WIX vs SHOPIFY — I tried both

Quicks Shopify Shopify Wix these are both tools that create websites so what's the difference well a big clue is hiding in an obvious Place their home pages wix's slogan is create a website Without Limits Shopify slogan is the global Commerce platform both slogans hint at what kind of websites they're meant to build Wix is for all kinds of websites small businesses blogs weddings portfolios online stores and more Shopify on the other hand is only for one type of website online stores in this video I'll show you how this fundamental difference comes through in ease of

use e-commerce templates and pricing by the end you'll know exactly which one is for you let's start with ease of use this is wix and this is Shopify we're going to edit a page with both we'll start with Wix Wix is a visual editor so we can just drag and drop elements like paragraphs directly into a page easy now let's edit a page in Shopify so online store pages will open it and here's our page we can add text but Shopify is not a visual editor so to see how things are looking we can save

and view the page okay so what if you want to add something cool like a photo gallery now Shopify doesn't have a gallery that we can add at least not by default so we need to upload each image individually let's fast forward through this there we go and we can save and view our page and there we go now with Wix we have a couple different photo gallery options that we can add to the website I kind of like this one and we'll just drag it into place then let's upload our photos and there we

go nice now Shopify does include something like a visual editor it's called theme customizer but it's mostly useful for customizing the home page the product page and category page which of course are important Pages for e-commerce so theme customizer is not a general purpose page editor like Wix has what I'm trying to explain is that wix's page editor is meant to create all kinds of pages home pages photo galleries about us teams blogs contact us pages and a bunch more Shopify is just for e-commerce websites so their editor prioritizes Pages like the home page or

product pages or category pages if you wanted a photo gallery or a team page you'd need to use their page editor which frankly just isn't as easy or flexible as wix next we're going to talk about e-commerce but before we do I want to make a quick note my work is supported by affiliate commissions so you can find a link to both Shopify and Wix in the video description below if you click that link I might earn a commission anyways let's discuss e-commerce on the surface both Wix and Shopify offer the basics they are both

able to sell pretty much everything physical Goods digital Goods event tickets whatever and both offer point of sale systems for selling in the real world Shopify has their own point of sale system while Wix integrates with one by HP but their differences become more apparent when you look beyond the basics because e-commerce can get complicated there's a lot that goes into it you need a credit card processor to accept credit cards you need to collect Accurate Taxes you need to integrate with shipping services to estimate shipping costs and print shipping labels and all these complications

is where Shopify shines in my experience Shopify makes these complications much simpler for example Shopify integrates with way more shipping providers than Wix and you can print shipping labels from within Shopify which you can't do with wix or consider taxes with Wix you have to manually add country and state tax rates and if they change you are in charge of updating them Shopify on the other hand includes the default sales tax for many states and countries and they update them regularly just a quick side note technically you can use a tool called avalara with Wix

that takes care of taxes but I found avalara to be way too expensive to even consider using okay back on track the biggest most important difference in e-commerce features between Shopify and Wix is shopify's App Store there are Shopify apps for everything that you can think of apps for back and stock alerts for selling on Facebook for adding live chat for adding product reviews and a bunch more the App Store is a massive advantage and it's growing all the time today Shopify has thousands of apps well Wix has hundreds and this isn't even a knock

on Wix because Shopify frankly has more apps than all its competitors and so the App Store is a big reason why at the end of the day Shopify just really has e-commerce covered I'm not saying you can't get by with Wix you can totally run an online store using Wix but if your store becomes successful like if you're doing more than let's say 100 sales per month I think you'll prefer to be on Shopify over Wix okay next up templates templates are of course the look and feel of your website Wix has over 800 templates

some of them are quite good well I'm always surprised that a few are still quite outdated looking Shopify offers nine free themes and they're all quite nice beyond that there are 76 paid themes and beyond that there is a massive Marketplace of third-party Shopify themes theme customization is a bit easier on wix if you can see it you can generally customize it with Shopify I've found that you can customize most things though occasionally I run into limitations for example recently I wanted a different color for these out of stock tags and I needed to write

CSS code to do that which is of course a little intimidating if you're not comfortable with code finally let's take a look at pricing here is wix's pricing page and here is shopify's now Shopify lets us toggle yearly and monthly to see accurate prices Wix isn't as upfront about this they say this is the per month cost but it's not clear if that's the monthly or yearly price you have to scroll down and find it in the fine print to see that this is the yearly price so that's the first thing to know when comparing

Wix and Shopify on pricing now Wix has two categories of pricing plans that we're interested in website plans are cheaper because they don't include e-commerce business and e-commerce plans are more expensive but they do include e-commerce and that's just the way it goes e-commerce plans are more expensive in almost every website builder we can see that wix's lowest price e-commerce plan is business basic and it costs 27 dollars per month when paid annually all Shopify plans have e-commerce and the cheapest plan is basic at 29 per month when paid annually it is a bit more

expensive than wix okay let's wrap this up when should you use Shopify and when should you use Wix well here's how I'd make that decision if I didn't need e-commerce on my website I'd probably use Wix because the website editor is just easier to use I still might even use Wix if I just needed like a really basic e-commerce website for example I'm a musician and if I just needed a quick and easy way to sell my record I might try Wix but I always use Shopify when I'm building a full e-commerce store in fact

I currently have a store on Shopify called the happy burlap and Shopify has been great I especially love printing shipping labels from within Shopify because frankly shipping can get annoying once again my work is supported by affiliate commissions and you can find a link to both Shopify and Wix in the video description below if you click that link I might earn a commission I hope this was helpful and thanks for watching