Both Wix and Shopify have been around for only two years. Wix was started in 2006, and Shopify in 2004. Both are ways to make a website, and now many people have to decide which one to use.
Is Shopify better than Wix, or is Wix better than Shopify?
Here, we’ll look at the features and benefits of both platforms and then help you decide which one is best for your needs.
Online Store
This is how Shopify was made. Wix offers a similar service, but what it does best is help people build websites, which is mainly what bloggers and brand personalities need.
Shopify is for people who want an all-in-one platform where they can create an online store, add products, make discounts and promotions, charge payments, and do a lot more.
The Basic Shopify plan costs $29 per month to buy. Wix, on the other hand, costs $17 per month.
Plans and Prices
If you use Shopify as your payment processor, Shopify will charge you 2% of each transaction. Wix doesn’t cost anything.
When you look at the different plans, you can see that the features you get are also different.
Here are the main ways that the basic plans are different:
Storage: Shopify has no limit, but Wix has a 20GB limit.
- Fee: Wix doesn’t charge a sales or commission fee, but Shopify does.
- Staff Account: Shopify lets you have up to two staff accounts, but Wix only lets you have one admin.
- Wix doesn’t offer a free trial, but you can get your money back in 14 days. Shopify gives you 14 days to try out the platform for free.
- Shipping: If you use Wix, shipping companies won’t give you discounted rates. You can save up to 64% on DHL Express, USPS, UPS, and other shipping services through Shopify.
- Email campaign: You can make up to ten email campaigns with Wix. This is not something that Shopify has. If you want to make an email campaign on Shopify, you need to add an app like MailChimp or GetResponse that lets you do that.
- If you look closely, you’ll see that Wix is still focused on making websites and not an online business store.
Those who take payments
At least 100 payment processors around the world work with Shopify. This includes places that take payments from credit cards. You can use third-party payment gateways like PayPal, Skrill, 2Checkout, and many others with Shopify.
On the other hand, Wix only has 17.
Wix lets people pay with credit cards, PayPal, and cash. The manual payment, on the other hand, only works with the paid plans.
With only 17 payment processors, Wix doesn’t offer much to business owners. The problem here is that PayPal may work in the UK, the US, and some other countries, but that doesn’t mean that people from every country can use it.
With Shopify, you can choose from hundreds of payment processors, and at least one of them will serve your country.
Topics and Plans
All of the themes in Shopify can only be used for online stores. This means that you have to put something in every one of them. There are themes in Shopify for stores with one product, a few products, or thousands of products.
There are two ways to change a Shopify theme. You can do this by checking and unchecking boxes in the settings or preferences areas, or you can change the code of the theme if you know how to do computer programming.
You can do most of the same things with Wix, and you can also start from scratch. Wix doesn’t have as many themes as Shopify, but it has more categories for themes based on the niche of your store.
For instance, Wix lets you choose themes that have to do with Arts & Crafts, Food, Fashion, Books, Pets, and other things.
On Shopify, the themes are shown by style instead of by category.
Most Shopify templates are free, but you’ll have to pay hundreds of dollars for the premium ones. Wix gives you free themes because they mostly charge for the internet or website service itself, such as bandwidth and domain names.
Apps Market
In the Shopify App Market, you can find a lot of cool apps. Some of them are free, but many of them charge a monthly fee. The same holds true for Wix.
Since Shopify is a platform for online stores, most of the apps you can find here are made to help you make a sale, handle a sale, or make sales better.
With Shopify, you can find apps that let customers spin a wheel to win a prize or apps that help you make tabs for your store.
Shopify also has a lot of help from other marketplaces, which makes it easy to run your store. For example, apps like Oberlo and AliExpress can be found in Shopify. Both of these apps make it easy to find great products to sell online.
Wix, on the other hand, has apps that are mostly good for making your site look good and be interesting.
Wix, for instance, has apps that will help search engines find your site better and apps that let you make forms that your customers will fill out.
Most Shopify apps help you bring in customers, get in touch with them, post banners, and make coupons.
Features of Blogging
Every business needs to have a blog. This is where you put your helpful tips so that customers can read them. This is also how you keep track of all the work you do for SEO.
Wix and Shopify both have blog features, but the design of Wix is better. Wix has a real drag-and-drop feature that lets you move photos around and put them where you want.
You can only click on some options in Shopify to make them smaller or move them to the side or middle of the page.
Both Wix and Shopify let you add tags, change fonts, add links, and change blog URLs to make them more SEO-friendly.
With Wix, you can make blogs and reach more people more quickly. Your readers can start a conversation, add hashtags, and help your community grow.
Features of Analytics
Every business person needs to know about business analytics. If you understand the numbers, you can make good choices.
This feature can be found on both Shopify and Wix.
You can see the following on different timelines with Shopify:
- Total sales
- Online store sessions
- Rate of customers who come back
- Rate of sales in an online store
- Average order value
- How many people are on your site?
- Behavior reports
- Products that sell well
You can also make custom reports with Shopify so that you only see what’s important to you.
In Wix, the analytics are meant to show you how well your pages are getting traffic. You can look at:
- The most popular pages
- Where your visitors are coming from
- Visiting for the first time vs. visiting again
- Visitor by the type of device
Wix can also give you a lot of other kinds of information. But if you want a better tool for analytics, you’ll have to buy it from the Wix app store.
If you know a lot about this, you can use Facebook Pixel and Google Analytics on both Shopify and Wix.
Secure Socket Layer (SSL)
It is also called SSL. It is a security feature that encrypts everything that happens on your website to keep your information and the information of your customers safe. It’s available on both Shopify and Wix, and it comes with every plan you buy.
Optimization for Search Engines
Both platforms have great ways to make sure that search engines can find them. You can change the snippet, meta title, and meta tags for every page, blog, or product you post.
This is important so that Google can properly index our site and pages and so that customers can find your store when they search for a certain keyword.
Wix, on the other hand, has an advanced SEO feature that includes canonical URLs, SEO patterns, 301 redirects, rich results, and many more.
Help and a database of knowledge
Both Wix and Shopify have different kinds of support systems, and both have huge libraries of training materials that you can read or watch.
Shopify has live chat available 24/7, as well as phone and email support. Wix, on the other hand, only has phone support.
Both platforms have forums where other users can give you advice and blog pages where you can learn how to build your site and grow your business.
Dropshipping
Shopify is a place where dropshippers and apps related to dropshipping can meet. It is not Wix. You have to upload your own products to Wix.
You can use dropshipping platforms like Chinabrands, AliExpress, Oberlo, and many more with Shopify.
You shouldn’t have to worry about this if you have your own product. But if you get your products from China or other countries, it might be hard to copy and paste product information into Wix.
In Shopify, it’s done for you. Your prices will even change on their own if the price you get from your source changes.
How well a site works
According to many reviews, Shopify works a lot faster than Wix. Tests show that Shopify works 92% of the time and only takes up to four seconds to load.
The problem with Wix is that it only gets a 65% rating for how well it works. It can take up to nine seconds to load, which is much longer than is ideal.
What does this mean for your company? Customers can leave if you take too long to respond or load pages. If a customer clicks on a product and it takes a long time to load, he will leave the site and not come back.
Summary
Obviously, each platform has its own advantages and disadvantages. People who are serious about growing an online store, especially those in the dropshipping niche, should use Shopify.
Wix, on the other hand, is best for bloggers and other influential people who want to sell a few things here and there. It’s also a good choice for small business owners, like stores that only sell to people in their area.