Case Study of moving from WooCommerce to Shopify
As ecommerce has become a more popular medium to sell products, there are a lot of “marketers” looking to build ecommerce sites for potential store owners. Unfortunately, many of these interenet marketers have never really created ecommerce sites, and in fact, have never used anything beyond wordpress to create a website.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I like wordpress a lot (and I think the woo framework is great). In fact, this site is built with wordpress (and a woo themes theme) and I use it in a variety of capacities, but I just don’t use it for ecommerce when there are tons of platforms out there, designed for ecommerce and do it so much better. In fact, in my opinion, it’s just plain lazy when a web designer uses wordpress to create an ecommerce store.
I am of the opinion that you use the best platform suited to your customer. For example, I tend to use WordPress for informational sites, Drupal for very large membership sites (Associations for example) and a variety of shopping cart applications from Shopify up to Magento.
A Woocommerce Crisis
About a week ago, I got a call from a friend of a friend. His girlfriend had been trying to build an ecommerce website for close to 6 months and was getting no where. The developer she had hired had disappeared, couldn’t be found and after all this time, the website was still broke. The checkout wouldn’t work and there were bugs all over the place that he couldn’t seem to fix. I said I would take a look and see if I could help.
Upon looking at the website and the backend I noticed something alarming that I am seeing more and more by “developers” (I use that term loosely) trying to create websites for people. It was hosted on cheap hosting, using wordpress and woocommerce and there had to be close to 20 plugins installed. More often then not, this is the first indication someone doesn’t know what they are doing. If they can’t do it with a plugin, it can’t be done. This includes simple social media buttons as well.
I tested the site, found out she was having a PayPal IPN issue. This is just the notification PayPal sends back to your website to talk to the shopping cart. I am seeing these issues with cheap hosts more and more as they have weird firewall settings. I tried to give her some instruction but she didn’t even have access to the hosting account.
Shopify to the Rescue
She was on the verge of quitting so what I did, was set up a quick and dirty Shopify website that matched pretty close to her existing website with one difference, it worked. She asked if she could use the platform as she just wanted a website up quick. So all I did, was go ahead, download all her products from wordpress, format them into a CSV that Shopify could read and literally in 2 hours, she had a website with all her products loaded and ready to go. All we had to do is make edits and formatting changes to reflect the difference between Woocommerce and Shopify.
Her graphics person created the banners we needed, I had her set up a shopify payments account and for less money than she was paying for her woocommerce store, she had a fully functional e-commerce website with no hassles. To compare the pricing:
WooCommerce Site:
Hosting: $10
PayPal Pro: $30
SSL: $5/month
Total: $45/month
Shopify
Monthly Fee: $29
Shopify Payments: Free
SSL: Free
Total: $29
On top of this, she doesn’t have to pay someone to keep her website up to date. That is Shopify’s job.
PCI Compliance
The other great thing about moving to a hosted solution is PCI Compliance (Payment Card Industry). Come 2015 being out of compliance can cost you money for data breaches. Since wordpress is one of the most hacked platforms on the planet, it is something to consider. Shopify is PCI DSS Level 1 compliant. What does this mean? It is the highest compliance available from the credit card industry.
Frustrated with your E-Commerce Store?
If you are frustrated with your wordpress e-commerce store, try out Shopify. You can always set up WordPress on a subdomain (i.e. blog.mywebsite.com) and run your blog from there while still having all the functionality and ease. Check it out below as they have a free 14 day trial. Or, if you want help, CONTACT ME and I can help you out.
For your 14 Day Shopify Trial Check Out Below:
Screenshots before and after:
BEFORE
AFTER
If you want to check out the live site, head to COMPLEMENT YOUR STYLE to check it out.
ANNOUNCEMENT: Want to build your own Shopify e-commerce site but not sure where to start? I have put together a complete step by step program that anyone can use to build their own Shopify website. Go to CARTPREP.COM for more information.
Hi! This was really helpful! I am a complete novice when it comes to website design. I want to set up an ecommerce to sell 3 food items to start off with and upto 15 within a year. I’m not expecting much sale in the beginning so am not sure whether to go with shopify or not?
Also, what do you think about using woocommerce versus an etsy clone for a multi-vendor marketplace?
Thanks
I guess the question is, are you doing recurring orders? Or one off. If they are one off orders, and you have never designed a website, then Shopify is the place for you. In fact, I have an entire walk through at http://cartprep.com if you are interested. If it is recurring, Shopify can do it with plugins but I have been very interested in the Cart66 service you can use on wordpress. As for multi-vendor, I would not trust the clones from a PCI Compliance and security perspective. You are better off looking at Magento (multi-vendor out of the box), Opencart with a multi-vendor Module (much easier) or all else fails, woocommerce with the multi-vendor extensions. Because you are a novice, my advice, get something up quick with Shopify, grow your business and if you need to expand, then you have the resources to build something better.
Very informative! Thanks for this post. I’m using Shopify for couple of years, and it’s so easy in use and stylish. No complaints. For those who want to move eCommerce data I can recommend this tool, recently my friend migrated with its help: https://www.shopping-cart-migration.com/shopping-cart-migration-options/6694-woocommerce-to-shopify-migration
Hope this will be handy.
Best regards,
Victoria
I had someone who used the service and it has its place. But un-needed for this particular conversion as you can download your woocommerce products, parse the data and upload it into your Shopify site.
This comparison is not so honest, you should add that shopify is taking at least 1% of your sales.
Only if you dont use Shopify payments which is essentially white labeled stripe. And at a level where you can get get better merchant account rates, you could easily pay for the upper levels of shopify that have no transaction fee. I know I know… wordpress is the bees knees and woocommerce is a gift from god but when it comes to total cost of ownership, ease of use, the hosted applications are better 80% of the time.
Awesome video. E-commerce stores are always a great choice for retailers. If you are looking for the easiest migration solution LitExtension service is the best option for you. It is fully automated and lets you transfer all your data fast and accurately from your online store to another platform without any tech skills needed. http://blog.litextension.com/how-to-migrate/