Both Shopify and Wix are two of the highest-rated website building tools and ecommerce platforms available today.
They both make it simple to design a store, sell across multiple channels, and even promote your brand, but which is really best?
After hours of testing, exploring, and experimenting, I think Shopify does come out on top – but it’s a close call. Read on for a comprehensive overview of how the two platforms compare.
Quick Verdict: My Bottom Line
If all you want to do is build a simple website and maybe sell some products and services on the site, Wix is probably the better choice. It offers a greater range of content creation tools, and cheaper plans. However, if you want to build a professional, scalable online store, Shopify is the winner.
The ecommerce platform offers better sales functionality, more advanced features for omnichannel selling, and access to a host of integrations. It’s also considerably better than Wix for multi-currency selling, dropshipping, and point of sale features.
BigCommerce vs Shopify: Key Takeaways
- Wix offers slightly cheaper plans than Shopify, but Shopify may offer better value for money if you’re in search of robust sales tools.
- Shopify is the better ecommerce platform overall, with inventory management, tax calculation, a world-leading checkout and integrated payment processing.
- Wix offers more templates, and a slightly more straightforward website builder than Shopify, although Shopify does give you some flexibility in terms of code.
- Shopify has a more flexible ecosystem, with a stronger app market, and options for headless commerce on higher plans.
- Wix has more content creation tools that will help you to promote your website, although you can boost your marketing capabilities with Shopify apps
Feature | Shopify | Wix |
Ease of Use | User-friendly, but can be complex for beginners | Very intuitive, suitable for beginners |
Website Design | Professional, many industry-specific themes | Highly customizable, over 500 templates |
E-commerce Features | Robust e-commerce capabilities, advanced tools | Good for small stores, basic e-commerce tools |
Pricing | Starts at $29/month, additional costs for add-ons | Free plan available, premium plans from $14/month |
Payment Options | Shopify Payments, integrates with many gateways | Wix Payments, integrates with PayPal and other options |
SEO | Strong SEO tools and integrations | Good SEO tools, but not as robust as Shopify |
App Market | Extensive app store with many third-party apps | Decent app market, fewer third-party options |
Support | 24/7 support via phone, email, live chat | 24/7 support, phone, email, and live chat |
Scalability | Highly scalable, suitable for large businesses | Best for small to medium-sized businesses |
Blogging | Built-in blogging platform | Good blogging capabilities, easy to use |
Multilingual Support | Multilingual capabilities, requires apps for full support | Multilingual support, built-in and easy to set up |
Mobile Optimization | Fully mobile optimized with dedicated mobile app | Mobile optimized, no dedicated mobile app for store management |
Pricing and Costs Comparison
Value for money is one of the first things I consider when conducting any review. Here, Wix does have a slight edge, as its pricing options range from $16 to $159 per month (when billed annually). If you choose an annual package from Shopify, you’ll pay between $29 and $299 per month.
Wix also offers a free plan, which comes with ads and limited storage, whereas Shopify only gives you a three day free trial. Although you can extend your trial for $1 for the first month.
Notably however, you will need to pay at least $27 per month for the Core plan with Wix if you want to access ecommerce features.
Shopify Pricing Plans:
- Shopify Starter: $5 per month (5% transaction fees): Social selling tools with no website builder.
- Basic Shopify: $39 per month(2.9% plus 30 cents transaction fees): All of the core website building tools and one admin account.
- Shopify: $105 per month (2.6% plus 30 cents transaction fees): The features of Basic with additional admin accounts.
- Advanced Shopify: $399 per month (2.4% plus 30 cents transaction fees): The features of Shopify with enhanced support and reporting tools.
- Shopify Plus: Variable pricing starting at $2300 per month: Custom transaction fees, advanced design customizations and integrations.
Wix Pricing Plans
- Light: $16 per month with 2 collaborators and 2GB storage space.
- Core: $27 per month with 5 collaborators, 50GB storage space and analytics.
- Business: $32 per month with 10 collaborators, 100GB of storage space and standard ecommerce features.
- Business Elite: $159 peer month with 15 collaborators, unlimited storage space, and advanced analytics.
- Enterprise: Custom pricing with more advanced multi-site management, custom templates and integrations.
Hidden Fees:
- Transaction fees: With both platforms, companies can avoid transaction fees using the built-in payment processors available (Wix Payments and Shopify Payments), although this doesn’t apply to the Shopify starter plan. Shopify does apply transaction fees for using third party gateways, while Wix does not.
- Custom domain names: If you pay for your Wix plan annually, you’ll get a free custom domain name for your first year. Unfortunately, Shopify doesn’t offer the same bonus, although you can buy a domain name directly from Shopify.
- Apps and Integrations: Both Wix and Shopify allow you to enhance your ecommerce store with integrations, but some of these add-ons can incur an additional fee.
