Many solutions exist for creating e-commerce sites, offering customizable templates for your online store, whether or not tied to a content management system, and allowing you, among other things, to process transactions securely.
In this article, we compare Wix and Shopify, examining their main features and performance, as well as their pricing and support, so you can find the platform best suited to your business.
Wix and Shopify: an overview
Wix and Shopify are two of the biggest players in the web solutions market, particularly in the field of online selling. Both founded in 2006, they make it simple and intuitive to create websites.
Do you have an online store project? Do you have a physical shop and want to create a showcase site? Are you interested in dropshipping? Then you'll inevitably look at these two website builders. To help you tell them apart, we've detailed their specifics, advantages, and drawbacks so you can make the best choice for your project.
Wix vs Shopify: the technical comparison
1. Design and integration
Drag-and-drop editor:
With Shopify’s drag-and-drop editor, you don’t need experience in graphic design or coding. Additionally, Shopify offers more 70 prebuilt themes to help you get started and save time. The result is a clean, professional storefront, even if you’ve never designed a shop before.
With Wix it’s the same: you don’t need to be a designer to get a professional-looking website. Also featuring a drag-and-drop editor, no coding knowledge is required, and Wix’s editor will help you achieve a professional look. If you don’t want to build your site from scratch, you can use one of the more than 500 templates available to save time.
Customization options:
With Shopify, you can easily customize the templates so your site is unique. You’ll also have access to your store’s HTML and CSS code, so if you know how to code, you can also customize your store completely freely.
Wix only comes with its "drag-and-drop" editor: while it is easy to use, its customization options are limited. Professionals—whether graphic designers or web developers—as well as anyone well-versed in coding may find the editor restrictive.
Platform integrations:
Shopify lets you grow your audience across more than 100 different social media channels and can integrate with over 80 marketplaces, while managing your products from a single location.
Also read: How do you create a dropshipping store with Oberlo?
Wix integrates with other leading sales platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Amazon and eBay. Once your Wix store is set up, these integrations make it easy to sell your products on those additional platforms. This simple step can help boost sales, but Shopify far outpaces the possibilities Wix offers…
2. Hosting and performance
Storage space:
Shopify offers unlimited storage from the first plan; you can add an unlimited number of products, photos…
All Wix online store plans have storage limits, with the Business Basic plan capped at 20 GB. While this capacity is sufficient for a small store, you may reach this limit fairly quickly and need to upgrade. With a 50 GB limit on the Business VIP plan, Wix isn’t the ideal choice for a business with a large product catalog.
Loading speeds:
Thanks to its cloud-based infrastructure, Shopify has an overall uptime of 99.98%. Shopify also claims to load 2.97 times faster than other SaaS platforms. A powerful caching system and its "StoreFront Renderer" technology ensure your content is delivered very quickly.
Wix is known for slow loading speeds, which could cost you potential customers due to a high bounce rate. Optimizing and correctly sizing images before uploading can help improve speed, but be prepared for slower performance than on Shopify…
Hosting:
Shopify hosts your site on its cloud servers and offers a product export option to other platforms, which means you can literally create your store on the server of your choice and import products that will be hosted on Shopify.
When you use Wix, you must also host your site through the platform. You can’t avoid it, which means you’ll have less control over your site and you’ll be subject to any downtime or speed issues present on the Wix platform.
3. Monthly cost and additional charges
Price:
Shopify’s plans are "Basic Shopify", "Shopify" and "Advanced Shopify", priced at $26, $71 and $266 per month respectively if you choose annual billing. There is also a "Shopify Lite" plan, which does not allow you to create an online store but lets you accept payments on third-party websites for $9 per month. Shopify offers a 14-day free trial with no credit card required.
Wix’s three e-commerce plans are "Business Basic", "Business Unlimited" and "Business VIP", priced at $23, $27 and $49 per month respectively, with annual billing.
For most small and medium-sized businesses, the "Basic Shopify" and "Wix Business Unlimited" plans provide enough features at a similar price level, including an unlimited number of products (which conflicts with storage limits), inventory management, payment gateways, and marketing and sales analytics.
Transaction fees:
Regarding credit card processing fees, Wix and Shopify are on par and start at 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction.
Shopify plans include transaction fees when you use an external payment gateway. These fees range from 0.5% to 2% and are charged in addition to your payment processor fees.
With Wix, you will have no additional fees, only those of the chosen external platform.
