Shopify Vs WooCommerce: Choosing the Best Ecommerce Platform for 2017 and Beyond

The universe of eCommerce has been expanding rapidly for the past few years. Every business, be it a start up or a popular one, has its presence on the internet. You might be planning to make your presence felt on the internet amongst other brands too. But before you launch an ecommerce platform for your business, several questions might pop up in your mind as to – “Who is a good hosting provider?”, “Which theme to go for?”, “Which domain to purchase?” etc.
Shopify Vs WooCommerce – choosing one of the two is one of the biggest dilemma that business owners face. Some might suggest choose Shopify and some might ask you to go for Woocommerce. This is because both of these are top-notch ecommerce platforms and both are well-accepted amongst business owners for having a simple and efficient user interface. Through this blog, we will provide you with some clarity about each of these platforms, and acquaint you with their strengths as well as drawbacks. It might help you to come up to a decision.

Understanding Shopify and WooCommerce

Shopify

You might have heard a lot about Shopify. It was launched in the year 2008 in Canada and is currently providing Shopify ecommerce store development solutions to more than 150K businesses. For all those who are unaware, it is a web based ecommerce platform that provides the businesses with a hosting platform and manages all the hosting requirements for them.
You can feel free to choose the domain name of your choice. As Shopify provides with a readymade platform, it becomes easy for the ecommerce store owners to have an online store without having technical knowhow. It has its own app store from where you can purchase different themes based on your requirement and budget.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce is an open source plugin for WordPress users. In order to use WooCommerce, you will need a self hosted website and WordPress installed within. If you like WordPress and are aware of its plugins, WooCommerce is a good option. But if you have still not decided which option to choose, you should know about the features of both the platforms.

Shopify Vs. WooCommerce: A Comparison

1. User friendliness

When it comes to user friendliness, Shopify is always the first choice. As soon as you create an account with Shopify, they navigate you to complete the setup, manage your hosting and help you with Shopify customization based on your choices and requirements. You can completely rely on Shopify to do an errorless job of setting up an estore for you. Needless to say, you don’t even need to have any technical knowledge to set up your ecommerce store. However if you want a custom look for your store or want any custom features you would have to opt for competent Shopify development services.
Setting up WooCommerce is not difficult either. It is just that the process can be a little prolonged as you need to install and update WordPress and install the WooCommerce plugin. If you haven’t embarked upon a task like this before, you might find it difficult.

2. Flexibility and themes

Every business owner likes to have an attractive looking ecommerce store and themes are a prerequisite for that. Shopify has its own theme store from where one can choose from more than 180 different themes. Several themes are available for free. However, if you want to go for the exclusive ones, you might have to pay for them. You can also customize the look and feel of these themes without any coding.
WooCommerce doesn’t provide with a theme store but you can consider a third party option like Themeforest which provides with more than 600 Woocommerce themes ranging from $29 to $64. You also might find free themes, but then you might have to work on customizing them on your own as you cannot get any support.

3. Product features and presentation

Shopify and WooCommerce rank the same when it comes to providing options for uploading pictures, writing product descriptions, adding product details like size, colour etc. But as WooCommerce works inside your WordPress theme, some of the images might not look great. So you need to keep yourself aware about the same. This doesn’t happen with Shopify.

4. Making Payments

Shopify charges extra fees if you use an external payment processor to process credit cards. But you can use external payment processors only in countries like US, Canada, UK and Australia. So if your business is located somewhere else, you might have to go through a payment gateway or a third party service. The charges of Payment Gateway vary according to different countries. So do your research before you decide one for yourself.
WooCommerce provides with different payment gateway extensions. Try adding Paypal through Stripe. You can also opt for Authorize.Net, Braintree, Amazon Payments and other payment gateways by paying a price of $79 annually. Hence, you can find an array of payment options in both the platforms. But it also depends on your location, your budget and extra fees that you need to spend.

5. Language flexibility

For a long time, Shopify users have found it difficult to offer multi language support on their ecommerce store. The only option was to duplicate the store and add sub domains which proved to be expensive. Now, it provides with a Langify app, which costs $17.50 per month.
WooCommerce wins here due to its popular and reliable WPML plugin. It offers a multilingual solution at $79 during the first year and $39 thereafter. This option is quite cheap as compared to Shopify.

6. Tax Settings

Shopify and WooCommerce both provide you with an option to display prices with or without taxes. Both the platforms do the math and calculate the tax rate based on your location which makes it easy for you to decide the final figure.