Features and Functionality of Shopify and Wix
Wix and Shopify both offer a range of useful features to ecommerce businesses, from easy-to-use website building templates, to support for various payment options. Wix used to have a significant edge in terms of ease of use and site development, with its AI tools.
However, Shopify has introduced more design flexibility to its platform in recent years, and now has its own AI-powered capabilities, like Shopify Magic.
Let’s take a closer look at the core features for both platforms.
Payment Processing and Payment Gateways
Both Shopify and Wix support a range of payment options, giving you absolute flexibility when it comes to letting customers use their preferred payment methods. However, Shopify does offer a few additional options. You can process more than 100 different payment methods, including popular options like Apple Pay and PayPal.
Plus, you can access competitive credit card rates and one-click payment processing capabilities with Shopify Payments and Shop Pay.
Shopify also introduced a “Buy with Prime” button in 2023, to allow companies to sell directly to Amazon Prime customers and offer free delivery.
Wix supports over 70 payment methods, and has its own payment processing solution, which doesn’t charge you any fees at all, even if you use a third-party payment gateway.
Themes and Design
One thing I love about both Shopify and Wix, is their approach to making web design simple. Wix allows you to customize more than 830 templates without paying anything, and they cover a range of industries and business needs.
Wix’s templates are great, but I would say they’re focused more on “general purpose” website design, rather than ecommerce. You can also start with a completely blank slate in Wix, and design everything from scratch (although it does take a little longer).
Unfortunately, Shopify only offers access to 12 free themes (we reviewed the Shopify free themes here), though there are hundreds of premium themes available, which can give your store extra functionality and boost its appearance. Notably though, the themes are more “ecommerce focused”, with extra capabilities like age verification pages.
Additionally, it’s worth acknowledging that it’s much easier to style and change templates with Shopify. Not only do you get access to all of the CSS and HTML code of your templates, but you can also change the theme you’re using in a couple of clicks.
With Wix, if you want to change templates, you’ll basically have to rebuild your entire website.
Read more:
Apps and Integrations
I think integrations are crucial to building an amazing online store experience for your customers. Fortunately, both Wix and Shopify offer access to app markets with simple integration options. However, there’s a huge difference in how many tools you can access on each platform.
Wix offers around 500+ third-party apps to choose from, while Shopify has more than 8000. The nature of the apps and integrations available are quite different too.
Wix focuses on add-ons that allow you to add features to your site, while Shopify offers more integrations to help connect the tools you use to run and promote your store.
Plus, on Shopify Plus, you’ll have access to exclusive integrations designed specifically for enterprise-level customers. Wix does give you more API access on its Enterprise level plan, but it doesn’t provide any specialized integrations.
Sales and Ecommerce Features
As I mentioned above, Shopify is definitely the better pick if you’re focused on ecommerce. One of my favorite things about Shopify is its approach to omnichannel selling. As well as being able to sell on your own ecommerce website, companies can also sell across social media channels and marketplaces like Amazon.
Wix does support omnichannel selling to a degree, offering access to Amazon and similar marketplaces, but there are far fewer connections available for social media channels, like TikTok.
It’s also worth noting that Shopify does have a cheaper starter plan for small businesses and beginners who just want to sell through messaging apps and social media. If you don’t need to create a polished store with Shopify themes, you can start selling for just $5 per month.
Shopify also offers:
- Better product management: While you can upload products in bulk to both Wix and Shopify, Wix caps the number of products you can import to your store, unlike Shopify. You can also export all of your product data from the platform.
- Product options and variants: Wix places limits on how many products you can sell, while Shopify supports unlimited products. However, Wix does allow you to create up to 6 product options and 1,000 variants for each item you sell.
- Product categorization: Shopify uses AI and automation to make managing product categorization simple. You can use an extensive range of predefined categories and tags to automatically sort through all of your products in minutes.
- Shipping: Shopify offers more shipping features for companies selling physical products. You can access a range of shipping options through Shopify partners, and calculate shipping rates in real-time on some of the higher plans.
Wix vs Shopify: Ease of Use and Customization
I used to think Wix was the easiest platform to use for building an online store. It’s AI-powered solution means you can design an ecommerce website in a couple of minutes. However, now, I think Shopify is actually more user-friendly.
When you start a website with Wix, you’ll be able to choose from a few setup options. You can design your website using a user-friendly template, or leverage the Wix AI builder. This essentially gives you a chatbot that will help you design your store.
When you create an account with Shopify, the platform will ask you a few questions about your company, such as what you want to sell, and whether you’re running a new or established business. After you’re finished with the setup process, you’ll be taken to the Shopify dashboard.
When you’re ready to start customizing your Shopify themes, or optimizing your Wix website, both platforms give you a set of straightforward tools. Wix has a great drag-and-drop editor which is extremely straightforward for beginners.
