When it comes to building an amazing online store, the most important thing any business owner can invest in, is the right tools. In today’s digital world, there’s more to making a name for yourself in the crowded marketplace than simply producing the right products or services, you also need a store that captures audience attention and drives new sales.
The good news for today’s would-be entrepreneurs, is that there are a lot of options out there that you can get started with, ranging all the way from BigCommerce, to WordPress. Today, we’re going to be looking at two of the most popular and well-known ecommerce platforms around, Shopify and WordPress.
Both of Shopify and Weebly are designed to simplify the process of building your online store from scratch. They offer exceptional user-friendliness for beginners, allowing you to move beyond issues like lack of code knowledge so that you can drag-and-drop the ideal website to life.
However, Shopify and Weebly also have some major differences between them.
Weebly vs Shopify: An Overview
If you’re looking for a beginner-friendly website builder for your ecommerce store, then both Weebly and Shopify have you covered. Weebly is an ecommerce platform that has earned a reputation over the years for being affordable, user-friendly, and brimming with great features. More importantly, Weebly’s fantastic pricing policy means that it’s affordable for small businesses too.
Weebly comes with access to everything from free templates for your website design, to SEO support, free plan access and product filter searching. Compared to Shopify, Weebly is a tool that definitely puts user-friendliness first.
Alternatively, Shopify is better known as being the ultimate ecommerce website builder, helping your company to stand out with everything from free SSL certificates, to social media integrations and dropshipping solutions too.
Compared to tools like Wix and Weebly, Shopify is one of the biggest ecommerce platform options around, with a host of fantastic customization tools and add-ons designed to take your store to the next level. You can support multiple languages with Shopify, tap into dozens of different payment methods, and even access a host of great email templates for marketing too.
Ultimately, making the decision between Shopify and Weebly comes down to deciding exactly what you want from your eCommerce store. Both tools will give you the basics, like a shopping cart, checkout tools, and options for accepting credit card payments. However, they differ drastically in everything from customer support services, to ease of use.
By the end of this comparison, you’ll be able to pick a winning tool for your ecommerce store between Shopify vs Weebly, looking at everything from transaction fees to payment gateways.
Let’s get started.
Weebly vs Shopify: Pricing
It would be nice to have the option to focus entirely on the features of an ecommerce platform builder when you’re shopping for the right tools. After all, everything from the number of products that you can host, to access to widgets and HTML customization can make a massive difference to how successful your company will be.
However, whether you like it or not, there’s a good chance that pricing is going to play a part in the decision that you make.
Weebly Pricing
To get you started, the Weebly website offers four different pricing options to choose from. It’s worth noting that each of these paid plans come with different tools to help you sell products online. It’s worth noting that you can only sell unlimited products and digital items, as well as creating coupons for your online store by upgrading to one of the higher-tier plans.
Options include a “free” basic-use solution, but you can only access that if you want to launch a website and add your own store functionality later.
If that’s not suitable for you, then you can try:
- Pro: £9 per month
- Business £18 per month
- Business Plus: £28 per month
Obviously, it’s pretty cheap to run an online store with Weebly. The best thing is that if you choose one of the online store packages, you get a free domain name with your purchase, which is worth around $20 and $100 in credit for Google ads to help get you started with your marketing too!
If you choose the Business Plus plan, you also get email marketing built-in, which is a nice extra feature for those of you who want a way to keep in touch with your leads.
Shopify Pricing
On the other hand, if you choose Shopify for your ecommerce platform, then you’ll have three Shopify pricing plans to choose from, including:
- Basic Shopify: $29 per month
- Shopify: $79 per month
- Advanced Shopify: $299 per month
Clearly, there’s a lot more expense to consider with each of the Shopify plans mentioned here. However, the good news is that all of the plans you get come with a comprehensive selection of capabilities to explore. If you choose the Advanced Shopify plan, or the Shopify plan, you can add gift cards to your sale strategy, mess around with the app center, and even play with CSS and CSV technology when building your site.
Advanced Shopify also comes with access to third-party calculated shipping rates, so you can rest assured that you’ll end up with the most accurate results.
For those who want to build an ecommerce site with reliable web hosting, Shopify and Weebly both have a lot of great benefits to offer. However, it’s important to note that although you’re paying a lot more for Shopify, you’re still going to get a lot more functionality.
