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Shopify is well regarded as the king of eCommerce platforms. But, it’s still worth seeing how it stacks up against its major competitors if you're considering switching which eCommerce platform you use.
For any eCommerce business owner, few decisions will be as impactful to your business’s success as the eCommerce platform you choose to run your storefront on. With today’s densely populated landscape of different eCommerce businesses, a number of different options have emerged for you to choose from, including Shopify
Just like any other sector, these eCommerce platforms are actively competing with one another to provide the best level of service to businesses. However, in competitive business situations like these, one always stands on top.
At point of writing, Shopify is easily sitting atop the eCommerce throne, and with recent sales data to hand, that doesn’t seem likely to change anytime soon. However, in spite of this fact, many businesses still spend substantial amounts of time exploring the different options that are available to them, whether they’re looking to make an ecommerce store for the first time, or move from an existing platform.
We want to break down how these platforms compare with Shopify, what you should think about when deciding on which platform to build your business on, and whether a competing platform is actually better suited for your business.
Despite its lean and approachable brand presence, Shopify has been a stalwart of eCommerce since 2006 and pre-dates many of the other eCommerce platforms we’ll be discussing in this piece.
In the roughly 20 years since its launch, Shopify has carved out a number of benefits for merchants on the platform that it stands on proudly.
Compared to major competitors, Shopify has a 33% better total cost of ownership, meaning that the cost of everything you need to run your business on the platform is significantly less expensive on Shopify.
Without a doubt, Shopify’s fresh out of the box checkout converts up to 36% better than that of other eCommerce platforms. This means that more website visitors to Shopify websites become customers compared to the visitors of other eCommerce platforms.
Because of Shopify’s pricing structure and the features available to merchants with the various packages, as an eCommerce business grows, a Shopify website can grow to accommodate the increased demand.
Shopify has a number of different competitors, each catering to a specific niche within the eCommerce market.
Shopify’s most direct competitors include BigCommerce, Magento (Adobe Commerce), WooCommerce, and Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Some more indirect competitors may be the ease of use friendly website builders of Wix, Squarespace and Weebly, and the less commonly used platform Volusion.
Despite not being second in the eCommerce market-share, you could easily argue that BigCommerce is Shopify’s biggest competitor. Unlike other competitors, both Shopify and BigCommerce are software as a service (SAAS) platforms, so the differences between the two are a bit more subtle. In fact, the two are easily the most directly comparable eCommerce platforms available; they’re both hosted platforms - so they both have in-built ssl certificates and security, both promise a 99.99% uptime, they’re both relatively friendly for non-developers, they both provide a variety of easy-to-use features, and are both optimised for mobile too. But as is to be expected, both have their own list of pros and cons.
One of the major differences is how the two are priced. Both BigCommerce and Shopify are available in different versions. Shopify with Shopify basic, Shopify, Shopify Advanced, and Shopify Plus, with Shopify Plus being marketed almost as its own platform; whereas BigCommerce has Standard, Plus, Pro, and Enterprise versions. The pricing for the comparable versions of the two stores is very similar, however the major difference is that BigCommerce forces customers to upgrade plans depending on their online store’s annual sales, which means you’ll have to spend more as you earn more. Whereas, if you have a successful and money generating store, running on Shopify basic, you can just leave it be if you choose.
In terms of actual features, both Shopify and BigCommerce have a treasure trove of features that can be used to scale your business. However, the two go about this in different ways. For example, BigCommerce does offer third party app integration, but they also offer their own versions of these apps built in. While these built in versions can take some time for users to wrap their heads around, they do offer increased flexibility. Shopify however, only offers some built in versions of these apps, but the third party app store is over 6 times that of BigCommerce’s. So chances are, if you need an obscure functionality, Shopify is far more likely to have an app that you can easily integrate.
One of the major differences with BigCommerce, is that, unlike Shopify, it is an open source platform, which comes with some innate benefits. For example, if you want to edit the checkout you can do so on any version by downloading the code. Alternatively, you’ll need to upgrade to Shopify Plus to edit Shopify’s checkout.
Whilst BigCommerce offers more features out of the box, with a few integrations, these same features can be easily integrated on Shopify. As a growing business, you need to consider whether you want to spend time building things out in BigCommerce, or if getting things up and running quickly in Shopify, with its tried and tested library of third party apps, is the best way to go.
Another key thing to keep in mind is, BigCommerce has not recorded a gross profit in the past two years, whereas Shopify grew by 25% in the last year alone.
The Wordpress plugin, WooCommerce, has an interesting stake in the eCommerce world. Despite Shopify’s marketing dominating the space, WooCommerce actually makes up a larger percentage of eCommerce stores than any other eCommerce platform. However, if we look exclusively at the top 100,000 eCommerce stores in terms of web traffic, Shopify edges WooCommerce out.
We’ve done a full piece on how Shopify compares to WooCommerce, so we won’t dwell on this for too long, but the primary reason for WooCommerce’s popularity is that it’s free… kind of.
Even though WooCommerce, in and of itself, is a free to use platform, you do need to fork out some cash for hosting. Some business owners may view this as you having more control, but it’s certainly another thing you’ll have to spend time on.
WooCommerce also has the largest library of third party apps and plugins. However, this is largely a trade off, as a lot of the basic functionalities that are offered within Shopify, WooCommerce does not have, and installing them can get complicated.
Furthermore WooCommerce can look quite unprofessional without a substantial money and time investment. People buy with their eyes first, and while WooCommerce offers a range of themes and designs for you to choose from, most of them pale in comparison to Shopify’s library of themes from a design perspective.
