Migrating from Shopify to woocommerce is one of the most common migration in e-commerce today. As more and more people understand. It’s actually quite a common problem for Woocommerce Experts — one that tends to appear when you’re ready to assume greater control over the finer details you were previously happy to overlook.
Shopify is one of the fastest-growing eCommerce platforms. It has an easy and clean user interface that can be operated by both technical and non-technical people. Shopify is a SAAS based platform, which makes it easy to manage and maintain by the Shopify team compared to a distributed open-source platform.
It has a wide range of themes to satisfy the needs of retailers of all sizes. Live chat and email support is inbuilt to help customers solve their queries.
Building an eCommerce store through Shopify is straightforward and comfortable. But as Shopify store size increases, its maintenance becomes tough and painful for store owners! Not only this but let me list down more reasons that compel store owners to migrate Shopify to WooCommerce.
- Shopify is a SaaS-based platform that gives very less flexibility to customize your store.
- To add more features you need to buy apps that add up to the overall cost of your online store.
- Only a few themes are available for free, and you can’t customize them!
- If you purchase plugins or themes from third-party, then Shopify is not responsible for your website security.
- You need to pay both transactional and additional fees for each transaction that happens on your site.
- Shopify can freeze your account if you fail to fulfill their terms and policies.
As the business grows it demands flexibility and expandability. You need customization to fulfill your audience’s expectations. You might need to add more engines to your machine to give it more power.
So, if you are facing a similar situation and want to migrate your online business from Shopify to WooCommerce, without losing any data then you are at the right place.
The Most Popular E-Commerce Platform
According to BuiltWith,WooCommerce is one of the most popular ecommerce platformscurrently being used by online retailers. An analysis of CMS market share found that WooCommerce is almost triple the size of Shopify.
To understand the answer to that question, let’s take a closer look at what WooCommerce is, how it works, and what it offers to its users.
WooCommerce is an open-source software tool, which lets you have full control over your website and gives you the power to customize freely. This flexibility allows you to bring your vision to life without limitations. Anyone can access, copy, modify, and change source code as they wish. Create the exact store you want with deep customization options. In contrast, Shopify’s closed source tool ensures standardization through Shopify’s centralized control, but does not allow the same flexibility with creativity and personalization.
The base versions of WordPress and WooCommerce are both free to download and use. You will be in charge of your domain name, hosting your site, and enhancing your ecommerce development solutions with features through the use of extensions. This allows you to get additional features while controlling cos
Company Background
WooCommerce was created by two developers, Mike Jolley and James Koster.
They worked on a fork (a replication) of an existing e-commerce plugin called Jigoshop, and the result was the first release of WooCommerce in 2011.
WooCommerce and WooThemes were both purchased in 2015 by Automattic, the same company behind WordPress itself.
Automattic is now the active developer for WooCommerce, which is used by over 300,000 online retailers, including some fairly large and high-traffic sites.
Users like WooCommerce for several reasons, chief among them the fact that it is relatively easy to install and configure, which is always a bonus for busy new digital retailers
Here are a couple of reasons why you should head for WooCommerce instead of Shopify:
Control your assets better
WooCommerce is an open-source platform. That means you are free to do whatever you want with it.
While Shopify offers much help to set up your store, there basically isn’t much you can do about making your own stuff. The platform provides all the materials and the variation isn’t quite a large number. There goes your custom-built site!
But in WooCommerce, you can pull any resources you want to use. There is no limitation. So, it’s a decent reason why you should migrate from Shopify to WooCommerce.
Flexibility, Customization & Pricing
When it comes to flexibility and customization, there’s literary nothing that can beat WordPress.
WooCommerce is open-source so you can edit, modify, copy things or even change raw codes/settings as you prefer. In a word, WooCommerce lets you use their codes as if it’s your own while Shopify chooses to manage their own.
Additionally, the wide range of customization WooCommerce provides, makes it more versatile than Shopify. You can enjoy endless customization, use themes, add-ons as much as you like.
The WordPress developers team states that the plugin repository has over 50K options to help individuals design their marketing strategy. So, migrating from Shopify to WooCommerce will result in your benefit in the end.
As for the pricing, you can get a hint from this small comparison from below;
WooCommerce displays Real-time shipping rates with a little package of $79 a year. It includes all the popular carriers like USPS. Unlocking the same feature in Shopify will cost you a big chunk of $299 a month! Freaking high!
So, there you have it. While both systems are for setting up your eCommerce store, comparing the prices will really make a lot of sense.
Cost of features
WooCommerce and WordPress both are free for everybody. You just need to spend on a domain name, hosting, and a little to a large amount for additional features like plugins, themes, etc. Without saying much, you can save all the necessary money on unnecessary features you might not even use ever.
For WooCommerce, the pricing is not so high. For Shopify, yes indeed it’s high. It’s another reason why you should migrate from Shopify to WooCommerce. For example:
- Depending on the monthly plan, you have to pay $29 to $299 if you are using Shopify. Within the same budget of a month, you can run a full-fledged website on WooCommerce for a year!
- Websites are bound to use add-ons to make it more user-friendly and appealing as possible. Shopify users get it hard because the most basic add-ons like Waitlists costs $15 per month! On the other hand, WooCommerce has it for $49 a year. That’s definitely a steal.
- A payment gateway is a necessary option for an eCommerce store must-have. While you are using external payment gateways, a permanent transaction fee from 0.5% to 2% gets paid to Shopify. This amount is pretty small at first glance, but soon they pile up in big numbers. WooCommenrce doesn’t take any transaction fees. No fees, no problems!
Total SEO optimization
SEO is important. Your website rank depends on how much work you have put behind the site structure and SEO. WooCommerce gives you SEAMLESS control over your site’s SEO. Means, you get to choose and use every tiny bit of the SEO system as you like. There! It’s worth to choose WooCommerce for this specific feature.
Unlimited product listing facility
If it’s a shop, it’s about products, right? Imagine having an online T-shirt shop. If you look for the size, color, standard format, the variation can go from 24 to 160 easily. And this number is for 1 product! Sweet!
But ops! Your Shopify e-Store can barely house up to 100 variation.
On the other hand, WooCommerce will let you put piles of tabs and tabs until you are satisfied. Cool! So, it is another reason to migrate from Shopify to WooCommerce.
Now, you might know this, the WordPress community (as well as WooCommerce) is one of the largest group of people. Millions of people are connected with it, developing a share-&-care relationship. The goal is to improve together. So, signing up for WooCommerce will connect you with all those happy faces instantly. Isn’t it great?
