In this Wix vs Shopify comparison, we will provide you with a holistic view of both the website builders and popular ecommerce platforms. You will easily be able to make the best choice between the two ecommerce platforms to set up your online store.
Wix and Shopify are both household names in the ecommerce space, especially in the post-pandemic era. And that is why it is difficult to crown any one the best ecommerce platform. Each of them comes with distinct features, pricing, scaling opportunities, and more.
If you don’t know what Wix and Shopify are, let’s have a brief overview of the two popular website builders, along with their pros and cons, then delve deeper into a detailed comparison.
What is Wix?
Source: Wix
Wix is an Israeli software company that provides cloud-based web development services. It is a website builder that allows users to create HTML5 websites and mobiles sites through the use of online drag-and-drop tools.
Users can create, design, and manage their websites easily. It is quite popular among ecommerce store owners – mostly small ones that do not require super powerful features nor have large product catalogs.
Wix works on a freemium model, which means its basic plan is free, but for more advanced features like connecting the website to a custom domain, removing Wix ads, accessing the form builder, adding ecommerce capabilities, or buying extra data storage and bandwidth would require you to move to Wix’s premium plans.
Wix is beginner-friendly, as it provides pre-made, customizable website templates that you can edit using its drag-and-drop HTML5 website builder. Its website builder has image galleries, graphics, fonts, Wix app market (with both free and subscription-based apps for added functionality), animations, vectors, and other options. Moreso, it even provides a mobile editor, using which users can edit their websites for mobile viewing.
Wix – Pros and Cons
| Pros | Cons |
| Ease of customization, creative freedom, with a massive collection of templates, and an intuitive drag-and-drop interface | You cannot change website templates, i.e. switch from one to another. A template is a pre-made website layout that you drag and drop elements to in order to create your customized store |
| Ability to add advanced features from its ecosystem of tools and products – Wix App Market, free SSL certificate, Logo maker, etc. | The free plan forces Wix branding. For instance, in the domain name, which is in this format in the free plan: accountname.wixsite.com/siteaddress |
| Ability to edit and personalize mobile view of the store through mobile-site-building tools | No tracking and analytics feature available in the free plan |
| Access a personalized SEO plan by answering a few questions about your website, location, and keywords, and use other marketing tools for email marketing, and creating social media posts etc. | The premium plan only lets you build a single site. This means that a premium upgrade is valid for one site only. If you wish to apply premium features, such as connecting your own domain to more than one site, you must purchase additional upgrades. |
| Great for small businesses | You can’t transfer your Wix website to another hosting server or to even another ecommerce platform when you feel the need to do so |
| Good for blogging | Only for small business owners or DIY website owners as it allows to build basic ecommerce sites |
| Great site speed and uptime | — |
Now that we have got an overview of Wix, let’s have a similar overview of Shopify, and then get straight into our Wix vs Shopify comparison to understand which one would be right for your ecommerce store.
What is Shopify?
Source: Shopify
Shopify provides a platform to large store owners who want to build a profitable ecommerce store. It allows them to have large product catalogs with advanced features such as managing large inventories and more. It facilitates large brick-or-mortar store owners with a Point Of Sale (POS) app for payment of goods in physical locations too when they choose to establish their online store on its platform.
WooCommerce vs Shopify – Which Should You Choose in 2024?
Shopify – Pros and Cons
| Pros | Cons |
| 60+ professional and customizable themes | More expensive than competitors |
| Multiple plugins to build a fully functional ecommerce store | Have to pay for plugins for basic features like credit card payments and some apps are costly especially those for inventory management etc. |
| In-built marketing, SEO tools, and effective automation and integration with extensions | Unavailability of some features in different countries |
| Good analytics | Charges transaction fees even in basic versions |
| User-friendly dashboard | Lack of content management features |
| Good support | Closed-source, hence there is only a certain extent that you can customize it unlike some open-source Shopify alternatives |
| Supports several payment gateways for your ecommerce customers | — |
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Wix vs. Shopify – 10 Key Differences You Must Consider Before Choosing Between Them!
To answer questions that we often see across the web, “Is Wix better than Shopify?” or “Is Shopify better than Wix?” We decided to do a detailed post to highlight the difference between Wix and Shopify.
