Shopify vs. WooCommerce: Which Is Better For Canadian E-Commerce Websites?

Shopify and WooCommerce are excellent e-commerce platforms with unique features and capabilities. Many e-commerce developers consider each the perfect alternative for the other, but Shopify has clear strengths over WooCommerce in certain areas. And vice versa. If you need help with either platform, contact us today.

But have you wondered which e-commerce platform is better for Canadian e-commerce websites? Since Shopify is a hosted solution, in this article we are comparing it with WooCommerce hosted on WP Engine (a popular WordPress hosting provider). Our parent company Beyond Programs Ltd is both a Shopify Partner and a WP Engine Partner with deep insight into both technology stacks, so we compared both hosted e-commerce solutions.

Table Of Contents

• What is Shopify
• What is WooCommerce
• What is WP Engine
• Usage & Popularity Statistics
• Ease of Setting Up and Development
• User Experience and Support
• Platform Capabilities
• Platform Security
• Financial Considerations
• Shopify Vs Woocommerce
• Which is Better For Canadian E-Commerce Websites

What is Shopify?

Shopify is a leading e-commerce platform that allows individuals and businesses to create their own online stores. Founded in 2006, Shopify has grown to become one of the most popular and user-friendly solutions for setting up and managing an online store. Here’s an overview of its key features and benefits:

1. Ease of Use: Shopify offers an intuitive interface that makes it easy for anyone to set up an online store without needing extensive technical knowledge. The platform provides a drag-and-drop store builder, making it simple to customize the look and feel of your store.
2. Hosting and Security: Shopify is a fully hosted solution, meaning it takes care of all the hosting and security needs for your online store. This ensures that your website is secure, fast, and reliable, with minimal downtime.
3. Customizable Themes and Apps: Shopify offers a wide range of customizable themes to give your store a professional look. Additionally, the Shopify App Store provides numerous apps and integrations that can extend the functionality of your store, such as marketing tools, social media integrations, and inventory management systems.
4. Payment Processing: Shopify supports multiple payment gateways, including its own Shopify Payments, which allows for seamless transactions. This flexibility ensures that customers can pay using their preferred methods.
5. Customer Support: Shopify provides 24/7 customer support through various channels, including live chat, email, and phone. This ensures that any issues or questions can be addressed promptly.

Overall, Shopify is a comprehensive solution for anyone looking to launch and manage an online store with ease and efficiency.

What is WooCommerce?

WooCommerce is a powerful and flexible open-source e-commerce plugin for WordPress. Launched in 2011, WooCommerce has quickly become one of the most popular e-commerce solutions due to its extensive customization options and integration with WordPress. Here are some key aspects of WooCommerce:

1. Integration with WordPress: As a plugin for WordPress, WooCommerce leverages the flexibility and power of the WordPress CMS. This allows users to take advantage of the vast ecosystem of themes, plugins, and customization options available for WordPress.
2. Customization and Flexibility: WooCommerce is highly customizable, allowing users to tailor their online store to meet specific needs. With a wide range of themes and plugins available, store owners can add various features and functionalities, from advanced product options to sophisticated shipping and tax calculations.
3. Open Source: Being an open-source platform, WooCommerce allows for complete control over the code and functionality of the store. This makes it an ideal choice for developers and businesses that require a high level of customization and scalability.
4. Cost-Effective: WooCommerce itself is free to use, though there may be costs associated with hosting, themes, and additional plugins. This makes it a cost-effective solution for businesses of all sizes, especially those looking to start small and scale up over time.
5. Community and Support: WooCommerce has a large and active community of developers and users who contribute to its development and offer support. There are numerous resources available, including documentation, forums, and third-party tutorials.

What Is WP Engine

WP Engine is a premium managed WordPress hosting provider known for its high-performance hosting solutions tailored specifically for WordPress websites. This hosting solution provides an intuitive dashboard for managing websites including backups and accessing support.

For our discussion, we are highlighting that WP Engine is also a solution for hosting WooCoomerce websites. The benefits designed for WordPress sites also benefit plugins like WooCommerce.

