than with Shopify. This is the statistics on the share of independent e-commerce platforms in the United States in 2020 given by oberlo (a subsidiary of Shopify)

WooCommerce, which most people are not familiar with, accounts for 26%, and shopify accounts for 22%.

3. why I use WooCommerce? 

Simply put, it is forced.

Before I had a shopify store that was a vertical boutique station, and many things referred to the leader A in that vertical field. A’s website is also built with shopify. According to its traffic and advertising intensity, it should be a shopify plus member (monthly rent is 2000 dollars).

I don’t know how or when A found my shopify store, and then it went to shopify to continuously report my infringement. Although, it reported the picture material of the products sold by sellers in this field, not only A and my shop are selling. In theory, there is no infringement and non-infringement.

However, I found that I responded to these objective conditions to their legal department, which did not help. They almost asked me to take all the products off the shelves, which is tantamount to making me close the store in disguise.

The shop was under the control of shopify, and I had to bow my head. After reluctantly stopping the shop, I slowly researched WooCommerce, tossed and tossed, and finally built the shop.

Here, I still want to emphasize again: To be a cross-border e-commerce company, to be an independent station, learning ability and a good attitude are the cornerstones, otherwise you may encounter pits and obstacles every minute. Only by maintaining a continuous learning and an optimistic attitude can you constantly surpass yourself and overcome the unknown difficulties.

4. WooCommerce store, the cost of one year

• Host space: This cost is a big one. For novices, it is about $120 a year. If the website traffic is higher, the cost will be higher
• Domain name: $10 to get it
• Plug-ins: Free plug-ins I use, 0
• Template: I use free templates, and I also recommend free templates to novice friends, 0
• SSL, provided by the host provider for free, 0
• Monthly rent and commission: 0
• CDN: very low, novices can ignore (the CDN of shopify store is provided by shopify, 0 charge)

About 130 dollars in total

5. Who is suitable for building a website with WooCommerce?

1. Friends who want to reasonably save the operating costs of independent stations. Regardless of whether you use an independent website building tool made by other systems or shopify, their monthly rent and commissions need to be calculated for friends who have a certain amount of shop monthly turnover.

Compare shopify and WooCommerce:

If you spend 100 knives a day, 3000 knives a month, shopify will charge you 29+3000*2%=89 knives a month

If you spend 1,000 dollars a day, it’s 30,000 dollars a month, and shopify will charge you 79 dollars a month (this package is the most cost-effective) + 30000*1%=379 dollars

And WooCommerce itself is 0 fees.

2. Friends who want to sell some side ball products, such as F brand, infringing products. As mentioned earlier, at least WooCommerce will not trouble you.

Some people may say: I use the domestic XX independent website building tool, it is fine.
Make do with it, no problem.
But to be honest, the code optimization level behind the website building tools, the host's website loading speed, CDN, etc., as long as you use foreign high-quality hosting + WooCommerce, the speed and stability of the website will definitely beat the website building tools made by domestic companies.
In addition, in addition to satisfying the above two points, I think it is also necessary to have the spirit of being not afraid of trial and error.

WooCommerce website building itself is more complicated than shopify. There are very few people sharing WooCommerce website building products on the domestic network. If there is, most of them are just a few things. I started learning from scratch, and I checked foreign networks from domestic networks, and then I wanted to give up countless times, and countless times to push it all over again, but I was not willing to give up on a store that was so easy to get on the road. Finally, I finally figured it out. At the same time, I am also going to put a few other shopify stores on the road, that is, shopify stores that have tested explosive models to WooCommerce, and shops that have not yet been on the road (no explosive models have been tested) still use shopify.

Well, I hope friends who are interested in WooCommerce and WordPress will remember to follow me, and I will organize dry goods and share them with you.