While all Shopify plans involve fees, Wix offers an entirely free one. Learn the differences between the two.

Last updated 9th November 2024 | By the editorial team

New to e-Commerce? Everybody is setting up shop in the cloud nowadays. However, building an e-store is not an easy feat. In fact, website builders have come a long way from the old code-driven ones. So why Choose Wix eCommerce Over Shopify For Your E-Store?

Today, powerful drag-and-drop web builders can take care of every detail for you. They can even manage the SEO. The two top builders are Wix eCommerce and Shopify. In this post, we’ll compare their e-commerce features and see which is better and easier to use. Read on to learn more.

Wix eCommerce comes with a number of benefits:

Pros

• Very user-friendly interface.
• Over 800+ templates with eye-catching designs.
• Highly customizable, including coding options for developers.
• Cost-effective plans for e-commerce.
• Advanced e-commerce tools, including global shipping payments and abandoned cart emails.
• Unified multichannel selling online, in person and on leading marketplaces, like Amazon and eBay.
• Powerful performance, reliability and security infrastructure that supports scalability.
• Advanced marketing tools and a strong SEO foundation to support eCommerce growth.
• Multilingual sites.
• 24/7 support.

Cons

• Can’t accept payments on the free plan.

Shopify comes with a number of benefits:

Pros

• Built-in e-commerce features, such as Abandoned Cart Recovery.
• Wide range of payment options, including e-wallets such as PayPal and Stripe.
• Live chat support.

Cons

• Complex pricing scheme that can easily go beyond your budget.
• Add-ons, apps, and themes only available to premium tiers.

Wix eCommerce makes building a web store easy and intuitive. Here’s how:

• Let’s face it, being intuitive enough for anyone to use while still offering advanced functionality and customization is at the core of Wix’s business model.
• A drag-and-drop interface, making building your online store an intuitive experience. The only thing you need to do is to click on an element and drag it to where you want it.
• Adding products and creating new categories is quick and seamless.
• The editing interface and dashboard are separate, so you can manage your products even when you’re not in your site.

Shopify comes with a number of benefits:

• Shopify keeps its editing interface and dashboard separate, which allows you to manage your store outside of your editor.

A clean, good design is essential for an online store. It’s the online equivalent of your shop’s storefront. Since almost half of the online shopping is done via smartphone, having responsive images and layouts is critical to the success of the sale.

Wix eCommerce has over 800+ templates—many of which are designed specifically for eCommerce— that cover almost every imaginable industry.

You can take a regular template and quickly edit it to transform it into an online store.

Velo by Wix allows you to customize your site; from web applications to page scrolling.

You can access it by selecting “Dev Mode” in the Wix Editor.

Shopify offers 100 different themes, which are up-to-date and cover a wide range of industries. But, the high price ($180) of some themes can be off-putting for people starting businesses. The themes are easy to edit; just click “Edit HTML/CSS” on the Admin Page.

Now we’re at the core of the issue. Let’s take a deeper look at the differences between these platforms in how you sell your products:

Product Types

Wix eCommerce

• Supports physical, digital, and service products, like clothing, digital downloads, and spa services.
• Requires an add-on app to sell service products.

Shopify

• Supports physical, digital, and service products.
• Requires the 3rd-party integration to sell digital products.

Product presentation

Wix eCommerce

• Built-in product video function.
• Easy to add a zoom feature.
• Customizable check-out page, which allows you to promote your brand.

Shopify

• Supports unlimited items with multiple variants.
• Requires installing apps for features such as zooming and videos.

Inventory Management

Wix eCommerce

• Upload single or multiple products.
• Features built-in visitor analytics and revenue reports.
• You can track orders and manage inventory from desktop or mobile.

Shopify

• Upload single or multiple products.
• Built-in stock management tools.
• Revenue reports.

Abandoned Cart Recovery 

This feature lets you email customers to let them know there are items still in their cart.

Wix eCommerce

• This feature is automatically activated with a paid eCommerce plan. You can customize the email and choose when it’s delivered.

Shopify

• This feature is available on basic Shopify plans including discount code creation.

Wix eCommerce

• Use Wix Ascend, an all-in-one marketing solution right from the site dashboard. While it’s available with separate pricing, you can enjoy many useful features for free, and it centralizes all your marketing campaigns. Wix’s App Market also features popular 3rd-party marketing apps.

Shopify

• Relies on 3rd-party apps for marketing features.

Wix eCommerce

• Supports all major payment options, including digital wallets such as Paypal, Stripe, Square and Apple Pay, as well as buy now, pay later options like Affirm, Afterpay, Klarna, and more.
• No transaction fees on any price plan.
• Wix’s 24/7/365 security protection not only protects your site against cyber attacks, it also provides you and your customers secure checkout and ensures their payment data stays safe.

Shopify

• Covers over 100 different payment methods. However, it doesn’t support Square.
• Charges transaction fees when using gateways other than Shopify Payments.

Shipping

Wix eCommerce

• You can track orders and set tax ranges for each product.
• Supports different shipping options, from free shipping to 3rd-party providers.
• Includes pickup and local delivery options
• Easy to add apps help you manage global shipping payments.

Shopify

• Its shipping process is somewhat complicated, but the platform offers live chat support to help make it easier.
• Shopify allows you to offer free shipping and synchronizing with 3rd-party shipping providers.

Both platforms allow you to:

• Add and edit the headline and text that appears in Google searches.
• Customize the text that comes after your domain, for example, “www.exampledomain.com/comparisonwix-vs-shopify/”.
• Attach alt text to images.
• Support with SEO best practices tips.

In addition to the features mentioned above, Wix eCommerce offers keyword suggestions for both short-tail and long-tail keywords. Wix also adds structured data markups to product pages so that they’re automatically eligible to appear as rich results on the top of search pages. In addition, Wix merchants enjoy automatic Local Business Markup for their stores, enabling Google to return accurate results in local searches.

Both Shopify and Wix have app stores that offer various features to integrate with your website and help with e-commerce.

The Wix App Market features hundreds of powerful web apps to customize and scale your eCommerce business. These include apps like:

• Quickbooks, to manage your finances.
• Envia, Shippo and ShipStation, to get big discounts on shipping labels.
• Kudobuzz, to add customer reviews.
• Modalyst and Printful, for dropshipping and print-on-demand products.
• Klaviyo Integration

Shopify offers e-commerce specific apps such as:

• Customer wishlist.
• Dropshipping.
• Product reviews.
• Currency conversion.

Wix eCommerce

• Features Wix Blog, which lets you create and edit blog posts.
• You can manage comments and share on social media.
• Wix App for mobile allows you to manage your blog on the go.

Shopify

• No built-in analytics.
• No social bookmarking.
• No blog-specific search.

Although Shopify is a known name in e-commerce website builders if you’re looking for a website builder packed with features to build your online store while keeping creative control over your brand and store design, Wix eCommerce is the solution.

Wix eCommerce simply offers more features, combining intuitive editing tools with strong e-commerce features. With Wix’s proven reliability infrastructure, you can also process record traffic, high volume sales and simultaneous transactions with industry-leading 99.98% uptime. It gives you more flexibility, allowing you to scale up as your eCommerce business grows.