For those who own an online business, what ecommerce platform do you use? shopify is attractive because of it's simplicity but WC is too because of low fees. I'm basically wanting to know what's the most cost effective way to open an online business over here, without losing >5% in fees per sale. Thanks all!
What is the expected turnover? You are comparing a SAAS with an opensource plugin system that needs some technical knowledge and could have issues over time. A developer to fix issues is likely going to cost a lot more than 70 per month.
You'll pay for the low cost of running a WC shop in many, many other ways. Just go with Shopify from the start.
You'll pay for the low cost of running a WC shop in many, many other ways. Just go with Shopify from the start.
Can you elaborate on the additional costs of running WooCommerce?
Security is probably the big one - there's constant attacks on WP so you've got to be on the ball with keeping things updated and secure.
You're going to have a monthly job updating WordPress and WC plugins, plus all the other plugins that've been updated. Ideally you'll be running these updates in a staging environment because there's a good chance one of them will break something in its update, and you don't want that happening on your live site. And then you've got to go through and figure out which plugin it was that broke.
Of course you could pay a company to keep on top of this stuff for you, so you can concentrate on doing the stuff you should be doing - but by then you may as well just pay the Shopify fee.
I use WC for the low running cost and it was pretty easy to setup, Wordpress hosting is also cheap. You'll need a payment gateway too which costs. I used Stripe last time only because they don't have a monthly charge (just per transaction) which suited as it was low transaction volume. Choose one that suits the likely transaction model or start with Stripe and move later. Shopify was too expensive for this low volume model.
I've previously used OpenCart and Shopify. If I was setting up again I would probably go with Shopify for ease - but I never had any issues with OpenCart and security (did payments through bank deposit and Paypal checkout) - and you can't beat the price.
Shopify was expensive when you take into account the monthly fee and the transaction charges.
Shopify any day as WC is too hard to manage with security vulnerabilities.
We use Shopify for our small business. I’m okay with the 5% transaction fee but with the business still getting started, and sales being low, it’s the almost $70/month subscription that hurts the most.