You have decided to set up your own dropshipping store and can’t decide which is the best ecommerce platform for you.

WooCommerce or Shopify?

WooCommerce dropshipping vs Shopify dropshipping- in simple words, both are the best ecommerce platforms available on the market.

Each one comes with its own set of strengths and can very possibly be the best solution for your dropshipping business. The best part of both these platforms is that you can start your own store without any help from professional experts such as designers and experts.

There may be many questions running through your mind- Which one is the best for your individual needs? Which is more cheaper? Which looks better? Which is more flexible and easy to work with? Which has more features, Shopify or WooCommerce?

I am going to answer all these questions for you with an in-depth comparison for WooCommerce dropshipping vs Shopify dropshipping. After reading this, you’ll know exactly which one is the best for your dropshipping business.

To make it easy, I will break this WooCommerce dropshipping and Shopify dropshipping into six different components to help you decide the absolute best for you:

1. Pricing and Scalability
2. ​Set Up Time
3. ​Themes
4. Features
5. Ease of Use
6. Help & Support
7. SEO Options

Let’s begin the search for the best ecommerce platform for your dropshipping business now.

WooCommerce dropshipping vs Shopify dropshipping: Pricing & Scalability

WooCommerce works on top of free open-source software called WordPress.

Everybody loves free! You would be surprised to know that a whopping 28% of e-commerce websites are powered by WooCommerce whereas Shopify powers only 8% of e-commerce websites.

Although WooCommerce itself is free, you will still need to pay for hosting. WooCommerce hosting costs $21 a YEAR.

You read that right.

$21 per Year with full control as compared to Shopify’s $29 per Month for the basic plan.

Let’s take a look at this from another angle.

Dropshipping, if done right, can earn you a lot of money without taking much attention and time, leaving room for more hustle. Once you hit gold with dropshipping, what do you do next?

Set up another dropshipping store, of course!

I know people who run 6-10 dropshipping stores simultaneously.

Let’s do the math now.

Here’s an example:

Let us suppose you run 10 dropshipping stores.

Shopify will charge you a fortune of $290/month, which sums up to $3480/year for 10 stores!

WooCommerce hosting will allow you to set up an unlimited number of websites for $21/year which averages out to to be just $2.1/year for every store.

$21/year versus $3480/year, woah!

It is not very hard to decide a winner here. Clearly, WooCommerce drop shipping is way cheaper than Shopify drop shipping.

WooCommerce dropshipping vs Shopify dropshipping: Set up time

Shopify is all about delivering an out-of-the-box solution in the quickest time possible. You just need to sign up and you can set up your own Shopify drop shipping store from scratch in less than 40 minutes.

For a step-by-step guide on how to set up a Shopify store, watch this video by Wholesale Ted – Shopify Tutorial for Beginners.

But if you do not want to go through all the hassle of making a store by yourself and setting up all the extra plugins you will need for your store to run smoothly? You can always buy Shopify dropshipping store and ask for it to be made as per your requirements.

When it comes to WooCommerce, you can set up your WooCommerce store from scratch in straight 1 hour and 10 minutes. Here’s another step-by-step video from Wholesale Ted – How to Create an Ecommerce Store: WordPress Woocommerce Tutorial.

As discussed earlier, you may want to set up your second dropshipping store soon. If you wish to set up more than one store on Shopify, you need to start working on it from scratch again.

Whereas, on WooCommerce, you can duplicate the whole store with this plugin called Duplicator. Everything will be copied from one store to another in a couple of minutes.

Voila! You have a new store in 5 minutes!

Here, again we see that while Shopify store takes 40 minutes, to begin with, creating another store will be as time-consuming as before. Whereas in WooCommerce, you just have to invest your time once and replicate whenever you want another one!

I’d say both of them stood out as winners here- Shopify for straight up less time and WooCommerce for its reusable structure!

WooCommerce dropshipping vs Shopify dropshipping: Themes

For ecommerce websites, the design is everything! Customers just don’t trust those sites that don’t have an aesthetically pleasing design or don’t function as well as they should. Therefore, every website owner wants their web store to look beautiful and have a forward-looking design.