Here are some key features and benefits of WP Engine:

1. Optimized Hosting Environment: WP Engine provides a hosting environment optimized for WordPress, ensuring fast load times, high security, and reliable performance. This includes features like server-side caching, CDN integration, and automatic backups.
2. Security: WP Engine offers advanced security features, including daily malware scans, automated updates, and a dedicated security team that monitors and protects against threats. This ensures that your WordPress site is secure from vulnerabilities.
3. Scalability: WP Engine’s infrastructure is designed to handle high traffic volumes and can scale with the growth of your website. This makes it an ideal choice for businesses expecting significant traffic fluctuations.
4. Expert Support: WP Engine provides top-notch customer support from WordPress experts. This includes 24/7 live chat and phone support, as well as a comprehensive knowledge base.
5. Development Tools: WP Engine offers various tools for developers, such as staging environments, version control, and automated workflows. These tools streamline the development process and make it easier to manage WordPress sites.

When combined, WooCommerce and WP Engine provide a robust solution for building and managing powerful e-commerce websites on WordPress. WooCommerce offers the flexibility and customization needed for an online store, while WP Engine ensures that the site performs optimally with high security and reliability.

Usage & Popularity Statistics

Every online merchant with growth ambitions will choose one of these platforms. BuiltWith, a leading global website tech analysis website, found that 25.5% of the top one million websites by traffic in June 2022 were e-commerce websites. Of these, WooCommerce was the most popular platform at 27%, with Shopify coming second at 20%.

However, by June 2024 when we rewrote this article, Google Trends showcased a much different picture. Specifically, interest in WooCommerce is dropping precipitously while interest in Shopify is skyrocketing and we are also seeing the trend here at BePro Software in our customer requests..

Ease of Setting Up and Development

Shopify and WooCommerce make it easy to set up your store and start selling. However, Shopify is the clear winner insofar as getting started is concerned, offering a wholesome platform that guides new users through the setup process. This way, new users find essential features at the ready, allowing your store to go live much faster than WooCommerce.

By contrast, WooCommerce is more of a built project than a plug-and-play platform, meaning the new user must decide every detail of their new online store. As such, WooCommerce supports more customization but can be cumbersome and time-consuming. You start with hosting from a provider like WP Engine, then you install WordPress, then you install WooCommerces, then you customize WooCommerce including buying and installing addons.

This difference in the setup process means that WooCommerce requires more build time. However, it also provides more website extensions in the form of plugins. These support more integrations with essential third-party services that extend the operability of your Canadian online store. Unlike Shopify, WooCommerce has also attracted a highly dedicated development community to support its ecosystem, making the world’s leading e-commerce platform more varied and flexible to suit different user needs.

Even then, however, the ease of getting started on Shopify makes it the preferred e-commerce platform for low-tech users. Here is a table providing context regarding the differences in setup and customization times for each approach.

Platform	Setup Time (hours)	Customization Time (hours)
Shopify	2	10
WooCommerce	4	20

User Experience and Support

You expect the world’s leading online store builders to invest heavily in user experience and customer support, which both Shopify and WooCommerce have. We evaluated the platform’s user experience based on customer support, ease of use, and difficulty in resolving unforeseen issues.

Both platforms have excellent customer support systems. Shopify and WooCommerce provide 24/7 support, with Shopify staff available to resolve your issues around the clock and optimize your sales. While there is no dedicated WooCommerce support staff, its availability through established third parties such as hosting companies like here at BeProSoftware means users receive superior customer support services compared to Shopify.

A typical WooCommerce store operator has unfettered access to support staff through live chat, email, support ticket system, and phone. Furthermore, WooCommerce is backed by an expansive knowledge center, including the WordPress developer ecosystem.

Once set up, Shopify is the more straightforward platform to use, with WooCommerce plagued by a steeper learning curve. Being a hosted e-commerce platform, Shopify handles most of the technical requirements of running an online store, allowing the merchant to focus on promoting the business and fulfilling customer orders. 

Platform Capabilities

Shopify has more features than WooCommerce. Well, this is both true and inaccurate. While Shopify has more e-commerce features than WooCommerce, the latter’s vast library of plugins and third-party extensions make up for this disparity. The difference, however, is that these added plugins cost more and can also impact how customers experience your store.

For example, Shopify provides several standard store base capabilities that WooCommerce users must add as plugins. These features are built-in abandoned cart recovery, product discount codes, unlimited store products, and multiple payment options.

While WooCommerce websites can obtain similar capabilities, they require the merchant to add plugins that extend the base functionality of the WooCommerce engine. The downsides to this are plenty, including clunky websites, security threats, and in some occasions, cases of feature incompatibility. These in-built and ready features make Shopify better suited to small and big online stores. 

