If you have products to sell, you could be missing out if you don’t have an online shop. There’s an increasing desire among customers to be able to buy something from the comfort of their homes and if you’re not offering that as an option, they may well go to a competitor.
There are various design solutions for creating your online store, but we tend to focus on WooCommerce and Shopify as there’s not much that can’t be achieved with either.
WOOCOMMERCE
This is ideal for small to medium-sized businesses. It’s essentially a WordPress plugin, so if you’ve got a WordPress website, we can easily add WooCommerce to get your shop up and running in no time.
It’s flexible, functional and professional and can be customised to your specifications – regardless of what you’re selling.
There are dozens of themes to choose from for a style suited to your business and this is backed up by intuitive analytics with all the stats you need, as well as features such as stock management, shipping options and discounts all readily available.
It also grows with your business, so if you need a bigger store or more functions, you can get apps and extensions for the job
SHOPIFY
Shopify is a web application that lets you create your own online store. It provides you with a wide range of ‘themes’ that can be customized to meet your own branding requirements, and allows you to sell either physical or digital products.
You build and manage your Shopify store in a web browser — so, as long as you have access to the Internet, you can run a Shopify business from any location.
Shopify's business model is to give you the key things you need to build and market an online store ‘out of the box’: templates, a payment processor, a blog and even email marketing tools are included on most Shopify plans.That said, you can customize a Shopify store more extensively through the addition of apps or using custom code.
Like Woocommerce, Shopify has analytics and reports built in that can give you the means to review your store's recent activity, get insight into your visitors, analyze your online store speed, and analyze your store's transactions.
The main difference between Shopify and Woocommerce is that you don’t own a copy of Shopify, but instead pay a monthly fee to use it.