From here on, we will break down each element that you analyze when choosing an ecommerce platform and show you how both Wix and Shopify fit into each criteria against which you rank an ecommerce platform when making your decision.
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Let’s first see the difference between Wix and Shopify when it comes to pricing.
1. Wix vs Shopify: Pricing
Source: DavidRockDesign from Pixabay
Let’s begin with a brief overview of both platforms’ pricing. In this blog, we will use the monthly pricing to highlight the difference between Wix and Shopify.
Wix – Pricing
All website plans include free custom domain for a year, no Wix ads, free SSL certificate, and 24/7 customer care. However, some of these features are not available for the most basic one (Connect Domain).
Similarly, all business and ecommerce plans have secure online payments, plans & recurring payments, customer accounts, custom domain, free domain for 1 year, and freedom to remove Wix ads.
The following table details everything included in each plan.
| Website Plans (online payments not acceptable) | Business and Ecommerce Plans (essential for online payments) |
| VIP (First priority support): $24 What’s included?
|
Business VIP (Full suite): $35 What’s included?
|
| Unlimited (Entrepreneurs and Freelancers): $12 What’s included?
|
Business Unlimited (Grow your business): $25 What’s included?
|
| Combo (For personal use): $8 What’s included?
|
Business Basic (Accept online payments): $17 What’s included?
|
| Connect Domain (Most basic): $4 What’s included?
|
— |
- All business/ecommerce plans include unlimited products, abandoned cart recovery, and selling on social channels. The VIP and unlimited plans include subscriptions, multiple currencies, automated sales tax, selling on marketplaces, dropshipping by Modalyst, Product reviews by KudoBuzz, and the VIP plan includes an exclusive loyalty program by Smile.io
Shopify – Pricing
Shopify follows a three-tiered pricing plan. You have the Basic Shopify, Shopify, and Advanced Shopify plans. Then, you can also explore Shopifyplus and Shopify Lite. Both of these plans are for high-volume merchants and large businesses.
You will find a few things common on all plans: ecommerce website, blog, unlimited products, staff accounts, 24/7 support, selling on online marketplaces and social media, inventory locations like warehouses, fraud analysis, shipping, manual order creation, Shopify POS Lite, abandoned cart recovery, multiple currencies, multiple languages, and gift cards.
| Basic Shopify | Shopify | Advanced Shopify |
| $29 | $79 | $299 |
What’s included?
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Verdict on Wix vs Shopify Pricing:
- Shopify has fewer plans and they are slightly more expensive at $29 vs. Wix at $23 per month. You also get more value for money with Wix’s annual plan ($23 per month), including free domain for your first year and $300 ad vouchers.
- Shopify plans are suitable for larger stores because of its power-packed features, while Wix is definitely less expensive and suitable for building small to mid-level ecommerce stores. With Wix, you also get a variety of plans based on your individual, specific needs.
- Shopify also has a transaction fee that you need to pay as an ecommerce store owner, whereas with Wix, you do not have to pay any transaction fee.
- You can create a limited number of staff accounts with Shopify (2, 5, and 15, based on your plan), whereas with Wix, there is no such limit. Staff accounts on the ecommerce store give access to staff members to Shopify admin and Shopify POS.
- Overall, Shopify has more powerful features but Wix offers many of its features on its lowest-price plan which offers you great value for money.
2. Wix vs Shopify: Ease of Use
Both, Wix and Shopify, offer a friendly user interface to its customers. You don’t need to have coding knowledge to build a great store online.
Wix – Ease of Use
Source: isitwp
The Wix interface consists of a drag-and-drop creator that allows ecommerce store owners the convenience they require to manage their store’s content on the front-end. You can easily click on an image, logo, or title, and drag it to the place you want to feature it on.
With Wix, you have the Wix ADI as well as the Wix Editor to help you start your ecommerce store. You must be wondering what these are and how they are different. Well, with the Wix Editor, you can edit almost everything on your ecommerce store. While Wix ADI generates a design based on information provided by you and thus doesn’t offer templates. Although you can make changes once the design has been created, you can only embed a limited amount of apps and features when you use Wix ADI.
