Trying to start an online store to sell stuff and receive money and you don’t know which platform to use? In this Shopify Vs. Wix Ecommerce Comparison I will show you the safest choice to make and why I considered the platform I chose as the best to start an ecommerce business.
I will be coparing betwwen Wix and Shopify for starting online stores using thirteen points that are related to: design, customizability, flexibilty, functionality, sales, marketing, payments, store management, and more.
Spoiler: Shopify is offering a 14-Day free trial and might not last for long as the demand is increasing, and anyway, they beats Wix for ecommerce as it was created mainly for building and managing online stores, and it offers much more flexibility and functionality, and it offers a better support than Wix that has many negative reviews online. The few dollars in cost different is negligible if you want to build a long-term business with less headache.
The Main Difference Between Wix & Shopify
The main difference between Wix and Shopify is that Wix is a content management system that was created to help you easily create websites and landing pages through the drag-and-drop front-end editor without dealing with coding at all, and then they added the ability to create a simple online store to sell stuff (digital and physical) and receive payments.
While Shopify is a content management system that was specifically created in order to help you build ecommerce stores and manage them with ease and without coding, and it comes with lots of options, functionalities and addon’s, and it allows you to create blogs as well.
Now, let’s go with the specifics about the difference between Shopify & Wix when it comes to using both of them for e-commerce online stores.
Shopify Vs. Wix Ecommerce Comparison: 13 Points To Decide Which Is Better
1 – Professional Look, Customizability & Flexibility
Both Wix and Shopify provide you with a professional look for your online store, and both come with many templates/themes that you can further customize to match your branding, market, products, …etc.
And in any case, many of the templates/themes provided by both, Wix ecommerce & Shopify are already tailored towards certain niches or industries.
However, you can further customize the look of your Wix or Shopify store with ease using either the front end editor without knowing anything about coding, or by changing the code whether with HTML or CSS.
Important to know that when it comes to Wix for ecommerce, it is better to stick to the same template you have chosen when you first built your store as it seems to be difficult to change to another template later, while with Shopify, you can easily change from one theme to another and make few changes to make the new theme match your branding.
And there are many Shopify themes, free and paid, like the ones I listed in my top converting Shopify themes list, and these could be either created by independent third-party developers like Booster theme or eCom Turbo, or could be created by Shopify themselves like their Out Of The Sandbox Themes: Turbo, Flex and others.
2 – Functionality & App Store
The default functionalities that come with Shopify might be more than the ones with Wix when it comes for ecommerce stores, but both of them have app stores where there are many applications that you can add to your store in order to give it more functionalities.
However, because Shopify is more popular in the commerce space, you will find more third-party applications that come with it, from print on demand apps, to discount apps, to email marketing apps, …etc.
3 – Ease Of Use
Both Wix & Shopify are easy to use when it comes to customizing the look of your store, and maybe Wix gives you more freedom to change the look of the template you have chosen, but as mentioned earlier, with Shopify you can easily change from one theme to another, while with Wix, you better stick to the same template you have chosen at the beginning when you build your store.
However, when it comes to managing the ecommerce side of your online store such as adding products, managing inventory, creating categories, payment methods, discount code, shipping, …etc. Shopify is much easier to deal with as it was created mainly for the purpose of building and managing online stores through its super intuitive dashboard.
Here’s a look at Shopify’s store manager dashboard:
And here’s Wix’s store dashboard:
4 – Products To Sell
Both Wix & Shopify allow you to sell physical products and digital downloads and receive payments for both of them.
5 – Dropshipping & Print On Demand
Both Shopify and Wix allow you to sell products that you don’t hold inventory for, with the business model called dropshipping, and both have apps that allow you to easily add products from online marketplaces to your online store with few clicks, and fulfill them with easy when they come in.
Also, both allow you to integrate them with many of the print on demand services such as Printful for example, but Shopify beats Wix in this point as there are many POD Shopify apps that you can integrate with your Shopify store in few clicks, and many of these apps such as Pillow Profits and WC Fulfillment are only available to connect with Shopify and not with other platforms like Wix ecommerce, which is restricted to Printful & Printify.
