When it comes to helping you choose between Shopify or WooCommerce for your eCommerce business the main factor OTHER articles focus almost entirely on is the cost of Shopify vs WooCommerce.
We’re going to get past the “price difference between WooCommerce and Shopify” and into some more of the eCommerce business fundamentals and review how Shopify stacks up against WooCommerce and how Shopify compares with WooCommerce.
Note: This article is being created over a length of time and will be a work in progress whilst the comparisons between WooCommerce and Shopify are being made. If you’re therefore reading this note, this article isn’t complete – and you should subscribe to the blog in the footer for updates.
WooCommerce vs Shopify – How does WooCommerce Compare with Shopify
Shopify vs WooCommerce – PCI DSS Compliance & Credit Card Security
I’ll open by saying that WooCommerce and Shopify are comparable when it comes to PCI Compliance Requirements.
We did an extensive guide on PCI Compliance for WooCommerce and Shopify to help you understand your role in complying with PCI DSS Requirements.
In short, choosing Shopify doesn’t relinquish you of ANY and ALL responsibility for PCI Compliance. Whether it’s Shopify or WooCommerce, you still have business level compliance requirements in the form of a paperwork exercise. If you want to know more, you should check out our ultimate guide to PCI DSS Compliance for eCommerce.
Shopify and WooCommerce: PCI Compliance Compared
| Shopify | WooCommerce |
| PCI DSS Compliance by PCI Questionnaire | PCI DSS Compliance by PCI Questionnaire* |
| Shopify / Payment Gateway Provider such as Stripe handles Credit Card Data | Payment Gateway Provider such as Stripe handles Credit Card Data |
*WooCommerce enables you to access a whole world of customisation IF you desire. If this includes customising the way that credit card data is captured and transmitted to your Payment Gateway provider, you are in essence taking responsibility for PCI Compliance – as you’re handling raw Credit Card data.
However, it’s really easy to modify checkout flows and website user experience (UX) WITHOUT code customisation using Cartflows (our recommendation for Checkout flow design with upsells and cross sells)
WooCommerce vs Shopify – Page Speed
There was a great WP Buffs podcast with a guy from Big Commerce outlining how Shopify isn’t as good for speed in comparison with most other eCommerce platforms, WooCommerce included. If you want the techie detail – have a listen:
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/wpmrr-wordpress-podcast/id1437721489?i=1000441107658
WooCommerce vs Shopify – Facebook Pixel Setup
With both Shopify and WooCommerce you’ll want to setup not only the basic Facebook Pixel, but also configure the eCommerce “standard events”.
When you input your Facebook Pixel ID into Shopify, the Facebook standard events are already catered for. Here’s the Shopify guide explaining this here – and you’ll also want to read the “Customer Tracking Standard Events” section on this help page.
Facebook tracks standard events and has the ability to Automatically create these standard events if and when it detects certain indicators on your site. You can read a bit more about Facebook’s Automatic Events here.
With WooCommerce, you could leave it up to Facebook to apply their Standard Events Automatically (they even mention doing this with WooCommerce on the Facebook help pages).
In reality, you probably actually want to setup not only the Facebook Pixel, but also the Facebook Product Catalog Feed, your Google Pixel, Pinterest Pixel – and conversion events for those platforms too.
For both WooCommerce and Shopify there are various App & Plugin based solutions that help consolidate your Pixel Management, Conversion Event Setup and Product Catalog Feed management.
You can of course take a “developer’s” approach and manually edit code and insert tracking snippets and scripts. The challenges are largely the same for both platforms in this regard.
| Shopify | WooCommerce |
| Facebook Pixel Setup and Conversions integrated into Shopify | Facebook Pixel Setup and Conversions can be* automatically detected by Facebook |
| No additional Apps needed | No additional plugins needed* |
| Easy | Easy* |
*This is easy if you just leave it to Facebook to figure out the standard events on your store.
But we’d recommend looking at your need for Pixel management, conversion event setup and Product Catalog Feed management across all ad accounts and use Pixel Your Site to handle EVERYTHING without you needing to do anything complicated.
Here’s an article I wrote on Ads Pixel, Conversion Event and Product Catalog Management for WooCommerce explaining how Pixel Your Site is hands down the best solution to an easy life as a store owner.
WooCommerce vs Shopify Schema Markup
Coming Soon
More Coming soon
Can I move from Shopify to WooCommerce?
Can I move from WooCommerce to Shopify?
shopify to woocommerce – parent topic
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migrate from shopify to woocommerce