Also read: Webflow vs WordPress: the comparison
4. Customer support
Shopify customer support is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Support is offered by email, live chat and phone, so you can quickly resolve any issue you may encounter. Through these channels, you can also call on a designer, a developer or a Shopify marketing specialist if you want extra help for your store.
While the Wix Help Center offers a wide selection of helpful articles, support is limited. Wix, for example, does not offer live chat. The platform provides a callback service in response to a support ticket request, available (in French) 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Wix: the turnkey e-commerce solution
With nearly 200 million websites hosted worldwide, Wix is a major CMS player. Like many site builders, Wix works with templates, including templates created specifically for e-commerce sites.
The designs are modern, functional and allow you to add animations as well as a hundred available apps. For example, the Wix Corvid app lets you modify a template's code to make it unique using JavaScript. It is the only solution for touching the site's HTML code.
This is one of Wix's drawbacks: indeed, if it is difficult or even impossible to access the HTML code, you will not be able to modify it to improve your SEO.
However, Wix has powerful tools to optimize your SEO: SEO templates, mobile optimization… On the other hand, the very popular editor suffers from the downside of its success: hosting is shared with thousands of other websites, which can slow page loading and therefore affect SEO.
If you are afraid of creating a website alone, Wix has thought of you with its Wix ADI tool. It is an intelligent assistant that will ask you questions to help you find the best design according to your target or area of sales or to produce content, such as a contact form for example.
The aim is to make the task as easy as possible. Likewise, to help your web marketing, you will have access to comprehensive reports that you can link with Google Analytics and to an email-sending tool.
Be aware, however, that the first option is paid and the second is convenient but not as well suited as a true specialized newsletter software. Wix allows you to link your store's social networks to your website.
Wix is perfect if you have a small business and are building a simple site, without a complex structure and on a small budget. If you want to create a site with more sublevels and more than 100 pages, you should turn to another solution, such as Shopify.
Don't hesitate to get support from a Wix freelance developer If you need help setting up your website.
Shopify: a more complex and comprehensive e-commerce solution
Shopify has become a major player in dropshipping. This CMS hosts tens of thousands of e-commerce sites with a philosophy of simplicity and speed. Like Wix, you have access to many templates, free or paid, but this time you can access the templates' HTML and CSS code and completely change their appearance if you have web programming knowledge.
Shopify asks you a few questions to learn about your future site and suggests the model best suited to your needs. There is an app store available with more than 7,000 different apps – some of which have a relatively high monthly cost. All sites are optimized for smartphones and tablets.
Shopify is an SEO ally: there are many options to optimize it such as image compression (without degrading quality), tips, a blog area, lighter web pages, the ability to edit titles, meta descriptions and ALT tags, as well as a free SSL certificate.
However, the blog area does not have all the features of a traditional blog like the one you can find with Wix, for example. The only obstacle to perfect SEO is that parts of URLs are not translated into French and remain in English, which can be detrimental.
Regarding web marketing, you have access to a comprehensive dashboard that displays your various sales-related data and, thanks to that, you can create a loyalty program.
As with Wix, you have a free email marketing tool. Facebook and Instagram can be linked so you can also sell your products on your social networks. Not all of these apps are free and some require a subscription.
Shopify is the go-to platform for e-commerce and/or dropshipping. It has all the features expected for this type of selling, supports more than 30 payment methods and makes shipping extremely easy.
You can add promo codes and even follow up on abandoned carts. Furthermore, Google and Shopify have formed a partnership and your products on your Shopify store will appear directly on Google Shopping.
So as you can see, Shopify is an e-commerce giant and offers a huge range of options to improve your online store, but this can require a larger budget. It is suitable for everyone, from beginners to large online retailers.
If you want to create an e-commerce site with Shopify, hire a Shopify freelance developer on Codeur.com by posting a project for free.
Wix or Shopify: our tip for choosing
Shopify is an easy-to-use online store builder, known for its excellent customer support and for its performance in terms of loading times and availability. With Shopify, you'll have more freedom in almost every area, but its price is slightly higher.
Wix's drag-and-drop editor, together with hundreds of templates, makes it easy to create a professional store. Although Wix doesn't offer the same level of freedom, performance, or customer support as Shopify, it has other advantages, including a free domain name and no transaction fees for external payment platforms.
Whatever your choice, you can count on freelancers who are experts on these platforms on Codeur.com to support you if you have a problem. Describe your project and quickly receive multiple quotes.