Also, when it comes to dropshipping, Shopify comes with more options, as it allows you to easily import products from AliExpress, one of the biggest online marketplaces, through a powerful app called Oberlo, and it gives you the ability to use other dropshipping options such as Modalyst, while Wix only integrates with Modalyst, which limits your options when it comes to dropshipping.
These all made many of those who teach dropshipping online focus on using Shopify in their courses, like it is with the number dropshipping course, eCom Elites.
6 – Inventory Management
Because it was mainly built for managing online stores, Shopify is more robust and much easier to use when it comes to manage inventory, add products and categories, and easier to automatically manage products that you add through the Oberlo app in order to sell through the dropshipping model such as removing them from the store when they go out of stock on AliExpress or to update their prices when the merchants on AliExpress change their prices.
Shopify is better if you want to add many products or many variants for each product.
Overall, Shopify is better for dealing with more products and orders than Wix when it comes to managing online stores.
7 – Partner Program & Affiliate Program
Both Wix & Shopify offer different ways of making money with them, like the partner program that you can join in order to build and maintain online stores for your clients through your dashboard, and get a monthly commission of what your clients pay to these platforms, in addition to the fee that you charge your clients.
Also, both offer an affiliate program where you get a commission if you successfully invite others to use the paid plans of anyone of these platforms through your affiliate link, and I wrote about both in detail in my Wix affiliate review and Shopify affiliate review.
However, and also that Wix may pay a higher affiliate commission in some cases, but the reputation of Shopify’s affiliate program is much better and the support they give to their affiliates and partners is much better, especially with what Wix has done with their affiliates after changing their terms and affiliate system in a way that denied many affiliates from their deserved commissions.
8 – Wix Vs. Shopify Pricing
Both Wix ecommerce and Shopify have many pricing plans that give your online store different functionalities and abilities.
Wix offers a free plan that doesn’t allow you to connect your custom domain name to your store, while Shopify doesn’t have a free plan, but they offer 14-day trial on any of their paid plans, with the ability to connect your domain name even during the trial period.
Wix plans cost $17/month, $25/month and $35/month and each one comes with some superior features over the other, cheaper plans, but they all allow you to receive payments and don’t charge you on the orders you get.
While Shopify’s main three plans cost $29/month, $79/month, $299/month, and each one has its unique features.
It might look like if Wix is cheaper overall, but if you want to make a fair comparison, then between Shopify’s Basic plan ($29/month) and Wix’s Business Unlimited plan ($25/month), Shopify is more worth the money and the $4/month in difference is negligible when you think of all the advantages you get from using Shopify over Wix, especially if you want to build a long-term, full-time income generating business that you can scale up.
Add to that, Shopify offers the Shopify Lite plan that costs only $9/month, and it allows you to add a Shopify Buy button to your WordPress website, Squarespace, Tumblr, Facebook page and Facebook Messenger, and it allows you to sell stuff and receive payments without creating a storefront.
Also, Shopify offers the Shopify Plus plan that is dedicated to build and manage much larger stores for big brands.
9 – Transaction Fees
In addition to their monthly fee and to the fee of the payment gateway that you use to receive payments, Shopify deducts a transaction fee on every order that you receive in case that you use any payment option other than Shopify Payments, such as: PayPal, Stripe, 2Checkout, …etc.
The fee depends on the plan you have chosen, as follows:
- Shopify Basic: %2 of each order’s value.
- Shopify: %1 of each order’s value.
- Shopify Advanced: 0.5% of each order’s value.
While Wix don’t charge any fee for your orders, you only pay their monthly fee and the transaction fee of the payment gateway.
10 – Payment Options
Wix offers your online store limited options for receiving online payments through PayPal, or with credit cards using payment gateways such as Stripe & Square, while Shopify offers a very wide range of options that goes up to 100+ payment gateways that you can choose from based on your country, as Stripe for example doesn’t allow you to use their platform unless you live in one of the few countries they operate in, even if you want to only sell to one of those countries.
Also, both Shopify and Wix allow you to take orders online and receive payments offline in-person.
11 – Wix Vs. Shopify Support
Shopify offers 24/7 support for their users through phone and live chat, while Wix offers support through a ticket-submission system, which needs you to be more patient, and if you want to talk to Wix’s support on phone, then you need to submit a request and they will call you back in their working hours!!
