Whoever thinks of e-commerce will come up with two of the biggest names, Wix and Shopify. But which one is better for your business? Which one is more suitable for your online shop?
In this article, we will dig deep into these two excellent platforms, therefore help you make the best decision.
An Overview of Wix vs Shopify
Many people think that Wix and Shopify are similar to each other, mainly because they share many characteristics in common:
- They assist users without coding skill
- They allow people to set up a website
- They let you do some business on their platform.
However, the difference lies in their purpose: While Wix prioritizes content-heavy websites, Shopify is the first choice to create an online store. Moreover, if the number of your store’s products only reaches 100, then choose Wix. Otherwise, Shopify is better as you can easily manage thousands of items on this wonderful platform.
For more detailed information, check the comparison below, starting with...
Price
In general, Wix is at a lower price. Normally, you’d better use Basic Shopify ($29/ month) in Shopify and Business Basic Plan ($23/ month) for Wix. After that, each has their package:
The pricing of Wix
The pricing of Shopify
User-Friendliness
With very few clicks, you can easily have your online store on Shopify. It’s fast to add products and variants, but creating a Shopify store is still a time-consuming task. On average, we need several hours to finish everything.
Wix, on the other hand, is not only easy but also fast to create websites. Besides its excellent user experience, Wix also provides Wix ADI - an option that offers ready-made templates in a flash.
User Support
Both Shopify and Wix offer helpful tutorials and excellent marketing blogs in which you could find some useful tips for yourself. Besides, they also include a large community that’s always ready to share experiences and assist each other with their problems. However, while Wix support only comes from phone and forums during business hours, Shopify is accessible through more channels - chat, email, and phone, and is available 24/7.
Shopify Live Chat
Themes & Flexibility
Wix offers more than 60 free templates, most of which are fashionable and up-to-date. Unfortunately, the lack of responsiveness of Wix’s templates will ask you to do some tricks in order to display them on smartphones.
Some examples of Wix templates.
On the contrary, Shopify themes look good and also work well on mobiles and desktops. Nevertheless, it only offers ten themes without charge, including Boundless, Brooklyn, Debut, Jumpstart, Minimal, Narrative, Pop, Simple, Supply, and Venture. Others will cost you around $140 - $180.
Shopify themes look good on both mobiles and desktops
Product Display & Features
At the first glance, it seems that Wix has more features with 6 variants and the support of carousel videos in every theme. In the meanwhile, Shopify only allows 3 variants for the products, including material, size, and color.
However, everything will change if you dig deep into the extra features of Shopify. Among them, the most interesting and exclusive feature is Augmented Reality- which lets customers view every angle and check the tiniest detail of your products.
AR - A unique feature of Shopify
Payment Choices
Diverse payment choices contribute a lot to the success of your online store. In terms of this issue, Shopify is the winner when it presents users with more choices of payment. In addition to Credit Card, Paypal, POS, and Offline Payment like Wix, Shopify also accepts Apple Pay/ Google Pay, payment other channels and apps such as Amazon, Pinterest, or Etsy. Multiple currencies are possible in Shopify as well but will require a complicated process.
Shipping Options
You can create shipping rules and have several shipping options on both Wix and Shopify:
- free shipping
- flat rate shipping
- shipping based on weight
- shipping based on price
- shipping based on product
Real-time shipping with discounts (in particular countries) is provided on both platforms as well. More specifically, Wix offers about 60 - 70% real-time shipping discounts via USPS in America and via Correios in Brazil. Meanwhile, real-time shipping in Shopify works in more countries (USA, Australia, and Canada) with more postal services. For example, in the USA, you can achieve 74% real-time shipping discounts via DHL Express, USPS, or UPS.
If you want to use real-time shipping from other suppliers, you need to use ShipStation and pay a cost of $9-$159 per month. This could be applied to both Wix and Shopify.
Another common retailing approach recently is dropshipping, and you can connect with many dropshipping companies via the Shopify app store. In terms of Wix, you need to integrate with some platforms (Modalyst, Printful, and Spocket) to be able to dropship.
Conclusion
Through the comparison above, it looks like Shopify considerably outweighs its counterpart. However, Wix is still ideal in many ways. Here is our recommendation for you.
You should choose Shopify if:
- You would like to sell products on a global scale
- You need as many payment choices as possible
- You find live support necessary
You should choose Wix if:
- You want to set up an online store in a low-cost and effortless way
- The focus of your website isn’t on the store
- You acquire traffic mainly by blog content
