If you name Shopify and Wix together in the ecommerce circuit, it is one tough call to analyse and determine which one would be beneficial for you and would fulfill all the criterias essential to set up your strong online business.

Shopify has often appeared as the headliner of the show. Being a proprietary platform and having the capacity to hold innumerable large businesses, Shopify was chosen by over 1 million merchants across the globe and successfully running their ecommerce site in a simple and smooth interface.

Wix on the other hand is a cloud-based development platform. It is very easy to use, generally preferred by small scale businesses. Wix is a very good drag-and-drop website builder. Due to its easy access and set up with free hosting without being pricey, Wix managed to become a popular name and hosts a massive number of, around 160 million websites.

In this blog you will get a fair share of ideas about both the platforms and would be able to perceive yourself the similarities, pros and cons as well as which one will be value for money according to your business’s stipulation.

Too much complicated platforms makes things harder for a novice and becomes a time consuming hassle to get things figured out. A platform should be effective, efficient and user friendly so that the customers can enjoy the experience of it as well as get the best out of the platform in a short time. Let’s compare both Shopify and Wix and see which one turns out better in the ease of usage.

Shopify is a platform to run large and professional ecommerce sites and thus is a little harder to perform the task there compared to Wix. Yet you will find the interface of Shopify easy and effective. Shopify has all distinctive sections for each category making it easy to manage the sales and marketing tools, themes, dashboard and analytics. You will need a website developer to set up your strong ecommerce site but is brilliant ultimately to make a mark your brand name in the world of ecommerce business.

Wix is very easy to understand and use. It is made completely beginner friendly and flexible to build your website without much hassle because of its drag-and-drop service. It makes things convenient to set up your simple website but Wix is a bit less flexible when it comes to building an ecommerce site. For that there are a lot of guides and videos available for users to get a hang of it. Wix is much easier than Shopify but it is best preferred to set up small online stores and websites.

Having an enticing design and interesting template is the first step towards drawing the attention of the customers with regard to your online store. A sleek template is certainly liked by everyone and tends to ignite the urge of the consumers to explore more of the website. Both the platforms have a great number of themes available but which one would give the premium feel and is customizable? Let’s figure out.

Shopify’s theme store is filled with the themes that an onlooker will have a hard time to choose the best for their website. It has a classy and premium feel which are made by professional designers keeping the marketing perspective in mind. Shopify has over 100 themes. They come free as well as charge up to $ 180. While it may come off at such a price point Shopify’s themes are expensive but it is a one time investment so is not that pricey. The themes are mobile responsive as well and would look as good as ever when viewed from any mobile device. The themes of Shopify are customizable. A beginner can do basic customization on Shopify themes whereas unique and professional customizations require the skills of web designers.

Wix has over 800 designer made templates. Wix allows pixel-perfect customization of their themes. The templates are highly customizable and are flexible to make use of it by simple dragging and dropping. It must be noted many of the themes of Wix are basically not designed for ecommerce websites but there are a lot of them which covers a wide range of industries. Like Shopify, Wix’s themes are also mobile responsive. In Wix ones need not know anything about coding yet they can perform the task efficiently and can build an attractive website. Drag-and-drop although made things easy for newbies yet for higher customization one may code using Wix code and make changes their own way. If you are looking for simple, basic and attractive themes for your site, Wix has all sorted for you.

A platform should excel in providing the best sales tools as these are the features that would be the medium to escalate the sales rate and help proliferate your ecommerce business. Shopify is a very powerful platform with excellent sales features. Wix on the other hand lags behind in this area quite a lot from Shopify. Unfolding here the best features we came across of each platform.

Some of the best sales features on Shopify that would help you assist in having a good sales rate:

• Abandoned cart recovery- Card abandonment transpires when a customer goes through all the check out process but leaves the cart without making the purchase. This creates a negative impact in the inventory by reducing its level. Shopify aids by sending automatic emails to buyers to recover cart abandonment.
• Sell anything- Shopify assists you to help expand your business. Apart from selling physical products, with Shopify you can sell various digital products such as ebooks, videos, graphic designs etc.
• Partnerships- Shopify gives the freedom to trade anywhere and to ease things up a bit for the merchants is courier partnered with USPS, DHL Express, Ups and Canada post.
• Multichannel selling- This is a very effective feature of Shopify to reach out to a large number of customers at once. Multi-channel selling helps companies to link their ecommerce site to various social media platforms such as WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Amazon.

Some of the best sales tools that are impressive of Wix are mentioned below:

• Variety in sales- Like Shopify, Wix too allows to sell anything, physical products as well as digital. But to sell service products, Wix needs an app to integrate.
• Video maker- This is one of the best features of Wix which enables the merchants to create their promotional videos, sales announcements etc. by adding design, content and music. Also all these take a minimum time to set up and your creative and engaging video is ready for the customers.
• Shipping- Wix provides a lot of shipping options. It gives shipping calculations: rate by weight, free shipping, rate by price, store pick up only. You can also set sales tax rules for your products. Shipstation is an app integration that enables the merchants in smooth-running of the delivery service.
• Abandoned Cart Recovery- Wix similar to Shopify provides abandoned cart recovery. Abandoned cart is really harmful for the inventory of the ecommerce site. But it must be noted that the abandoned card recovery mail is not standard in Wix which is a standard one in Shopify.

The objective of marketing tools is to be able to provide customers a satisfactory service and help them climb up the ladder of success with the best planned out market rules and strategic ways of engaging with the customers.