I don’t think that this is convenient when you have a problem with your store and you will lose potentional customers if you don’t solve it asap.
And overall, Wix has many complaints from its users and their rating on Trustpilot is very low (1.5 of 5), while Shopify is better since their users don’t face as much trouble managing and maintaining their online stores as it is with Wix.
Also, both offer their own training material and resources that would help you use their platforms.
Wix Academy contains resources on how to use their CMS to build landing pages, websites and online stores, and it contains some resources on email marketing, mainly in the form of articles.
However, Shopify provides better resources not only on using their platform to build online stores, but also on creating and managing and ecom business with different models such as dropshipping, print on demand, selling your own products, …etc. with the many articles, tutorials and complete video courses that were created by successful ecom business owners.
12 – Marketing & Sales Channels
Shopify beats Wix hard in this area as Shopify allows you to integrate your online store with many marketing channels and online marketplaces such as Facebook, Instagram, Amazon, eBay, Google Shopping and others, which gives you a better reach with less hassle, while Wix is a bit limited with Facebook and Instagram mainly.
Also, Shopify is better with email marketing thanks to the many email apps that can be integrated with your store in order to create email marketing campaigns through either workflow automations or broadcast email messages.
Add to that, the fact that even without using any app, Shopify allows you to send abandoned cart emails to those who entered their email but didn’t complete the purchase, and you can edit the email message in order to include a discount coupon for example, which might increase the conversion rate of your store.
Both Wix & Shopify work fine with seo when it comes to defining the meta title, meta description, custom URL’s, image alt text, blogging, …etc. but Shopify might have an edge when it comes to website speed as hosting ecommerce websites requires more resources and Shopify was original created for this purpose, and this is an important SEO factor as it affects the user experience, which is Google’s main concern.
13 – Store Analytics
You can connect both, Wix stores and Shopify stores to Google Analytics in order to measure how people react with your store, but Shopify offers more detailed built-in analytics for your store that includes stats on your product pages number of visitors, sources of traffic, and sources of buying visitors.
As you can see from the 13 points explained above, Shopify is much better than Wix when it comes to building and managing online stores both, on the short term and on the long term.
The only point where Wix might be better is that they offer a lower-cost plan to build online stores, but the few bucks in difference is ridiculous when you think about building a good, long-term profitable business with a more robust and better supported ecommerce platform.
Shopify offers a better value for money for what you pay.
And you might be asking yourself now:
If Shopify Was Better Than Wix For Online Stores, Then Why Are Many Other Bloggers Recommending Wix Instead?!
The short answer is that these bloggers want to make more money from you through the Wix affiliate program, which pays them $100 or more for every paying user they bring to Wix through their website.
While Shopify pays affiliates only $58 dollars for every paying Shopify Basic user they bring to Shopify.
Unfortunately, some affiliates take the unethical path by promoting products or platforms that give them higher commissions even if these services were inferior to the services that pay lower affiliate commission.
Conclusion – Which One Should You Use For Ecommerce Stores: Wix Or Shopify?
Shopify is much better than Wix when it comes to building ecommerce stores as this is the main intent of building the Shopify CMS in the first place, and it is the best online stores building platform at the moment thanks to the quality of their software, ease of use, flexibility in design and functionality, customer support, more payment options, …etc.
And Shopify is better for managing larger inventory and for scaling your business.
The few dollars in difference doesn’t justify using Wix over Shopify because you will get more flexibility, better support and better quality with Shopify, which all translate into time and money, and makes it not worth wasting the time overthinking it.
Consider the few extra dollars that you pay to Shopify as an investment in your business.
Even if you think of starting out with Wix and then moving to Shopify, the money you will save is not worth the hassle of changing from one system to another.
In general, you can try Wix for the free plan, and you can try Shopify’s paid plans for free thanks to the 14-day trial they offer, but I recommend that you just start with Shopify and stick to it and not over-analyze things.
==>>Click Here To Claim Your Shopify 14-Day FREE Trial!
This is my conclusion of this Wix Ecommerce Vs. Shopify comparison.
If you have any question or if you have a different opinion, or if you have an experience that you want to share about any or both of the platforms, Wix and Shopify, then I would like to hear from you, please, let me know in the comments’s section below and I will be coming back to you asap 🙂