Shopify has just over 100 themes to choose from of which only 10 are free to use. The rest of them start from $100 and go up to $180.

Ouch! That is a bit pricey.

I know how to code and trust me it took me a lot of time to modify the HTML and CSS files. Even after paying $140 for the theme, I was unable to make it look the way I wanted it to look. Shopify themes force you to adhere to their design. You can’t really change the design as per your wish.

You don’t want to fiddle with the code and end up making your store look worse, right?

As with many other aspects of WooCommerce, with designs, the world is your oyster.

In simple words, WooCommerce beats Shopify in the design with hundreds of thousands of themes it has to offer.

The best part? Many of them are free and offer complete customization giving you a complete control over your dropshipping store.

Your website will look amazing with an ultra-modern look even with the free themes. WooCommerce also has a plugin called Visual Composer. It is a drag and drop builder for WooCommerce. You can make your WooCommerce drop shipping store look exactly how you want it to look. You decide everything.

You decide what your store looks like on a computer. You decide how your store looks on a mobile device. You are not bound to anything. You are free. This is the way it should be. Could it get any better?

Yes! The plugin costs only $34!

But that’s not where it all ends. We have lots more to compare and see.

So, let’s keep moving…

WooCommerce dropshipping vs Shopify dropshipping: Features

Talking about features, Shopify has an App Marketplace where you can purchase apps and plugins that make Shopify a feature-rich ecommerce platform.

Shopify has over 1200 Apps. Most of the apps come with a free trial of 15 days, after which you pay a fixed amount every month for the app.

WooCommerce has over 75,000 plugins to choose from. As an open source software, WordPress is renowned for allowing third-party developers to create various extensions and plugins.

WooCommerce taps into that further by offering a myriad of interesting and exciting additions. Whether you want to easily edit aesthetics, sell on Facebook, ramp up email marketing techniques, understand user behavior or quite frankly do anything else, you'll be able to do so with this dynamic ecommerce platform.

Any feature you can think of, WooCommerce has a plugin for it! Shopping cart recovery? Follow-up emails? Affiliate program? You name it! Furthermore, almost all the plugins come with a free version.

The free version would be more than sufficient for of us. Free for lifetime. If you want to buy the premium/pro version, you can buy it for a one-time fee.

Here are a few more features that come in the power-packed WooCommerce dropshipping platform:

• Sell about anything from physical products or digital goods (including software and apps).
• Accept Payments via PayPal and Stripe built-in gateways (also a range of other gateways available for an extra chargeable fee)
• Flexible shipping rates and taxes
• Unlimited number of products and product categories with AliExpress Dropshipping
• Mobile-friendly design and structure
• Complete control over your data
• Works with your existing WordPress theme
• Literally thousands of plugins (extensions) available

WooCommerce has no monthly recurring charges like most Shopify Apps. Shopify comes nowhere close to WooCommerce when it comes to powerful themes and plugins as its backbone.

WooDropship is an extremely powerful WooCommerce drop shipping tool that will help you start your WooCommerce AliExpress dropshipping store with just a few clicks.

WooCommerce dropshipping vs Shopify dropshipping: Ease Of Use

Shopify works on a subscription-based model and offers out-of-the-box features and functionality that are pretty much easy to use even if you’re a beginner. The prices start from $29/month and go up to a whopping $299/month.

That’s a lot!

Coming to WooCommerce, this is where it is again a hands-down winner. Being an open-source platform, WooCommerce is essentially free. Further, it has a very easy and intuitive UI making it highly efficient even for a non-technical person.

The level of ease with WooCommerce can be seen from the fact that as soon as you activate this plugin, it automatically creates Shop, Cart, Payment and other pages for you instantly.

Once you start using it on a daily basis, I am sure you’ll see why it’s loved by millions of people who select it as their ultimate ecommerce solution.

WooCommerce dropshipping vs Shopify dropshipping: Help and Support

Shopify has great customer support. They are available 24*7 over the phone or chat to help you out if you get stuck anywhere.

WooCommerce, on the other hand, offers no official support. This may seem like the only case in which Shopify has the upper hand. However, don’t be too quick to judge! While WooCommerce support isn’t very straightforward, WooCommerce has an equally good or better support.

