ShopBase vs. WooCommerce

ShopBase is always there to help if I have an issue, and they also offer helpful ideas for building and optimizing my store.

[WooCommerce] does really well for simple stores that don't have a lot of products. It's really easy to set up and get products added so people can purchase them online. It's not the best for really complicated stores with products that need a lot of customization; you have to find 3rd-party plugins to add additional functionality to your store and sometimes those can create conflicts between one another.

Incentivized

• Helpful materials
• Supportive team
• Affordable apps

• Keeps track of product inventory, including details of product variations such as colors and sizes if required.
• Keeps track of orders so that the shopkeeper has one place to log in and see the status and history of orders to her shop.
• Creates shop-related pages automatically. Once you add one or more products, they will automatically appear on your shop home page. Additionally, pages for viewing shopping carts and for checking out are automatically created.

Incentivized

• No free plan
• Need more apps
• Limited themes

• Because of how the Wordpress database is structured, WooCommerce isn't great for large or complex e-commerce sites.
• More out-of-the-box options would be nice within the base software.
• Because add-on plugins are developed by 3rd parties, sometimes you get conflicts that break things.

Incentivized

Despite very rare glitches, more connected to an excessive number of plugins, that affect the speed of the site, we are extremely satisfied with the platform, the ability to import and export products, even though we just export them, as we have our proprietary system for updating inventories. We love the ease of upgrading, enhancing, innovating, and the freedom we have to do whatever we want, which is a plus, when you consider Shopify can take down your whole store as they please, if they think you aren't abiding to their TOS or their ever changing set of rules.

Incentivized

I gave it lots of points for being a simple product that instantly gives you a store. Very intuitive and simple for the client to update or implement. Loses LOTS of points when you want to do anything besides just sell stuff (coupons, etc) then it makes you pay big money for the add-ons and makes it difficult and time-intensive to develop your own.

Incentivized

not muh support

Shopify apps are diverse but not consistent and costs a lot to build a store.

We were pretty sure we wanted a WordPress site so that we had more control over the site itself, having been burned by third-party vendor sites before. The fact that WooCommerce integrates so well with WordPress was a big selling point for us. Magento would have been too heavy of a lift for our small dev team and we didn't want to rely on Shopify or BigCommerce (though all of those products could have their merits for other projects or clients).

Incentivized

• Save lost sales
• Reduce cost
• Take less time to manage

• Positive: low cost to start up, and allowed us to start selling right away.
• Negative: better plug-ins have a high cost of entry. For example if you want to do subscriptions you need a paid plugin for it.
• Positive: easily integrates with PayPal and Stripe.

Incentivized