Shopify – Ease of Use
Source: Magnalister
Shopify’s interface is a bit different from Wix’s in the sense that it also has a dashboard, which is separate from its editor. When you are working on Shopify, you have to move back and forth a lot between the preview and the back-end to check the impact of changes on the front-end. However, Shopify has numerous pre-made templates that will allow you to create a professional online store quite easily.
Verdict on Wix vs Shopify Ease of Use:
- Wix allows more creative freedom than Shopify in terms of your online store’s design
- Wix ADI lets you set up a ready-made store quickly with the help of artificial intelligence
- Shopify has great user experience and also links to tutorials that help store owners establish their online store easily, but Wix doesn’t fall short here as it has its own tutorials and step-by-step guides
- Shopify has more structure and is also user-friendly but it is more suitable for larger ecommerce stores
3. Wix vs Shopify: Features
Now that we are done comparing Wix vs Shopify pricing and ease of use, let’s discuss how they are similar and different in terms of features.
Wix – Features
Wix comes with a number of great features to set up a functional ecommerce store. Some of the most noteworthy features of Wix are as follows:
- Custom domain name
- Professional Mailbox
- Free Hosting
- Analytics
- Contact management
- Member login
- Live chat
- Social tools
- Beautiful storefront
- Store manager
- Product pages
- Multiple payment methods
- Coupons and discounts
- Worldwide shipping and tax
Shopify – Features
Shopify vs WordPress – 9 Key Differences
Shopify has plenty of features that are more advanced than that of Wix. Some of them are as follows:
- 70+ professional themes
- Brand and customize your online store
- Mobile commerce ready
- Edit HTML and CSS
- Custom domain name
- Work with an expert
- Full blogging platform
- Web-based website builder
- SSL certificate
- Unlimited bandwidth and email forwarding
- Google analytics and an analytics dashboard
- Multiple shopping cart features
- Marketing and SEO features, gift cards, discounts and coupons, social media integrations and tools, automatic sitemap generation, Google Ads credits, etc.
- Multiple products and inventory features including video and 3D support for product presentation and subscription app for recurring revenue streams
- Flexible shipping rates
- Automatic tax calculation
Verdict on Wix vs Shopify Features:
- In terms of features, Shopify is a lot more powerful than Wix as it comes with a greater number of ecommerce-specific advanced features.
- However, there are some areas where Wix is better than Shopify. For instance, when it comes to displaying product variations, Shopify lets you add 3 variants for color, size, and material, but Wix lets you add 6 variants with around 100 options to choose from, be it material or color.
- Both Wix and Shopify allow you to add titles and descriptions, and provide a zooming feature for product image galleries.
- Shopify supports augmented reality (AR), 3D product display, as well as video to showcase products, and both Wix and Shopify allow product customizations, ribbons, size charts, or wishlists.
- Shopify has 6000 apps for added store functionality, whereas Wix has only about 300 apps.
4. Wix vs Shopify: Support
Having great support is incredibly important if you are a beginner and a new ecommerce store owner. So, choose an ecommerce platform that you think will best facilitate your need for support.
Wix – Support
Wix has a number of great marketing blogs and also provides written tutorials to facilitate its users. You will have phone support during business hours, 24/7 live chat customer support, and forums. It has a huge community to help you with your problems.
Shopify – Support
Shopify has tutorials, as well as 24/7 support via chat, email, and phone. There is also a large community to help find answers to your concerns through forum threads. Other than that, Shopify has a blog that helps guide store owners on how to grow their businesses.
Verdict on Wix vs Shopify Support:
- Shopify provides 24/7 support via not only live chat, but also through phone and email
- Wix provides phone support only during business hours
- Shopify’s marketing blogs are more helpful than that of Wix
5. Wix vs Shopify: Payment Options
Customers want ease when they opt to shop online. Hence, in order to counter your shopping cart abandonment rate, you must ensure you choose an ecommerce platform that offers numerous payment options.