Shopify is very effectively dealing with the marketing features, and customers witnessed a lot of difference in their sales with just the use of marketing features of Shopify. Shopify natively supports many marketing tools but apart from that to get much more features it relies on third party integration. Shopify is very flexible regarding this. It runs email campaigns, rolls out ads on Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Amazon and other social sites. Also all of these are quite cheap, either freely available or costs little something.

Wix also shows a good result in having marketing tools with Wix Ascend, which is a separate subscription to manage marketing features. Wix lets you integrate your site with Instagram, Facebook, Twitter for a better approach. You can run email campaigns where you can send upto 3 emails a month without Ascend subscription or can subscribe to it to avail premium features.

A feature rich platform gives a wide scope for the company to integrate their site with more apps and plugins to turn their ecommerce site into a resourceful one. It increases the flexibility and boosts the functionality of your online store. Let’s discern which among Shopify and Wix is enriched in features of this spectrum.

Shopify essentially built to manage large businesses, has to be capable of providing integration of a large number of apps and extensions. Shopify’s app store consists of over 4000 apps including free and paid apps. Oberlo, one of the best apps of Shopify gives an excellent dropshipping service. Plug in SEO optimize the SEO related issues, HubSpot CRM is very helpful to personalize and automate your marketing campaign. These are the sneak peek of the valuable apps available in the Shopify app store.

Wix although provides quite a number of apps and add-ons yet it couldn’t match the level of apps of Shopify that are provided especially for ecommerce sites. Wix App Market has over 300 apps which serve the basic purpose and are good enough for scale businesses. Out of it, a lot of apps are free to use.

Price point plays a vital role in the selection of a platform. While looking at the price section of both the platforms, it must be kept in mind that Shopify supports enterprise level businesses and Wix is generally preferred by small to medium-sized businesses.

Shopify has its own payment processor called Shopify Payments as well as supports over 100 payment gateways including Amazon Pay, Worldpay, PayPal, Stripe etc. Shopify has three versions available. It charges an extra amount of credit card processing fees if instead of Shopify payments third party payment gateways are used.

Here are the list of prices that need to be paid as well as the extra transaction fees in different versions of Shopify plans:

• Shopify Basics- 2.9% + 30¢ per transaction
• The Shopify Plan- 2.6% + 30¢ per transaction
• Shopify Advanced- 2.4% + 30¢ per transaction

Wix is comparatively cheaper than Shopify. At first Wix is free to use as long as a person wants to use a basic website without one’s own domain name and not a professional ecommerce site. If one may want to build an ecommerce website on Wix that requires the company to switch to other plans of Wix that we are mentioning below.

• Connect Domain- Rs. 80
• Combo (includes small professional website
  and good amount of storage)- Rs 125
• Unlimited- Rs 185
• Business & ecommerce- Rs 225

The performance of your business should always be watched to know the cracks from where the water is leaking and hampering your business and on what areas there should be upgradation needed which eventually decides the fixation required to enhance the performance. Shopify and Wix both give access to Google Analytics that helps very effectively in tracking the performance of your business.

Shopify provides inbuilt analytics and dashboard that’s brilliant in analysing the inventory, sales rate, customer visiting, live tracking of the customers visiting your site and so much more. All these are professional tools made to assist you in smooth running of your online store.

Wix in comparison has the analytic feature in only its ecommerce price plan and the rest of the plan of Wix lacks it.

Interestingly both the platforms provide dedicated help and support to its customers which makes it a tough call to say which one will perform better in the aspect of support. A platform’s help center should be active enough to address the issues that might arise while using it to build the website. Below mentioned the functionality provided by both the platforms and let’s see which one turns out to be better.

Shopify’s help center offers- 

• Contact support
• Video tutorials
• Shopify community
• Webinars
• Changelog
• 24/7 phone support
• 24/7 live chat support
• Email support

Wix’s help center offers-

• 24/7 phone support
• Email support
• Forums and help center
• Plenty of guides
• In-editor help

Now that we learnt in depth about both Shopify and Wix and are well aware of their strengths and shortcomings, let’s summarise everything at the end of the comparison blog.

• Wix is beginner friendly whereas Shopify is also very easy to use yet to set up a professional ecommerce site, one needs to hire a developer.
• Shopify and Wix both have impressive themes but Shopify’s themes are made for ecommerce business whereas Wix lags behind in this having very limited industry type templates.
• In Wix customization is very flexible and gives total freedom to build the site on one’s own way but that requires coding knowledge; and on the other hand Shopify is a little less flexible, though it too provides a lot of scope of customization.
• Shopify is essentially for large businesses whereas Wix is preferred by small to medium sized businesses.
• Shopify has absolutely great sales tools but here comes one big drawback of Wix which provides very basic sales tools won’t be able to support big business.
• Both Shopify and Wix have dedicated help and support where both of them lack one feature of the other. Shopify has 24/7 live chat support which Wix doesn’t have and Wix has an onsite editor which is absent in Shopify.
• Wix is cheaper than Shopify perfect for a regular user to build their site.

The verdict cannot be delivered upon the subjects that are of the same niche but vary greatly in their outcomes.

Here Shopify is the clear winner if you want to build a strong ecommerce site and run a large business and take advantage of all the well designed professional tools.

Wix is your go to platform if you want a simple website free of cost or if you want to run a small ecommerce business and have limited funds. Wix for that matter shows excellent support with many beautiful and easily customizable templates and has sales tools enough to run your small company.