If you’re thinking of building an E-commerce website, there are no shortage of options. You can set up a full-fledged website from scratch within minutes or hire a developer to create your personalized E-commerce website.

There are two very good options, i.e. Shopify and Wordpress,  that you could use to build your E-commerce business, but before crowning to any of them, let’s see what are the differences between these two extremely powerful E-commerce solution.

Shopify Vs. WordPress

1.       WordPress is self-hosted i.e. you need to take care of hosting by choosing a third-party hosting services. On the other hand, Shopify itself hosts the website.

2.       Setting up an e-commerce website is easier in Shopify than that in WordPress. Unlike the latter, with Shopify there is no need of installing a software, updating plugins and CMS on your own or paying for a separate hosting service.

3.       WordPress is open-source and free to install, while Shopify charges a considerable amount of money for its range of plans.

4.       There are thousands of themes and plugins in WordPress, way more than those in Shopify. One gets more customization options in the former.

5.       Shopify charges a transaction fee as per its subscription plans. In WordPress the same depends upon the payment gateway you are integrating.

6.       WordPress gives the access to source code to developers, and hence, one can easily customize the code to build a website as one likes. Professional WordPress developers  can build a website according to your needs by tweaking the source code or creating personalized themes and plugins. Such kind of flexibility is not there in Shopify.   

7.       With self-hosted WordPress, you are responsible for acquiring SSL certificates, fulfilling PCI compliance, and integrating payment gateways. In other terms, you have to manage the security of the website. On the other hand, Shopify takes full control over the security and scalability.

8.       If you delete your Shopify account, you lose all your data. There is no scope of migration once you choose to host your E-commerce website on Shopify. Migrating to or from WordPress is easy for WordPress experts.

9.       Both Shopify and WordPress support Content Management System. One can easily create a store-blog using these platforms. Also, one even with no coding experience can personalize one’s website by changing images and text, and implementing visual elements.

Having gone through the points, you might have got an idea about the platform that will ideally suit your needs. There are no clear winners here. If you are aware of the technical stuffs, such as security and hosting, you will get more customization options with WordPress. You can even develop your website the way you like. However, if you’re a small retail and not a big-time tech-savvy, Shopify might be perfect at handling everything you need.