Shopify Vs Wix – Which is better for you in 2020?

 

This may come as a surprise, because the Wix store isn’t the first name you’d think of for an online business. But in this in-depth, stamina-filled fight with Shopify, we’ll see if it’s worthy of your consideration. Who knows, the underdog might have a few surprises in store (pun intended).

Wix vs Shopify: What’s the main difference?

Shopify is a dedicated heavyweight in the world of eCommerce, designed to give businesses everything that they need to sell online. More than 600,000 businesses use Shopify globally. On the other hand, Wix is all about drag-and-drop simplicity and easy site building for beginners.

If you’re looking for a website builder that can help you to get started in a hurry, then Wix is likely to be the best option for you. On the other hand, Shopify can handle much larger sales, with access to everything from social media integrations, to dropshipping.

Although both Shopify and Wix have various features designed to help you get started in the wonderful world of website building, Wix is more likely to be the go-to choice if you’re a beginner, while Shopify will help you to expand.

Still not sure? You’re not alone. Choosing the right eCommerce platform can be tough.

That's why I'm going to give you an in-depth comparison of Shopify vs WIX, based on items like features, cost, and ease of use. Keep reading to find out whether Shopify or WIX is right for your online store.

Wix vs Shopify: The Main Features

The battle between Wix and Shopify is all about deciding what kind of store you want to build to rank on Google. While Wix is first and foremost a website builder, like WordPress, Shopify is a dedicated heavyweight in the world of eCommerce.

Basic online store functionality

While both Shopify and WIX have some quality basic features, in terms of selling online, Shopify is the clear leader with incredible store management features and super clean product pages.

Both Wix and Shopify come with a great range of free and paid templates to get you started. They’re also excellent for ease of use, with easy-to-use builders that will help you to get your website launched in no time. However, Shopify is more geared towards helping you sell than Wix.

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Inventory management

WIX is quite clean when it comes to inventory management, but Shopify has it all so nicely organized in one area. Access a product creation page, inventory tab and an area for your gift cards right from the same module.

As you might imagine, Shopify is all about giving you the full package for inventory management. With Shopify, you’ll have everything you need to get customers to your shopping cart, including an inventory solution that allows you to upload multiple or single products, use tools for stock management and more.

Alternatively, Wix is intended for much smaller online stores. This means that everything from the app market, to the inventory management is more limited than what you’d get with Shopify.

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Coupons and discount codes

Discounts and coupon codes are both included without any extra charge from WIX or Shopify. It's tough to distinguish between the two since you can specify which products are available for discounts on each platform and there isn't much work involved for either.

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Quality

In terms of quality, both platforms’ templates are professional in appearance and contemporary in terms of their design. 

As you might expect, the Shopify themes are geared fairly exclusively towards e-commerce, and are arguably more robust for use in that context. 

Wix offers a much greater range of general-purpose templates though — so if your aim is to build a content-driven site, there’s far more on offer from Wix.

I much prefer the way you choose templates in Shopify, however. You can filter templates by a much wider range of criteria, relating to both content and aesthetics. 

For example, you can look for templates which are best suited to small or large product catalogues; filter by visual effects (parallax effects, video backgrounds etc.); filter by layout type (wide, narrow, etc.); and much more.

By contrast, Wix only categorises its templates by industry or business type.

The bottom line on template quality is that if you’re looking for a dedicated e-commerce template, Shopify arguably provides you with stronger templates and a better way to choose one. Wix is the more obvious choice however for general-purpose templates.

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Ease-of-use

Wix provides three interface options for building websites:

• Wix Editor

• Wix ADI 

• Corvid

The ‘Wix Editor’ option allows you to pick a template, create a structure for your site, and then populate it with content. This is probably the best option for most users.

‘Wix ADI’ mode (‘Artificial Design Intelligence’) automatically creates a customizable website for you complete with images, video, and text. This is done by asking you a few questions about what you’re trying to achieve, and then populating your site with publicly-available information about you or your business from the web. How good the content it pulls is a bit of a hit-and-miss affair really, and will depend on the quality and relevance of information Wix finds about you online.

Finally, there’s ‘Wix Corvid,’ which provides access to the platform’s APIs (i.e., some aspects of Wix’s code). Corvid permits the addition of greater functionality to Wix sites, and more control over their design, but you will need development skills to use it.