First and foremost, WooCommerce is an open-source and free WordPress plugin. It means that you can get the support from WordPress forums. Also, there are thousands of developers out there helping out people with their problems on various official and unofficial forums as well.

A noteworthy thing to learn is that WooCommerce team lets everyone create a free user account over WooCommerce and get any help they need. There are tons of blogs and vlogs that cover WooCommerce as well.

In a nutshell, WooCommerce is so popular that if you have a problem, there is a pretty good chance that other people have faced the same problem before you and have found a solution already!

Just Google it, and you will find the solution to your problem in the top links.

WooCommerce dropshipping vs Shopify dropshipping: SEO Help

SEO is where the things get real. For people who don’t know anything about SEO, please learn about SEO as it is a vital component for e-commerce success.

No matter how good your storefront looks, no matter how reasonable your prices are, no matter how good your product is, if you can’t get to your potential customers, you are finished.

Generating organic traffic should be on top of your priority list. If you have ever done SEO before, you know what it takes to get ranked at Google and the huge amount of traffic and sales it generates. Facebook ads will do the trick, but for long-term success, SEO optimization is a must!

No wonder why 95% of Shopify stores shut down in a month from their launch!

WooCommerce is built on top of WordPress. WordPress is a content creation platform used by bloggers around the world, and it is renowned by SEO experts as one of the most reliable options available.

WordPress is much more SEO friendly than Shopify. It is easy to add and edit content as well as meta information to ensure that your pages have a high chance of ranking for specific keywords.

WordPress plugins like Yoast SEO can help you make your WordPress site highly SEO optimized, and let you be in full control of nitty-gritty SEO details.

Further, WooCommerce takes advantage of what's already there in WordPress, or what's available through third-party plugins like the previously mentioned Yoast SEO, or the WooCommerce-specific version of the Yoast plugin.

However, this does not mean that you will suffer from SEO point of view with Shopify. It is just that WooCommerce is much better at SEO than Shopify since WooCommerce gives you more SEO-specific options overall, purely because of the fact that it's built on top of WordPress.

WooCommerce dropshipping vs Shopify dropshipping: A quick round up

Just to make things a tad bit easier and faster to grasp, let’s take a closer look at the essential comparison of Shopify vs WooCommerce.

WooCommerce Dropshipping

Shopify Dropshipping

A free WordPress plugin and fully customizable eCommerce platform.

Subscription-based tool starting from $29/month.

Being open source, you can modify your store freely without any limitations.

You can only customize it to the extent that Shopify allows.

You are in complete control of your website data.

Shopify controls your site data.

Hundreds and thousands of themes and designs available. (Many are free!)

100 store designs available. (only 10 are free)

Forum support, ticket support and many blogs online.

Real-time email, chat and phone support.

Based on WordPress, it is SEO optimized and has many additional plugins like Yoast SEO

Limited SEO support.

Over 75,000 plugins and extensions for creating a feature-rich and dynamic web store. (Many come with a free version)

Over 1200 apps which become paid after a free trial.

Highly scalable with reusable features and components.

Another dropshipping store has to be started from scratch.

Another dropshipping store has to be started from scratch.

Monthly payment as per selected plan.

Who is winner

Shopify is one of the easiest ways to start your online store. You can get your own store with just a few clicks. So, if you just want to spin up an online store as quick as possible, go for Shopify.

However, for a successful dropshipping store I’d have to go for WooCommerce.

WooCommerce is pretty old and experienced in the game of e-commerce. Being an open-source project, it always gets the best of technology from the best developers in the market dedicated to improving it one step further.

Further, WooCommerce dropshipping gives you the huge benefit of SEO which is essential for long-term success.

I would choose WooCommerce for AliExpress dropshipping over Shopify any given day for its better SEO capabilities, being more pocket-friendly than Shopify, having thousands of free plugins and themes, and the most important part, its customizability.

Don’t wait anymore!

Now, that you’ve got your answers, I am pretty sure you know what’d work best for your dropshipping store.

Are you looking to start your dropshipping business right away?