When it comes to eCommerce website development, there are numerous tech slacks/platforms to choose from, out of which, WooCommerce and Shopify are the two big names now. Let’s get a brief understanding of what WooCommerce is and then draw out a few pros and cons to it to help you decide whether it’s right for you to continue using it in 2022 or not.

WooCommerce is by far the most popular eCommerce platform available today. It's easy for newcomers to pick up and use, doesn't break the bank, and offers a wide range of customization options. Well, that’s what most YouTube videos & blog writers say. However, in practice, it's not entirely true. Most people struggle, and even if you manage to build an eCommerce website using WooCommerce on your own - chances are it will be flawed, time-consuming, and a distraction from other aspects of your business.

The benefits & drawbacks of WooCommerce.

Advantages of WooCommerce -

• The plugin is entirely free for any WordPress site to use and you can easily turn your WordPress website into an eCommerce store just by installing WooCommerce.
• Supports almost all types of payment gateways, at least the famous ones.
• Because it's open-source, you can change the code and customize it however you want to, considering you already know PHP.
• There are hundreds of free and paid extensions that you can use to advance the functionality of your existing online store.

Disadvantages of WooCommerce -

• Free does not necessarily mean without cost. In some cases, payment is still required (e.g domain, hosting, email service provider, etc).
• To get the most out of your eCommerce business, you may need the assistance of a developer or designer if you are not familiar with HTML, CSS, and some Javascript.
• Adding essential capabilities to WooCommerce necessitates the use of third-party plugins, which increases website complexity and decreases loading speed.
• WordPress's interface isn't comprehensive, and there's still room for growth in areas like financial management.
• The product management feature is inferior to those of its rivals.

Now that you know the pros and cons (or if you already knew them), should you stick with WooCommerce or switch to something else? In simple words, WooCommerce is the best choice if you are just starting out and don't have a lot of money to spend on an eCommerce site right now.

BigCommerce and Shopify, on the other hand, are your best bets if you need to scale up your existing website's speed or require a better platform that is easy to operate, delivers a fantastic user experience, and has top-notch security.

So BigCommerce or Shopify?

When compared to Shopify, which charges you every time someone buys from your site if you don't use "Shopify Payments," BigCommerce offers more plan flexibility, more built-in features, the ability to handle hundreds of product variations, and support for more payment gateways - all without charging you recurring transaction fees. BigCommerce gives you more control over your site's SEO than Shopify provides by letting you modify your URL structure and access the robots.exe file (which instructs search engines like Google on how to crawl and index your site).

Shopify, on the other hand, is simple to administer and offers a wide variety of adaptable capabilities, in contrast to BigCommerce. It's also worth noting that Shopify provides a wider selection of high-quality free themes than BigCommerce does, with only 5. In terms of customer satisfaction, Shopify outperforms BigCommerce, but store owners will ultimately decide which platform is best for them based on a variety of need-specific factors.

The easiest way to determine which platform is right for your needs is to schedule a free meeting with our creative web development company so that we can talk about your goals in detail.