Regardless of which of the three versions of Wix you use, the process involved with adding or editing content is similar across the board.

Simply put, it’s equivalent in complexity to using Microsoft Word. You just select the copy or content you’d like to edit, and tweak it accordingly. (You get more flexibility however in how you lay out or move content around pages with Wix Editor and Wix Covid).

With Shopify, there’s just one interface — you’ll find that it has a few more (or less) options available depending on the plan you’ve picked, but it behaves consistently regardless.

The main difference between managing content in Wix vs Shopify is that with Wix, you’re working on a front-end interface.

This means that you see your edits on your screen as you make them. You use Wix’s drag-and-drop page builder to create and edit pages — this gives you a lot of flexibility, but it should be said that the tool is fiddly and you can end up having to work quite hard to lay out your page in a coherent manner.

With Shopify, you have to edit content in the back end, and then preview or publish it to see your changes. This means using a fairly simple WYSIWYG editor to add content to your website (again, similar in complexity to using Word). You don’t have anything like the degree of flexibility regarding layout that you’d find in Wix; the flipside however is that the platform feels more solid and easier to use.
Another key difference between working in Wix and Shopify — and as discussed above — is that in Wix you are working with two versions of your site, a desktop one and a mobile one. This gives you greater control over the appearance of both, but can also mean more editing.
Ultimately neither platform presents a massively steep learning curve when it comes to editing a website; some users will prefer the ‘immediacy’ and flexibility of the Wix front-end editor to Shopify’s preview-and-publish approach, but others will appreciate the simplicity of using Shopify.

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Payment gateway options

Over  70 payment gateways are available through Shopify , including PayPal, Stripe, Authorize.net and PayMill. WIX has improved over the years, but it still doesn't quite match up with its 17 payment gateways including PayPal, Stripe, Square, Wirecard, Braintree, and Authorize.Net.

In the battle between Wix vs Shopify, Shopify covers almost all areas with checkout solutions, with more than 100 different payment gateways to choose from. You can even access more advanced Shopify features like Shopify payments, which eliminates transaction fees.
Wix also supports a range of traditional payment options on the backend, including PayPal and Stripe. However it is missing some options compared to Shopify. Additionally, Shopify allows you to set tax rules and shipping rates for each product, while Wix doesn’t offer these features. You also don’t get global shipping payments.

Wix vs Shopify: Costs

WIX:

Shopify:

The bottom line on Wix vs Shopify pricing is this: if you’re hoping to build a ‘general’ website showcasing content rather than products, then Wix is considerably better value: you can get a decent site off the ground for $13 per month. 

You’d have to spend over twice that to do something similar with Shopify — but then again, if you are hoping to build a non-ecommerce site, Shopify is not really the obvious solution for you!

If you are looking at building an e-commerce site, this is also technically cheaper with Wix — its $23 entry-level e-commerce plan works out at $6 per month cheaper than the Shopify equivalent (a not insignificant $72 per year).

And the fact that no transaction fees if you use a third-party payment gateway compares positively with Shopify.

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Dropshipping

Dropshipping is an online retailing approach where you don't keep what you're selling in stock: you take the order, send it to a supplier, and they deliver the goods to your client on your behalf. It’s an attractive (if competitive) method of selling goods online.

Shopify allows you to connect your store to a very large number of dropshipping companies, via its app store (which I discuss later). However, it’s hard to establish which of these dropshipping companies make their goods ethically — the goods on offer in Shopify’s dropshipping apps are often made in the Far East, where working conditions can be very poor. 

Up until recently, you couldn’t dropship with Wix. However, the company recently introduced some integrations with platforms that facilitate it. These are with Modalyst, Spocket, Printful and Printify.

Ultimately, Shopify offers more choice in the dropshipping department, and indeed is the best option I’ve come across for dropshipping in general to date — but It’d be great to see a list of ethical dropshipping companies and/or apps made available on the platform.

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Wix vs Shopify: summary

Overall, Wix is the more obvious choice of the two platforms for anyone wishing to build a ‘general-purpose’ website. Its page layout tools, email marketing, data capture and wider range of templates make it more suitable for those kinds of users. For e-commerce applications, however, Shopify is much stronger.

This is because Shopify’s fully responsive templates, support for AMP on product pages, dropshipping features, multi-currency selling functionality and its wide range of integrations with other key apps make it in my view the more appropriate, professional choice for anyone wishing to build an online store.