While both platforms support multichannel selling on Amazon, eBay, Instagram, and Facebook, this functionality costs an extra $79 on WooCommerce but is a free integration on Shopify. Unlike WooCommerce, Shopify also supports brick-and-mortar and pop-up stores, giving merchants more options to move their inventory.

Platform Security

Shopify tends to be a more secure e-commerce platform than WooCommerce because it’s a hosted solution. Utilizing WordPress hosts like WP Engine can improve the security of your website. As a hosted e-commerce website builder, Shopify automatically incorporates several security features into all of its stores. At the same time, individual WooCommerce merchants must ensure security in their respective online stores through addons like Wordfence or Securi.

For instance, a new Shopify store comes with an SSL certificate and various Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) compliance. By contrast, a WooCommerce store operator should comply with these requirements or suffer the business losses of noncompliance. As such, users need to source quality SSL providers and set up their store’s PCI-DSS compliance independently.

This difference can be telling. In global e-commerce, high-level platform security encourages customer trust and can therefore be as crucial as the quality of products one sells. Security is a priority for all websites, with global website security and threat monitoring leader Sitelock noting that search engines often block traffic to or warn visitors from insecure websites to protect them from malicious actors on the web. This reduces your pool of potential customers, hurting eventual sales, so availing such a crucial service in-house is a clear win for Shopify.

Financial Considerations

A critical factor in the choice between Shopify and WooCommerce is the annual cost of each platform. A WooCommerce merchant incurs lower costs over a year than an operator of a similar-sized Shopify store. WooCommerce is an open-source platform that’s free to use, with its extensions typically costing around $39 each on average. 

WooCommerce pricing is friendlier and more flexible, allowing merchants to unlock more features later on as their stores grow. This makes WooCommerce more affordable than Shopify, even considering the extra cost of plugin upgrades.

Unlike Shopify, the most significant WooCommerce cost items include the domain name, web hosting, security, and some extensions, all of which cost a fraction of the Shopify fees. A basic hosting plan on WP Engine can be had for as low as $17 CAD. However, the advantage over Shopify is that most of these costs are scalable, with most essential plugins having free plans to get you started.

By comparison, the hosted Shopify e-commerce platform comes with fixed-priced plans, and more expensive apps are needed to extend its functionality. The basic Shopify plan costs $24 per month and includes basic store reports, 2 staff accounts, and four inventory locations. Users must upgrade to a higher plan to get more capabilities and, in some cases, will still have to buy costly extensions and integrations to access the specific capabilities they need. Such high costs make Shopify restrictive for new store owners with limited financial resources.

Shopify VS Woocommerce

In the e-commerce landscape, choosing the right platform for your online store is crucial. Shopify and WooCommerce each offer powerful solutions with unique features and benefits. When considering WP Engine as a hosting provider, the decision becomes even more nuanced, as both platforms cater to different needs and preferences.

Shopify is designed for simplicity and ease of use, making it an excellent choice for those who want to get their store up and running quickly without extensive technical knowledge. As a fully hosted platform, Shopify handles hosting, security, and maintenance, allowing users to focus on their business. While its customization options are somewhat limited compared to WooCommerce, its straightforward pricing model and reliable support make it accessible to a broad audience.

WooCommerce, as an open-source plugin for WordPress, offers unparalleled flexibility and customization options. This makes it ideal for those who need a tailored solution for their online store. Leveraging the power and flexibility of WordPress, WooCommerce allows users to create a highly customized and feature-rich online store. When paired with WP Engine, users benefit from an optimized hosting environment, expert support, and advanced development tools.

In conclusion, Shopify is ideal for users who prioritize ease of use, convenience, and reliable support, making it suitable for small business owners and entrepreneurs who prefer a hassle-free experience. On the other hand, WooCommerce with WP Engine offers a robust solution for businesses that require extensive customization and control over their online store. The choice between the two depends on specific business needs, technical expertise, and budget, allowing users to make an informed decision that aligns with their e-commerce goals.

Which Is Better For Canadian E-Commerce Websites?

Ultimately, our team here are BeProSoftware offers Shopify development and WooCoomerce development services on hosting providers like WP Engine. We also offer video tutorials on a monthly subscription basis for DIY scenarios. If you are still confused which platform is right for you, consider scheduling a consultation or contacting us directly.

Each platform has its pros and cons; however, they definitely have different customers. One provides the server hosting for you and a network of support. The other provides a standalone system, which you can customize as needed to fit your specific needs. Our expert developers can help you to navigate the options and get started today.