7. Page Speed and Uptime

You must be aware that websites whose uptimes are low have to pay a fine to Google. Shopify undoubtedly provides with the best speed. But the speed of a WooCommerce website will depend on your web hosting service. In case you are hosting the WordPress site for yourself, you need to make sure that you reach an uptime of 99.95% or more. If you are hosting from outside, the hosting companies will give you an agreement mentioning the guaranteed uptime.

Concluding…

So the question is, what should you choose? WooCommerce or Shopify? Go for WooCommerce if you are using WordPress, like its plugins, need multilingual support and want to make the best out of SEO.
In case if any of the above points are not a part of your strategy, go for Shopify. Extremely easy to set up, cost-effective, entails a lot of features and provides support. Once you have clarity about the kind of ecommerce platform you want to have, it will be easy for you to take the right decision.

Key Advantages of Mcommerce You Must Know About

Mobile ecommerce, also known as Mcommerce has completely transformed the ways in which eCommerce businesses approach their customers. You all must be aware that as a part of Mcommerce, most of the business transactions take place through mobile devices. However, Mobile commerce is not confined to eCommerce industry.

There are several ways in which it is influencing the lives of retailers and their customers. So what are the ways in which Mcommerce benefitting the businesses of today? What advantages are provided by Mcommerce to the retailers? Let us find out.

1. Bridging gaps through push notifications

Push notifications have become the most preferred way for businesses to get in touch with customers as well as potential clientele. Notifications help in sending an instant message and notifying customers about upcoming offers as mobiles are carried by people wherever they go.

A Survey by Responsys proved that 76% customers between the age group of 18 to 34 who shop through mobiles have enabled push notifications from their favourite brands. Hence, if you have an mCommerce app that sends push notifications, it can help to boost your conversion rate by targeting the audience you want to. There are several companies providing Android App development which enables you to send push notifications easily.

2. Single click calling

Gone are the days when customers used to shoot emails and wait to hear from the company in 24 hours or a week. Delays in getting back to the customers make them change their preferences and impression of the company. Thus, it is better to provide with a contact option that helps customers to reach service executives without a lot of effort. With the one click calling, real time chat assistance and toll-free numbers, companies have become more accessible and approachable.

3. Location Tracking & Personalized Notifications

Suppose your customer is passing by your coffee shop…and your company sends an instant push notification about the latest flavours of coffee or other offers at your shop; the customer is sure to check in and find out about it. So once a customer subscribes to your brand, you can send location based push notifications with personalized discounts and boost your sales. Yet another study by Responsys proved that personalized push notifications are liked by people and provide with 2 times higher conversion rates as compared to the ones made through marketing emails.

4. In App Payments

Payment convenience and security are the two most important aspects expected by customers when they making transactions with a brand. And this is why in app payment facility is one of the biggest advantages of Mcommerce. So how does in-app payment work? Once the customers download the app of your company, they can pay from within the application and get personalized offerings through you. Also there is no need of third-party payment gateways as they are hosted by the platform itself. This means that Android users can pay through Google Wallet and iOS users can pay through Apple Pay.

Through mobile wallets, customers can maintain a prepaid account through which amount is debited after making a purchase. These changes in the online payment systems enabled businesses to fetch more customers and offer products and services based on the subscription. Approach companies that provide MCommerce App Development so that you can come up with an intuitive and smart app for your customers.

5. Omnichannel promotions

If you are making the most out of mcommerce, you can promote your ecommerce business in a lot of ways. Besides push notifications, you can send daily/weekly deals, coupons, offer special prices for registered customers and free shipping so that the numbers of registered users go up. By doing so, you will be able to market your business well and increase the number of customers. People who get in touch with your brand through social media apps can be given a good user experience by optimizing content and user-friendly interface.

In the year 2015, a research by eMarketer proved that the mobile ad expenses comprise of 49% of total digital ad expense spent by brands and companies. The research revealed that mobile ad spending will go up to 57 billion US dollars in the year 2018; which makes it 29 billion dollars more than what it was in June 2015.

Investing for providing enriched Mobile commerce experience

Most of the companies today are working towards enhancing the customer experience by making innovative products, service and data so that the customers can make the most out of it and they can have a competitive advantage over others.

In today’s times when people interact with their devices more than anyone else, there can’t be a better opportunity to promote your business. So if you want to succeed with your mobile commerce ventures, you must find a unique mobile Ecommerce solution. You can conduct research, get in touch with companies that offer these services, and invest on different technologies to enhance the experience of your customers.

