Shopify vs. Woocommerce - Best Ecommerce Platform in 2025

I'm going to give you the pros and the cons of Shopify versus woocommerce and by the end of this video you're going to know exactly which of these platforms you should choose but before we get started I have the hookup with both Shopify and woocommerce and I have a better deal for both of these than you can find anywhere else and I'm going to share that deal with you at the end of this video we're also going to go over the five most common questions I get about these platforms and my name is Travis I've

been a full-time e-commerce entrepreneur for over 10 years I've done over $7 million in online sales and I've created websites with both Shopify and woo Commerce so make sure you smash the like button Because by the end of this video you will know 100% which of these platforms are right for you let's start first with the pros of Shopify and Shopify has over 7 million Merchants that use their platform and it's the second largest e-commerce platform out there Shopify websites have generated over $183 billion and Shopify is an all-in-one e-commerce platform that's made from the

groundup for e-commerce sellers that are looking to create their own online store they have better looking and more professional templates to create your online store from than woocommerce and it's also easier to use Shopify and you can create your own Shopify store in as little as 4 minutes Shopify also has a lot more professional add-ons and apps that you can use than woocommerce does though technically woocommerce does have more apps and integration than Shopify does the quality of the add-ons in Shopify is slightly higher in my opinion there's also just more things that seem to

integrate with Shopify than there is with woocommerce another big Pro with Shopify is there's 247 customer support and overall less can go wrong with a Shopify store because it's being hosted by Shopify versus with woocommerce you're going to have to get your own hosting company and I'll talk about that later in the video I do have a hosting company that I recommend you use if you are going to go with woocommerce but one of the benefits with Shopify is you don't have to worry about any of those kind of issues Shopify websites also load in

about half the time on average versus woocommerce websites and when people are going online to buy things if your website takes a long time to load they may end up leaving your website and go to a different website to buy whatever they're looking to purchase so this is really important but with all that being said there are some really big Pros with woo Commerce and the first pro with woocommerce is it's actually the largest e-commerce platform in the world with over 6.5 million users and over 36% of all e-commerce websites are hosted on woocommerce and

the woocommerce plug-in has been downloaded over 200 million times and the way that woocommerce works is it's actually free unlike Shopify which cost money woocommerce is free sort of it's a plugin to to your WordPress website and WordPress is a free way for you to create an online site but when you're using woocommerce and WordPress you still need to pay for hosting and hosting is going to cost you at least a couple dollars a month and there are a lot of different companies that you can go with to host your website but I recommend going

with hostinger and it's only a couple of dollars a month it's fast it's reliable and I have the hookup with host singer I'll put a link to that discount code in the description down below ow and that link in the description is effective ecommerce.com hostinger and it's the best deal you can find for hosting your woocommerce website the next big Pro of woocommerce is that it's fully customizable in fact it's way more customizable than Shopify and that's because Shopify locks down certain features so that you don't mess anything up which makes it so that Shopify

is a little bit more stable it's a little bit safer and that less things are going to go wrong but if you want to fully customize your website then W Commerce is the site for you another big Pro with woocommerce is they won't shut you down I've heard a lot of stories of people that start a Shopify website and they end up getting their site shut down because for whatever reason Shopify doesn't like what they're selling and this often happens to people that are selling things from third world countries or if they're selling something that

Shopify doesn't want you to sell online even if it's completely legal if Shopify doesn't agree with what you're selling they can shut down your website however with woocommerce you completely own the website and you're not going to get shut down because it's your website WordPress also has a lot of free themes and plugins because woocommerce is a free community there's a lot more free apps free plugins and free things that you can do to enhance your WordPress website and even though WordPress does not have 247 customer support like Shopify does it does have a huge

community of other sellers that will help you with any technical difficulties that you might run into now something I should mention is that if you use host singer as your host they actually have an AI assistant that can help you out plus 247 customer support so even though woocommerce naturally doesn't have a ton of support if you decide to go with hostinger as your host they can support you and now that we've talked about the pros of Shopify and the pros of woocommerce let's talk about some of the cons of both these platform because there

are a lot of cons for both these platforms and the first con of Shopify is that it's more expensive in fact it's way more expensive starting at a minimum of $29 a month and going up from there as I mentioned I do have the hookup with Shopify you can get your discount links down below whatever the the latest best deal is I'll include that in the description link down below and Shopify is about 10 times the price of woocommerce not to mention that if you do choose woocommerce and you pay for hosting it's going to

cost you a few dollars a month but you can actually start multiple websites with that same hosting company with Shopify every time you start a new website it's going to be another monthly fee now you do get a 10% discount for each additional website you start but that can add up very quickly especially if you're looking to start multiple websites so if you are looking to start multiple websites then paying for hosting and going with woocommerce is a no-brainer another big comos Shopify is all the apps all the plugins all the extras are just more

expensive developers of Shopify assume if you're paying for Shopify you probably have a little bit more money it's kind of similar to iPhone versus Android with iPhone it's a more expensive phone and developers assume that if you have the money to buy an iPhone that you're willing to spend money on apps so the same app on an iPhone is going to cost you more money than the same app on an Android phone it's very similar here Shopify and all those apps they're just going to be more expensive they always jack up the price of their

apps and integration with Shopify there's also an extra fee if you want to use a third-party payment Gateway you can use Shopify payments and you're going to be charged around 2.9% of all the sales that you make plus 30 cents of every transaction however if you want to use a third-party payment Gateway you're going to have to pay an additional 1% on top of all your other credit card fees because no matter what if you are accepting credit card payments online you're going to have to pay some kind of a fee and a lot of

