More than 33% of all websites in the world use WordPress. So, what’s WordPress? Is it suitable to build an eCommerce store?
WordPress.org is primarily a blogging platform that can be customised to run online store among other things using 3rd party themes and plugin.
However, you need to have some expertise to manage a WordPress store as building an e-commerce store on WordPress needs knowledge of web hosting, theme customisations, woo-commerce and other plugins. You will need to download additional plugins like woo-commerce to enable that functionality. Getting woo-commerce to work and configure needs additional knowledge. This is too much for a novice or beginner and invariably they make mistake, as there is no inbuilt tool in WordPress to set up a store
Shopify is build for ecommerce and has more than 600,000 online stores running on it.
It is basically a DIY tool to set up your online store in minutes. You need limited or no knowledge of creating websites. It’s easy to set up your e-commerce store as it has all tools inbuilt to get your first store up and running in minutes.
Additionally, Shopify also features an app store that can further enrich your ecommerce store with customer acquisition functionalities. With plugins one can enrich WordPress store but since there are all types of web plugins it’s harder to use.
To get started with online ecommerce store with shopify, just open an account, choose theme and start adding products. Just so simple. While as to build a basic online store using wordpress would need following steps : Find a hosting partner, load WordPress app on it, download woocommerce plugin, figure out how to make your website secure, worry about bandwidth, customise eoocommerce, add products etc etc.
In terms of cost, Shopify charges a small fee on monthly basis to keep your store live and make your worry free on site maintenance including store security and bandwidth. For WordPress store you need to pay small / smaller fee to hosting partner every month. You may also need to pay for other plugins to ensure that your store has proper firewalls and security.
If there are any store setup issues, you can take help of Shopify support to resolve it. While as for WordPress store you are of your own to sort issues between hosting partner, plugins and thrme partners. If I say, it’s big trouble it’s not incorrect, atleast for someone who is just starting his / her online store journey.
So, without doubt Shopify is the solution to go for to build your store as its easy to get started with it and you can have your first store up and running in minutes.