Weebly is a lot cheaper, but it also provides fewer tools. The choice of which one is right for you will depend on whether you want to look for add-on functionality elsewhere with Weebly or get everything that you need in the same place with Shopify.
It’s also worth noting that Shopify gives you a 14 day free trial so that you can try the software out for yourself before you invest.
Weebly vs Shopify: Sales Features
As mentioned above, there’s a lot more to running a successful online store than finding the cheapest ecommerce platform. You need to make sure that your ecommerce site has everything that you need to succeed in your business plan, from Google analytics, to fantastic checkout experiences.
The good thing about Shopify and Weebly, is that they’re both very easy to use, so you shouldn’t have much trouble getting everything set up.
Of course, if ease of use is what you’re looking for, then Weebly is probably going to be the go-to choice for you.
Weebly Features
Weebly gives you everything you need to maintain and enhance your online store in one place. Since Weebly was purchased by Square in 2018, the tools available for building your online store have improved significantly. Weebly now offers a range of fantastic niche-specific features, ranging from integrated shopping carts, to order and inventory tracking.
With Weebly, you get access to flexible shipping options, inventory management tools, physical and digital good support, coupon codes, filtered product search, and so much more. You can even build your own mobile website too.
There’s an in-built shipping tool that makes it easier for website owners to send products internationally or domestically, with real-time shipping rates dynamically calculated by weight, quantity and address. What’s more, managing your inventory and keeping track of what you sell with things like bulk import and export features is a breeze too.
Perhaps one of the most compelling features of Weebly is the fact that it comes with a host of ways to make navigating your website easier. You can help your visitors find exactly what they need with product search and badges, what’s more, there are other features like:
- Customizable checkout pages with payments accepted via Stripe, PayPal or Square
- Automatic tax calculator and integrated shopping cart
- Customer reviews featured for social proof
- Product search support and product badges
- Coupon and gift-card customization
- End-to-end customer support
- Real-time shipping tool
- Inventory tracking
Weebly’s technology also includes a helpful email marketing feature, which can help you with notifying customers about everything that’s going on in your web store, such as news, events, updates, and special offers. Even the app store for Weebly is constantly evolving, so you can add things like call-out boxes and live chat to your website.
👉 Check out our detailed Weebly review for more info.
Shopify Features
Shopify, on the other hand, also has plenty to offer.
Shopify’s ecommerce platform was designed to give teams everything they need to run an online store with absolutely none of the hassle. With a robust storefront that includes more than 70+ professional themes to choose from, getting started with Shopify is a breeze.
There are countless tools to browse through, including solutions that make it easy to brand and customize your online store, and solutions for editing HTML and CSS. You can rest assured that your website will be mobile commerce ready, with a built-in shopping cart available, so that people can browse through your online store and buy what they need from their mobile.
You can also access your own domain name, or purchase on with Shopify, and tap into a full blogging platform, which you don’t get with Weebly.
Shopify also has its own full web-based website builder with drag-and-drop functionality to make running and designing your store a lot simpler.
Shopify stands out from the crowd due to its wide range of integration options and updates. You can boost your online store performance and functionality however you choose. There’s even the choice to synchronize your Shopify account with Amazon, connect with Google analytics, and browse through a range of other integration options too.
To keep businesses ahead of the curve in the shopping process, Shopify has also introduced an Augmented reality tool, so you can allow your customers to view your products from a variety of different angles.
👉 Other features include:
- Plenty of free themes and professional themes to choose from
- Access to your own domain name
- Work with experts to build your site
- Web-based website builder
- Free SSL certificate for encryption
- Automatic shipping carrier rates
- Accept Visa, Mastercard, and a range of other credit cards
- Over 100 payment gateways
- Flexible shipping rates
- Abandoned cart checkout recovery
- Automatic taxes calculations
- Customer profiles and accounts
- Dropshipping and fulfilment centres
- Email templates and marketing
- SEO optimization
- Google AdWords credits
- Discounts and gift cards
- Product reviews and testimonials
- Social media integrations
- Inventory management
- Import/Export
- Unlimited products
The list goes on. You also get access to everything from unlimited bandwidth for your website hosting, to dashboard analytics, Google analytics, and reports that you can export to share with your team members and shareholders too.
Overall, while Weebly is becoming a lot more impressive when it comes to sales features, it really can’t compete with the massive range of capabilities that Shopify can offer.
One point worth noting is that both Weebly and Shopify also have POS solutions for offline companies too. Shopify has it’s own POS hardware which you can purchase from the Shopify website, while Weebly offers offline solutions through Square.