people think that you don't have to pay any fees with woocommerce it's not true you're still going to have to pay a percentage to stripe or whoever you use to be able to accept credit card payments but with woocommerce you do have more choices in who you can use to accept credit card payments so technically you can get your transaction fees down a little bit more than you can with Shopify and even though Shopify does have a ton of beautiful free templates the Shopify premium templates are going to be more expensive again than any of

the templates that you're going to get with woo Commerce another con with Shopify is Shopify does have less overall plugins Shopify has around 3,000 plugins available versus woocommerce who has over 55,000 plugins so that is a lot of cons for Shopify but woocommerce also has a lot of cons as well and the first con with woocommerce is you're way more likely to have technical difficulties with woocommerce than you are with Shopify in fact fact I have both Shopify and woocommerce websites and I recently ran into an issue with one of my woocommerce websites where people

weren't able to go and check out my products they weren't able to buy products and it took me a couple of days to figure out what was actually going wrong that's never happened to me with Shopify and anytime I've ever had an issue with Shopify I was able to get in touch with the support team and get it fixed right away and part of the reason why you're not going to have that kind of an issue with Shopify is they don't allow you to change anything with the checkout procedure that is locked down but with

woocommerce since it's fully customizable they allow you to Tinker with anything and so with Shopify the chances of you messing something up are a lot lower so that is a con with woocommerce that sometimes you accidentally mess something up and it could affect your entire checkout now if you're a beginner and you're not really going into the weeds and messing with things this will probably never happen to you but it's something to be aware of another con with woocommerce is it doesn't come with everything you need ready to go it sounds like it's great that

woocommerce is going to be free but you're actually going to have to add certain add-ons and apps and Integrations if you want all the power that Shopify has out of the box Shopify has a lot of features that woocommerce just doesn't have and with woocommerce you're going to have to pay extra for those features another con with woocommerce is that you're most likely going to have to use stripe or PayPal in order to accept payments with woocommerce and stripe has a fee and PayPal has a fee so you're going to end up having to pay

credit card fees either way now if you are a little bit more technically Advanced there are ways to get those credit card fees down but keep in mind majority of people end up using stripe or PayPal in order to process their payments which means they're paying the same fee as they would with just having a Shopify website at least that transaction fee obviously your monthly fee is going to be lower with woocommerce and overall I'd say woocommerce is just not as beginner friendly as Shopify is and woocommerce websites will require a lot more maintenance because

you'll have so many different plugins and you'll constantly have to be updating everything to make sure that there are no issues and because of this there tends to be a lot more security issues with a woocommerce website and overall the chance of you getting hacked or someone stealing your customer's credit card information with woocommerce is higher than it is on Shopify now before I announce who the winner is Shopify or woocommerce keep in mind that there are a lot of other online platforms that you can use to build your e-commerce website such as Squarespace Wix

Big Cartel and a ton of other platforms and I did a complete video comparing all these different platforms and going into more detail about which of these platforms you should use and I'll link that video down below in the description but the summary of that video is for most people you're either going to want to use Shopify or woo Commerce however before I announce the winner there is another option and what I usually talk about on this channel is selling on Amazon you can always create an online store on Amazon and I personally believe that

this is the most powerful way to make money online and I have a free 8 Hour course that shows you how to sell on Amazon I'll link that down below but now let's get into the winner of Shopify versus woocommerce so which platform is right for you well interestingly enough Shopify is actually the cheaper option to start because when you're paying for hosting with woocommerce usually you're going to pay for an entire year at a minimum upfront but keep in mind in the long run woocommerce is going to be a lot cheaper than Shopify and

with websites like hostinger you can actually pay for less than a full year upfront woocommerce also is a lot cheaper if you want to go and build multiple stores because you only have to pay once for hosting and then you can use that same Hosting account to create multip websites Shopify on the other hand is easier if you're a beginner and you have almost no technical skills and you don't want to learn any technical skills Shopify is probably the winner for you it's very easy to use and set up a website with Shopify all you

have to do is drag and drop and click on anything that you want to change now I do want to say that normally woocommerce is a little bit more complicated than Shopify to set up but again if you sign up using hostinger as your host they make the process of setting up woocommerce so much easier because they have one-click woocommerce installs pre-built store templates as well as they can help you with any onboarding because they have 24/7 customer service and their hosting platform is optimized for woocommerce but let's answer overall what is the best platform

for you and if you're tight on cash if you're looking to start multiple websites if you're not expecting to make a ton of money out of the gate with your e-commerce website then woocommerce is the winner for you however if you're looking for a platform that's easy to use and going to require little to no maintenance and is less likely to have any security vulnerabilities then Shopify is the answer for you and to be clear as I've mentioned throughout this video woocommerce normally is a little bit more niched down it's not as beginner friendly but

if you sign up with the correct hosting company they make that process of setting up your woocommerce website a lot easier plus certain hosting companies like host singer have 247 customer support so you're basically getting a lot of the features that Shopify has but a lot cheaper either way I have the hookup I have discounted rates for both of these down below I have a discounted rate for Shopify and if you are going to go with woocommerce I have the hookup with hos singer which is the number one woocommerce website hosting company that I recom

commend I have links to both those down below again you can go to effective ecommerce.com hostinger to get that discount but if you are looking for the best way to start making money online in my opinion that's by selling things on Amazon I have a free 8 Hour step-by-step tutorial that's going to explain what Amazon FBA is and show you how to do it all you have to do to get that for free is Click right here to get that video thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video