B2B Ecommerce Marketing: 6 Strategies for Success

When it comes to promoting a B2B business, the entrepreneurs are not as enthusiastic B2C business owners. They don’t make the most out of marketing and other tactics to enhance their market reach and often tend to underplay.

Also, owning an ecommerce store is not easy. You need to target the audience, indulge into product marketing, conduct SEO and do a lot more. During such times, it might get perplexing as to which tactics to choose for promoting your B2B ecommerce business. To help you get over your problems, we are here with some highly effective tactics that will help you to lessen the bounce rates and boost your sales. Take a look at them.

Provide an easy access to your product catalog

“If you’ve got it, flaunt it.” All the B2B business owners must remember this adage. You might want to restrict the shopping cart access for security purposes and keep it limited the registered customers so that they go through your sales team. But it is advisable to keep an open access to it so that the information can be looked into and shared by your potential customers to others. When your catalog is open to both general visitors and registered users, it will also enhance the ranking of your website on Google Search Engine.

In case your business is not meant for all the visitors, you can hide the Add to Cart button so that single purchases can’t be made on your wholesale website. Also, open catalog will make the work easy for your sales and marketing team as they will not have to spend a lot of time giving prolonged product explanations to customers.

Make bulk ordering simple

It is very important to optimize the ordering process on your B2B ecommerce store. The lesser the difficulty in checking out, the lesser are the number of cart abandonments. When it comes to bulk ordering, nobody likes to add product to the cart as many times as the number of products. In order to help your customers get over these ordering concerns, integrate a quotation manager extension to your ecommerce store.

With the help of this extension, users can search for the product, enter the quantity of products needed and add it to the cart. This way, your customers will not have to spend a lot of time in placing their order and you will also be able to boost your sales.

Provide better search options

Gone are the days when the access to products was dependent on a simple search bar. Over the years, search functionalities have become smarter and intelligent autofills, spelling corrections and suggestions have become some of the most common features.

Invest into an advanced search tool that helps customers to surf for products based on name, features, colour, SKU etc and also suggests products based on their purchase history. Analysis of searched information will also help you to conduct an effective SEO process.

Offer layered navigation

When customers are visiting your website for the first time, they might not be aware about your offerings. This makes it difficult for them to find what they are looking for. By offering layered navigation, wholesalers will be able to filter through your products easily. You will also be able to help them locate the products without the need for them to create a new search.

Inculcating multi select features, flashing latest offers and smart filter options will save the time of your customers spent behind reloading the pages and stopping the number of crashes.

Share useful content

Content still continues to reign as a king. You need to offer content that answers questions of your customers and takes care of their requirements. Take your ecommerce store beyond being just a catalog store and make yourself a valued partner of your customers. Several B2B website owners post product videos, images as well as customer reviews on their websites and it leads them to make better conversions.

Use rich content like CAD files, spec sheets, support documents, product catalogs, part explosion diagrams etc as it adds values for the shoppers. Remember, the more detailed the information, the more assurance it offers to your customers that they are investing into a right product.

Make the checkout process easy

If your checkout process is simple, your conversion rates are sure to get better. Try to a one page checkout process so that your customers do not have to traverse through several pages and provide with different information on each page. This checkout page should include customer, shipping and credit card information all in one place. Also, if you have a single checkout page, the likelihood of your website to crash will decrease.

You can also use extensions to provide discount codes, offers and newsletter subscriptions before they check out. It’s a great way to boost your sales.

Have a responsive ecommerce store

Mobiles have taken over the basic way in which people experience the World Wide Web. Most of the transactions happen on mobile, tablets and other devices these days. And that is why ecommerce experts advice the ecommerce store owners are to build a responsive ecommerce website time and again. Try developing an ecommerce website which doesn’t just look good on desktops and laptops.

You can get in touch with professional ecommerce website developers who use different responsive themes and templates for Magento so that they can provide you with an attractive and user-friendly interface.

On a concluding note

Above mentioned are the most crucial B2B ecommerce tactics that we could think of. But if you want to know more, you can read the case study “The Five Foundational Pillars of B2B Ecommerce” published by Magento.

It is the right time for ecommerce store owners to add layered navigation in their search tools, use responsive website design or adding bulk ordering. Do you have any insights on B2B ecommerce tactics that you would like to share? Feel free to write to us!