WooCommerce vs Shopify: Which One Is Better for Your Ecommerce Store?

Shopify and WooCommerce are among the top well-known platforms for ecommerce businesses worldwide. The question is; which one is the best ecommerce platform for your inventory management? Let’s look into these two platforms explicitly. What about the order management features that they provide?

Let’s learn more about Shopify

First of all, Shopify is a closed-source cloud-hosted tool. There is no need to stress about the technical aspects of the platform because it is handled by the support team of Shopify. The most significant advantage of Shopify is its simplicity. However, in this platform, a user will not have full access to its technical configuration and specific features thus flexibility is not provided 100%. What about affordability? With Shopify, you need to sign up for a paid subscription almost right away whereas in other hosted solutions you need to cover hosting expenses plus potentially some developer help in setting things up properly.

Who is this for?

Shopify in its simplest form is aimed at small businesses that sell their products online. Moreover, dropshipping businesses can benefit from Shopify’s features. In general, Shopify is easy to use so it’s well suited for beginners and for businesses that have a very small budget. In addition, Shopify can be useful to businesses that don’t have very complicated requirements.

Let’s learn more about WooCommerce

WooCommerce is an open-sourced plugin for WordPress websites that helps you create an online presence and conveniently sell your products. It is very easy and simple to use because you don’t need a developer to get started on the website, you can customize your product page quickly and easily on your own. WooCommerce is useful, especially if you integrate it with third-party plugins to extend your platform with multiple additional features depending on your needs. 

Who is this for?

WooCommerce is ideal for medium-sized and above eshops, wholesale and retail companies as well as for businesses that need to track manufacturing. Also, it is perhaps not so suitable for one-man businesses because typically a company needs a developer to help in setting things up after a point.

WooCommerce vs Shopify

Shopify Features

Shopify provides a variety of pricing plans. Depending on which one you’ll choose, you will be able to use the related features for your business. Here are the key features of Shopify:

1. Free and paid themes for your eCommerce store
2. Free and paid app extensions that you can choose from Shopify’s app store
3. Shopify accepts credit card payments through its payment provider
4. Shopify’s blog which includes helpful articles
5. Support team available to help you 24/7
6. Shopify can help you succeed through multiple resources such as forums, webinars, support, and courses.

Shopify Pricing

	Basic Shopify	Shopify	Advanced Shopify
Packages	29 $/month	79$/ month	299 $/month
Staff Accounts	2	5	15
Unlimited products	Yes	Yes	Yes
Inventory Locations	up to 4	up to 5	up to 8
Reports	–	Standard	Advanced
Third-party shipping rates	–	–	Yes

Shopify’s Customer Support

Shopify provides multi-channel support to its customers.

Customer Support Channels	Shopify
Contact Support	Chat, Email
Video Tutorials	Youtube Channel
Shopify community	Forum
Community events	Events for Networking
Webinars	Free sessions to help you run Shopify
Changelog	What’s New
Business Courses	Learn Resources

Shopify for inventory management

The platform provides its own app store that includes free and paid apps that can be integrated with Shopify in order to level up your eCommerce store. Furthermore, with Shopify API you can add your own features to scale the functionality of your eCommerce store. Is Shopify the best ecommerce platform for your inventory management?

Shopify’s inventory and order management become more difficult when demand increases. Shopify inventory management is suited for small business owners due to its basic functionality and the limited compatibility of sales channels. Furthermore, with Shopify inventory management, you can track incoming inventory and transfer of goods between locations in a very basic way and you can’t handle easily dropshipping orders, customer fulfillment, returns etc. Regarding multichannel selling capabilities, Shopify supports only Facebook, Instagram, Amazon, and eBay. If your company sells through other channels such as Magento, you should integrate with another inventory management plugin.

That is why Megaventory provides an integration for Shopify users. If you are already a Shopify user, then by connecting your Shopify account with Megaventory, locations, customers and products will be synchronized from Shopify to Megaventory. Also, if there are multiple variants per product in Shopify, the corresponding products will be created as separate SKUs in Megaventory. In addition, the Megaventory product description is populated from the Shopify product title.

If you’re already using Megaventory and you would like to connect it with Shopify the process is the same as above. You can check all the steps that you will have to follow here.

WooCommerce Features

What about the key features of WooCommerce?

1. Offer flexible and secure payments
2. Manage orders on the go
3. Sell anything (from physical products to digital content)
4. Get free and paid extensions to add features through the WooCommerce Marketplace.
5. Support team available 
6. Market your eshop through Google Shopping
7. Add Jetpack to secure your store

WooCoomerce Pricing

WooCommerce pricing doesn’t include specific packages as SaaS solutions do. It depends on the features and the capabilities that you install to your store based on what you feel it needs to have. Except for the general costs of building and launching a website, there are some additional ones, such as operating costs. These costs may include expenses for website theme design, plugin configuration and security, to name a few.

WooCoomerce for inventory management

Is WooCoomerce the best ecommerce platform for your company’s inventory management? If you’re already using WooCommerce and its inventory features, then you will have noticed that there are some issues occurring. For instance, there is the lack of providing information concerning the location of the inventory, tracking items inside and outside the storage, replenishing stock, and the lack of information on product costing. Also, the WooCommerce inventory management feature doesn’t allow you to properly manage purchases and stock because the user cannot properly order stock from suppliers and multiple locations aren’t supported. These issues are the reasons that usually companies integrate their WooCommerce with a third-party app.

For instance, by integrating WooCommerce with a 3rd-party inventory management app such as Megaventory for your order management, you will be able to take off the order fulfillment burden from WooCommerce. Instead, you’ll be able to check in real-time the availability of your products, connect more than one warehouse, store, and other locations, approve, send, and close orders, and overall improve your workflow – way more than what WooCommerce can do. 

Is your company ready to benefit from Megaventory’s features? Start your free trial now!

To sum up, both of these e-commerce platforms are useful and will help you to scale up your store. But what does your business really need?