👉 Check out our detailed Shopify reviews and Shopify pricing guide for more info.
Weebly vs Shopify: Ease of Use and Customization
For any product to be successful in the digital world to be successful, people need to enjoy using it.
The good news is that most people won’t have problems with either Shopify or Weebly. However, as we’ve mentioned before in this comparison, Weebly definitely puts more effort into providing an experience that’s incredibly straightforward.
Weebly Design and Customization
Weebly is all about drag-and-drop functionality for people who have never worked with a line of code in their lives. Weebly allows you to customize everything about your web store, placing elements wherever you choose, with absolute freedom. There’s plenty of choices when it comes to customizing typography and color too, so you can make sure that your website is unique to you.
Professional-looking themes are plentiful on Weebly, with designs that have been created by professional to suit your specific niche. Additionally, because the interface for Weebly is so clear and consistent, you’re not going to feel overwhelmed if you’re starting from scratch.
Of course, Weebly isn’t perfect, there are some problems with the ease of use and customization options. One thing worth noting is that although there are more themes to choose from today than there used to be, you’re still not going to get anywhere near as much choice as you would from a contender like Shopify.
Additionally, the themes are pretty basic, and some people find that they don’t have enough intuition in them for shoppers. Some people can find it difficult to track down information about shipping, or even locate the shopping cart on a Weebly theme, which is obviously a big issue.
Additionally, although Weebly’s website building tools are relatively easy to use, they’re missing things like an “undo” button so you can jump back through your content, and keyboard shortcuts that might otherwise make your life a little easier too.
Shopify Design and Customization
So let’s take a look at Shopify then.
Shopify is very similar to Weebly when it comes to ease of use. You don’t get a drag-and-drop builder with this platform, but you do get clear instructions throughout, so you shouldn’t have too much trouble with building your website.
People love the experience that they get with Shopify, even without drag-and-drop functionality. Setting up and customizing your store is a lot easier, and Shopify also includes a lot of keyboard shortcuts and undo buttons so you can jump backwards through design changes if you need to.
There are dozens of great themes to choose from with Shopify too, which means that you can rest assured that your website isn’t going to look the same as countless other competitors online. Just remember that some of the themes that you’ll have to choose from with Shopify can be quite expensive. However, even if you do choose a premium theme, it will usually be cheaper over-all than having a professional design your website for you.
Although Shopify isn’t actually a dedicated website builder so much as an eCommerce tool, it still has a lot better design options to offer than Weebly. The themes that you can access from Shopify are more modern, with a host of clearly-laid out action buttons and industry-specific features that you can explore too.
Weebly vs Shopify: Ecommerce Support
Okay, so we’ve looked at the basic features of both Shopify and Weebly, and we’ve examined how simple each tool makes it for businesses to launch their own web store.
Now it’s time to think about the ecommerce functionality that you’re going to get.
Weebly eCommerce Features
On the face of it, Weebly is a straightforward platform that helps small companies and solo entrepreneurs to get their websites up and running quickly. It’s nowhere near as comprehensive as Shopify when it comes to selling features, but Weebly still punches well above its weight for what it is.
Fully integrated shopping carts will ensure that you can keep your customers on your store from the moment that they view a product that they want, to the time when they complete a purchase. Additionally, Weebly gives you access to various important tools that make sales easier, including inventory tracking, and coupon access. Unfortunately, there’s no abandoned cart recovery available with Weebly.
One major selling point of Weebly is the fact that you can migrate a store that you’ve already started building onto the Weebly platform with ease by uploading a CSV tool. However, even with this functionality, Weebly still loses out to Shopify when it comes to functionality. Sure, you can integrate your store with Google analytics with Weebly, but the reporting is nowhere near as advanced as what you get from Shopify.
Additionally, unlike with Shopify, there are some major limits on what you can actually do with Weebly overall. It’s only going to be suitable for very small businesses – not companies in the midst of significant growth.
Shopify ecommerce features:
On the other hand, Shopify has always stood out as one of the must fully-featured ecommerce platform son the market, brimming with tools that help you to sell more products every day. Shopify has the functionality to cater to businesses large and small, with endless solutions for functionality, ranging from abandoned cart recovery, to automatic tax calculations.
Shopify also gives you the option to accept payment methods from over 70 different environments, including credit cards and PayPal. You can also accept money in different currencies, which means that you can go far beyond what you can do with Weebly.