Wix – Payment Options
Wix allows payments through PayPal, credit cards (Supports Stripe or Square credit card processing), Wix payments, and also lets you offer payments through “buy now and pay later” solutions like Laybuy, Afterpay, and Affirm. It also allows for cash on delivery payments, cheques, and wire transfers. For brick-and-mortar stores in the U.S., Wix also allows POS payments, supported by its own payment system, SumUp, and Square as well.
Shopify – Payment Options
PayPal, credit card payments (including Stripe and Authorize.net), BitPay for Bitcoins, Shopify Payments, and over 100 other external payment processors are available to use with Shopify.
Verdict on Wix vs Shopify Payment Options:
- Shopify has over 100 external payment processors which can give your ecommerce store customers great convenience and ease in making their payments
- The BitPay feature in Shopify allows people to pay using Bitcoins, which are increasing in popularity
- Overall, Shopify has more powerful payment options than Wix, in general, though Wix also offers a wide variety of payment options that are enough for small ecommerce stores that Wix is ideal for
6. Wix vs Shopify: Shipping Cost Settings
Checking the shipping options available, and knowing how shipping rates are calculated internationally on each ecommerce platform is essential. This will help you choose an ecommerce platform that is most suitable for your store’s needs.
Wix – Shipping Cost Settings
Wix allows you to set shipping costs per country or region. It also provides options to set flat rates, rate by weight, rate by price/product, or offer free shipping. The option to calculate real-time shipping rates is also available, which makes the whole process a lot more convenient.
Moreover, Wix also allows integration with fulfillment providers like Shipstation and ShipBob. But this option is only available in the Business Unlimited plan or above. Wix also allows you to set up custom fulfillment to trigger email orders to your own fulfillment providers. It makes local deliveries and pickups an option as well just like Shopify.
Shopify – Shipping Cost Settings
When it comes to Shopify, you get a ton of options for calculating and setting up shipping rates, for instance, flat rate, discounted rate, free shipping, and carrier-calculated shipping rates from carriers like FedEx, UPS, etc.
Shopify has its own fulfillment network that allows for easy fulfillment and dropshipping, and you can also choose services like Amazon for the same.
Shopify also allows you to print shipping labels from its backend.
Verdict on Wix vs Shopify Shipping Cost Settings:
- Wix has integration with fulfillment providers, but in expensive plans. In contrast, Shopify has its own fulfillment network and also lets you use services like Amazon.
- Shopify also allows you to print shipping labels which Wix does not allow
7. Wix vs Shopify: POS Capabilities
Integrating your POS system and ecommerce website will let you sell in more places at once. Moreover, having POS capabilities will also stop you from over-selling products as it provides real-time inventory data, instead of having you do manual data entry.
With POS capabilities, you are able to offer cross-channel promotions and discounts, and also improve your overall cross-channel customer experience.
Wix – POS Capabilities
Wix gives you POS capabilities through its own POS system, but right now that is for US only. It also offers this through Square and SumUp.
Shopify – POS Capabilities
Shopify has its own POS system that you can use to sell in-person and online, allowing you the freedom to sell from wherever.
Verdict on Wix vs Shopify POS Capabilities:
- Both come with their own POS systems and have the necessary POS features a store needs to sell both offline and online
8. Wix vs Shopify: Tax Settings
You wouldn’t want your ecommerce platform to calculate incorrect sales tax, hence it is important that you look at the tax settings offered by your ecommerce platform.
Wix – Tax Settings
Wix allows you to set taxes on a region-basis, and enable or disable taxes. There is a free app called Avalara, and it helps Wix calculate tax rates automatically. Wix also let’s you set special tax rates for some product categories. However, the Avalara app is only available with Wix’s Business Unlimited plan and above.
Shopify – Tax Settings
With Shopify, you can include or exclude taxes from the product prices on your store. Automatic tax rate calculation is also available for different countries.
Verdict on Wix vs Shopify Tax Settings:
- In terms of tax settings, Wix and Shopify are almost the same and both provide automatic tax calculation
9. Wix vs Shopify: App Stores
Having an app store in an ecommerce platform means you can extend the functionality of your ecommerce store. This is why you should choose an ecommerce platform that comes with a variety of apps and extensions.
Wix – App Market
Source: Wix
Wix has above 250 powerful web apps to enhance your Wix website. These apps add an extra dose of functionality and features to help you sell online.
