AS 79: Woocommerce vs Shopify – which is better?

What’s up you invincible Kings! Wondering what is the best e-commerce platform is? For almost a decade, I’ve been building e-commerce sites, platforms, web services, and have often pondered the true answer to this. I’m your host, David Aladdin, and Your listening to episode 79.

As of recently, I’ve come to a solid conclusion as to which is better, woo commerce or Shopify. The best e-commerce platform for physical products is shopify. In this episode, we deep dive into why Shopify best’s woocommerce, and why I think you should use it too.

Woocommerce, oh how much potential you have, yet so much headaches. Woocommerce, is an awesome platform to start an e-commerce store. Don’t get me wrong. It’s core platform is free, recently acquired by Automattic and distributed as a core platform as free.

Shopify is better for physical products....

The first question you ask yourself is…am I selling physical or digital goods? I prefer Woocommerce for digital goods and Shopify for physical goods.

What is Woocomerce?

Woocommerce is has many strengths, including the fact that it easily installs onto Wordpress, an free install-able core operating system to hundreds of thousands of websites on the web today. In addition, wordpress is fully customization, from themes, to plugins and every single aspect of your website.

Out of the box, it comes very polished as well, with reporting, product creation and fairly flexible to work with most WordPress themes.

Not only that, Woocommerce was once the solution I used to power my own e-Commerce site, until I started to realize the major potential flaws and headaches that came with it.

For one, Woocommerce claims its’ free, but most of the functionality exists in plugins that cost on average of $70 to buy, with 1 year of updates. This doesn’t sound like a lot, but when major core areas of your functionality cost $70/year to keep updated, it gets pretty frustrating year after year, buying these upgrades, with fairly glitchy updates.

That’s not to say that you have to pay for the update, but usually when you don’t pay for the upgrade, that core section is unupdated either now not working, preventing a conflict in another area, that is now not working.

Now imagine having 5-10 of these plugins, each $70/year. If you don’t upgrade, you potentially have conflicting plugins, or security vulnerabilities in your site.

Security vulnerabilities is something that scares me deeply with Woocommerce.

When you have the e-commerce portion of your website hosted by wordpress, on a shared or dedicated server, you always have the potential of being hacked. My biggest concern was this. If I automated my fulfilment through my e-commerce wordpress site to my FBA storage, I could potentially be screwed one day if my wordpress site was hacked for whatever reason.

And yes, there are tons of ways to secure your Wordpress site. But in the past decade or so, with all the security plugins like wordfence, ninjasecurity, secure cloud based security, the list is long.., I’ve still been hacked – say it be a wordpress theme glitch, an un-updated plugin from codecanyon. It happens a lot.

Was it me just being lazy? Definitely not. Wordpress has been highly refined over time, but every add on that you have, requires constant updating. It is extremely annoying to see 10 new plugins requiring updates each week, and then checking all of the plugins to get updated.

Wordpress is great but breaks down a lot from updates

If you use wordpress, you know exactly what I mean. Then on top of that, sometimes, if you update all the plugins, you can get the white screen of death, which can just happen as perhaps your server sql database crashed, or something corrupted.