Additionally, Shopify definitely beats Weebly when it comes to analytics.
When you can understand your customers, you’re more likely to be able to sell to them. Shopify gives you a level of detail in your reporting that you simply can’t get with a tool like Weebly. That means that it not only gives you what you need to thrive as a bigger store, it helps you to grow too.
Shopify allows you to sell on social media sites like Pinterest and Facebook, and it can even integrate with your Instagram store. Additionally, there’s the option to invest in dropshipping with Shopify too.
Other tools allow you to send discount codes, create your own blog, create multiple staff accounts and so much more – all perfect for driving your bottom line. The only real downside with Shopify when it comes to selling features is that there’s a risk that you might find the number of tools available overwhelming.
👉 Further reading:
- How to Dropship on Shopify – 6 Step Guide to Shopify Dropshipping
- 10 Best Shopify Dropshipping Apps and a Full Tutorial on How to Dropship With Shopify
Weebly vs Shopify: Customer Support
Having amazing customer support means that you can keep your business running smoothly, no matter what. After all, no matter how easy to use a tool might be, there’s always a chance that you’re going to need a little bit of extra assistance from time to time.
Weebly is a little limited when it comes to customer support, particularly when you compare it to Shopify. You’ll need one of the higher-level accounts with Weebly just so that you can speak to an assistant on the phone. Additionally, you’re going to struggle to get quick responses to your questions. While Weebly’s support isn’t terrible, it’s just not as comprehensive as what you might expect from some of the major providers on the ecommerce market.
Perhaps the customer support is so limited because Weebly is easy enough to use without any guidance. However, either way, this is a major downside for us.
On the other hand, Shopify’s customer support is a completely different experience. With it, you can get access to everything from Twitter and Live chat, to email and over-the-phone support. Help is available from every plan, even if you’re just on Shopify Basic.
Having this high-tier level of support is incredibly useful if you’re just starting out with selling products online. However, it can be useful to have plenty of customer support no matter where you are in growing your business.
Weebly vs Shopify: Apps
Another area where Shopify really gets ahead of Weebly is with apps and integrations. We mentioned above that apps and integrations is one of the areas where Shopify stands out from all of its competitors. However, it is worth noting that Weebly does have quite a lot to offer for such a small competitor.
The App center for Weebly is more immersive and intuitive than Shopify’s so you can find the service that you need a lot faster. Additionally, with the app center, you can expand your site with just the click of a button. Since all the apps are already integrated, you don’t need to play with code to get them onto your site.
Some of the apps available from Weebly are premium, which means that you need to pay for them, but you can usually find trial periods to get you started.
Of course, even with Weebly’s improvement in the app world, Shopify’s app store still stands out as one of the best in the business. You can choose what you need to expand your store functionality from thousands of apps, which cover everything from social media integration to taxes and accounting.
The great thing about Shopify’s apps is that they don’t just let you add new features to your store, they also help you with automating things like following up with customers after they abandon a cart. Some of the apps available on Shopify are free, and others aren’t, we’d recommend doing your research to make sure that you’re investing in the tools that are best for you.
Shopify vs Weebly: Which is Better
With fantastic third-party apps and a host of built-in tools to examine, you really can’t beat Shopify when it comes to finding a solution that will help you to grow your online store. From the incredible Shopify theme range, to the selection of customization options for your web design, Shopify makes it easy to design a store that’s perfect for you. You can also go above and beyond with your website, designing a custom domain with money back guarantee options on your products.
Shopify doesn’t force you to opt for a pro plan if you want excellent customer support and guidance either, you get the support that you need no matter what. Additionally, although the pricing plans aren’t as cheap as they are with Weebly, they’re very reasonable when you consider the amount of functionality that you’re actually getting.
Shopify is the go-to ecommerce website builder for any company looking to scale and evolve at a rapid pace. However, Weebly could be the better option for very small businesses. If you’re only a one-man band, then Weebly should be able to give you the functionality you need without breaking your budget. The Weebly experience is also very easy to use, so you don’t have to worry about asking for professional help very often too.
Shopify might be a superior ecommerce platform overall, but it can’t compete with Weebly when it comes to low pricing options for companies that don’t want to spend a lot of cash on getting started with their online store.
Which platform will you be using? Let us know in the comments below!
The post Weebly vs Shopify: What You Need to Know (Mar 2020) appeared first on Ecommerce Platforms.
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