Shopify – App Store
Source: Shopify
Shopify has over 6000 apps in its app store, both from third-party developers as well as its own platform.
Verdict on Wix vs Shopify App Store:
- Shopify’s apps are mostly ecommerce specific and focused toward extending the functionality of your ecommerce store. However, with Wix’s apps, you can enhance your overall website.
10. Wix vs Shopify: Security
Security is an important feature of any ecommerce platform. The reason is quite obvious – cyber attacks can cause any ecommerce store to lose revenue and customers’ personal data, which can cause irreparable damage to the confidence and trust customers have in your brand.
Wix – Security
Wix deploys security measures to keep its platform and customers secure. It has a dedicated security team, it is PCI compliant (which means you get a website that complies with the highest level of payment industry standards that keeps your visitors’ transactions private), and offers a free SSL certificate as well. In fact, each website on Wix comes with SSL certification, 24/7 security monitoring, and more.
Shopify – Security
Source: Shopify App Store
Shopify stores are PCI compliant, which means your customers’ payment info and business data stay private. How? Because being PCI compliant means your website is compliant with the highest level of payment industry standards. It offers a secure back-end as well because of its user privilege system.
Verdict on Wix vs Shopify Security:
- Wix and Shopify are both PCI compliant. They stand at the same level when it comes to security.
The Alternative to Wix and Shopify
Wix and Shopify are both great ecommerce platforms. However, while Wix is for beginner-level and small ecommerce stores, Shopify, on the other hand, is ideal for large ecommerce stores.
Moreover, since Wix and Shopify are not self-hosted solutions, you can miss out on the speed, flexibility, and scalability that come with a self-hosted solution where you choose your hosting yourself.
An ecommerce platform that is suitable for both small and large ecommerce stores, and also lets you host your ecommerce store anywhere is WooCommerce. Not only this, but since WooCommerce is powered by WordPress, and WordPress is open-source, you get to use apps and extensions from both as well as create apps and add functionality using CSS codes.
Couple WooCommerce with Cloudways, and you get a WooCommerce Starter Bundle that makes launching your store possible in just a few clicks. With this bundle, you will get pre-installed apps so that you don’t have to pick and choose which app you would need for your ecommerce store. Your store will stand up in a few minutes so you can start selling.
Discover Cloudways Ecommerce Starter Bundle!
Launch your ecommerce store with a bundle more scalable and affordable than Wix or Shopify!
Conclusion
Now that you have an in-depth perspective on Wix and Shopify, you can easily decide between the two popular ecommerce platforms or go with an alternative ecommerce platform of your choice. We hope that we could help you in making your selection easier and that you begin selling online soon!
Explore our alternative series to understand which ecommerce platform you should choose for your ecommerce store:
Q1. Can I use Wix and Shopify for free?
You can create a free website with Wix using a Wix domain. You will have to get a paid plan if you want your website to look professional and have a custom domain name.
Shopify is not free and you can only use its free trial for 14 days.
Q2. Which is cheaper, Wix or Shopify?
Wix is cheaper than Shopify. Wix basic plan is for $23/month, while Shopify’s plan starts from $29/month.
Q3. Which is better for SEO, Wix or Shopify?
Shopify has superior SEO features than Wix. Why? Because it has more ecommerce specific marketing apps and tools than Wix and hence is more powerful in terms of features and functionality.
Q4. Should I use Shopify for my small business?
Shopify is ideal for large ecommerce store owners. For those who are only beginning their ecommerce businesses, it is advisable that they start with Cloudways WooCommerce Starter Bundle and then scale their store later.
Q5. Is Wix good for small businesses?
Yes, Wix is great for hoppy, personal websites, and small businesses.
Q6. Is Shopify good for beginners?
Shopify is a user-friendly ecommerce platform and hence beginners can use it easily. There is no coding knowledge required so beginners can launch their store with ease.
Q7. Can I move my domain from Wix to Shopify?
Yes, you can. Just edit your DNS settings in Wix so that they point to your Shopify store. Now, your URL will lead your customers to see your Shopify store rather than your Wix store.