Since its acquisition by Adobe in 2018, Magento has not only rebranded to Adobe Commerce, but has had a drastic fall from grace, with it now barely making up 1% of the top 100,000 eCommerce websites.
Magento maintains a strong level of community amongst web developers though, due to its open source nature. These developers will still voice their gripes with the platform, namely, there being three different versions of Magento to choose from. Unlike choosing between Shopify and Shopify plus, where the decision depends more on your desire to scale your business, Magento’s three versions are entirely different.
There is Magento Commerce Cloud, Magento On-Prem, and Magento Open-Source, with the first two being grouped under Adobe’s “Magento Commerce” umbrella. The confusing aspect is that all three are technically open-source, despite it only being the namesake of one of them, with the main difference between the three instead being the pricing.
Magento Open Source is available to use for free, so long as you pay for hosting, whereas both versions of Magento Commerce come with a price tag. The distinction between the two “Magento Commerce” versions lies in the hosting. Commerce Cloud is self-hosted through a partnership with Adobe and is thus referred to as a “Platform as a Service” and Adobe makes it very clear that it would like you to choose this one. Finally, Magento On Premises, shortened to 'On-Prem,' requires you to find, and pay, for your own hosting platform. However, neither “Magento Commerce” options have a fixed price.
In fact both Magento Commerce versions have an annual licensing cost ranging from $22,000 to $190,000 depending on the size of your business. Basically, just like BigCommerce, if you earn more they charge you more.
Phew! Yes there is that much to consider before we’ve even learned about what the platform actually offers compared to Shopify.
The main difference between Shopify and Magento is that a Shopify website will place much less reliance on a web developer. This is not to say that you shouldn’t have developers involved in decisions that affect the functionalities of your eCommerce website, but that the implementation of these functionalities will be a much simpler affair.
You could argue that Magento offers you more control, but you also have to consider how the way in which a functionality is installed on Magento will affect your ability to scale your business. This is referred to as technical debt, and basically refers to the consequences of the technical decisions you have made with your project. Working with Shopify, there is rarely any technical debt, whereas Magento stores are infamous for it.
Salesforce Commerce Cloud is a common choice of eCommerce platform amongst enterprise level businesses due to its integration with other Salesforce products, which they may also use. However, when comparing Salesforce Commerce Cloud’s proficiency as an eCommerce platform to Shopify, a clear winner emerges.
in 2023, a Big Three consulting company released a study of ecommerce conversion rates and found that Shopify’s checkout converts 36% better than Salesforce’s. This means that, if the only difference between two identical stores was that one used Salesforce’s checkout and the other used Shopify’s, the store on Shopify would have 136 orders for every 100 on the Salesforce store.
Beyond this, Shopify has a 35% better total cost of ownership than Salesforce Commerce Cloud, with Salesforce taking 1-3% of a store's revenue rather than a fixed payment. This means a store making £500,000 a month, is paying £5000-£15,000 to Salesforce, whereas Shopify stores will never pay more then the $2300 fixed fee for Shopify Plus.
And finally, Salesforce as a business is focused more on CRM than they are eCommerce. They’re simply never going to innovate at the rate Shopify already does, and they have shown no inclination to want to change that any time soon.
Like the comparison between Shopify and WooCommerce, we also have a full piece comparing Shopify to Wix, Squarespace, & Weebly, so we’ll summarise the differences here.
Wix, Squarespace, & Weebly are all website builders that offer eCommerce functionalities, whose primary demographic is small businesses that want to set up a website quickly and have it require minimal maintenance.
The primary difference between these platforms and Shopify, is that Wix, Squarespace, & Weebly websites are nowhere near as scalable. Shopify has made an effort to market itself as the eCommerce platform for entrepreneurs in an effort to take market share away from Wix, Squarespace, & Weebly. The key difference is that entrepreneurs who build a website on Shopify will be able to grow their business with the platform.
With marketing tools, POS extensions, and more, even if it may be easier to build a website on Wix, Squarespace, or Weebly, a Shopify site will ultimately be a better tool for a small business.
Volusion is a relatively small player in the eCommerce landscape, but one that has generated significant buzz as a direct competitor to Shopify.
On the face of it, the two platforms are very similar. This is true in terms of pricing structure, how a merchant builds their store on the platform, and the operating interface of the platforms.
However, in nearly every way Shopify outshines Volusion. Shopify offers more themes for merchants out of the box, more features with marketing capabilities and Point of Sale systems, Multicurrency selling, and has a Blogging CMS built in. In fact, Volusion is the only platform here that doesn’t have an in-built blogging CMS in any capacity.
The only benefit of Volusion over Shopify is that Volusion allows for highly customisable products with more than 3 product options, whereas Shopify does not. Whilst this has long been a critique of Shopify, it is a challenge merchants can get around with technical knowledge and custom functionalities.
The main considerations you should be making as an eCommerce business is, how much do you want to invest in your brand compared to your IT department? And how much do you want to scale your business? Whilst BigCommerce, WooCommerce, and Magento each offer undeniable levels of flexibility in terms of designing a website, you are going to have to spend a lot of time and money developing them.
Similarly, Wix, Squarespace, & Weebly may let you set up a website quickly, but you’ll not be able to scale your business nearly as far as you can with Shopify.
Shopify set out as the eCommerce platform that could both let businesses set up an eCommerce website quickly and scale businesses to an enterprise level. The platform maintains that position today, even as their competitors try to leverage it against them.
However, whilst simplicity is still at the heart of Shopify’s offering, as a growing business looking to scale, you should still consider working alongside a specialist Shopify Agency that can help you grow. Be it building a custom theme, custom product pages, or custom functionality, you need to be investing in your website in order to unlock your true potential.
Find out how we can elevate your eCommerce store today.