Shopify, on the other hand, gives you a section-based editor, which is slightly more restrictive, but does make it simpler to add and reorder sections for each page.
Notably, Shopify also recommends adding your products to your site before you edit any templates. This makes a lot of sense, since you’ll want to be able to add products to your website pages as you work on your site. P
lus, you can use Shopify Magic (the AI-powered tool), to quickly generate product descriptions and simplify the process of setting up your store.
Wix vs Shopify: Marketing and SEO
Selling products isn’t the only thing you’ll need to think about when setting up your online store. You also need to be able to promote your website. In terms of built-in features for marketing, Wix definitely has the better selection, with “marketing suites” offered for each paid plan.
Marketing Tools
Every Wix website comes with access to a suite of marketing tools, which become increasingly more advanced the more you’re willing to pay.
The Light Suite, included on the cheapest plan, comes with lead capture forms, automated workflows and more. You’ll also be able to access site chat functionality on more expensive plans.
Shopify doesn’t have as many marketing features available as standard. However, you can create discount codes and gift cards, and leverage integrations with a range of social media channels and email marketing apps.
Both platforms also have their own email marketing tools, and abandoned cart recovery options. With Wix, you can send newsletters to 200 subscribers a month for free, however, you’ll need to pay if you want to expand your service. With Shopify, you can send up to 10,000 emails per month for free.
Notably, both email marketing solutions are pretty basic compared to the tools you’ll get from advanced solutions like GetResponse or MailChimp.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Another thing both Wix and Shopify do quite well from a marketing perspective, is handle the technical side of your SEO. You can tweak page titles, headers, and meta descriptions on both solutions. Wix also offers a personalized SEO checklist, which I think is great, and an AI meta tag creator for premium plan owners.
However, Shopify outperforms Wix by ensuring that all of its website templates are fully responsive. Some of Wix’s templates aren’t quite as responsive, which could make it harder for you to stand out on the search engine results pages.
You can also use AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) with Shopify product pages, although you’ll need to pay for an app to access this functionality. Shopify even automatically creates 301 redirects for you, whereas you have to create them manually on Wix.
Both platforms also offer relatively similar blogging capabilities as well as access to RSS feeds so you can share content with your subscribers.
However, I think Wix is a little more impressive here, simply because it allows you to use both categories and tags in your blogs (Shopify only offers tags).
Plus, Wix has an autosave feature which gives you more peace of mind when uploading content.
Notably, with both apps, you will be able to access SEO tools in the form of add-ons and plugins that can help give your ranking a boost.
Dropshipping with Wix vs Shopify
If you’re building an ecommerce site for a dropshipping business, Shopify is definitely the better choice. Shopify allows companies to connect their store to hundreds of different dropshipping apps and print-on-demand platforms.
The platform partners with DSers as its go-to dropshipping solution, but there are dozens of other great options out there. Plus, the Shopify backend can even direct you to dropshipping apps automatically if you need help searching for partners.
Shopify even has its own fulfillment network, which can give you step-by-step support ensuring your products can reach your target audience.
In the past, companies using Wix ecommerce couldn’t access any dropshipping features, however this has begun to change. You can now connect your Wix store with a handful of dropshipping apps, although there aren’t nearly as many to choose from as you’ll get from Shopify.
Additionally, it’s worth noting that all Wix plans (except the Light plan) can integrate with the Modalyst dropshipping app, but the number of products you can access will vary depending on your plan.
Plus, Shopify has it’s own “dropshipping starter guide”, which can walk you through the process of building your store with tutorials and videos.
Wix vs Shopify: POS Solutions
If you’re going to be selling products in-person, then once again, I’d recommend using Shopify. For years, Shopify has made POS technology a key feature of its platform, offering access to a hardware store, detailed reporting, inventory management, and software.
The basic “Shopify POS Light” solution is built into every plan (except the Starter plan), so you don’t need to pay anything extra to access these features.
Plus, you can choose to upgrade to Shopify POS Pro for $89 per month, to access a more robust range of in-person selling tools.
Until recently, the only way to use a POS with Wix was to leverage an integration with Square, SumUp, or a similar solution. However, Wix has now launched its own “Wix Point of Sale”, which includes a similar feature set to Shopify POS Light.
However, unlike Shopify’s solution, Wix POS is only available in Canada and the US, and there aren’t as many hardware options to choose from. What’s more, you can only use Wix certified hardware with your POS software, as there’s no support for third-party solutions.
Customer Support and Community
One of the best things about using a SaaS platform like Wix or Shopify instead of a self-hosted solution like WordPress, is that you’ll get more support. Both Wix and Shopify are providers that offer a wide range of customer support options, even on their most basic plan packages.
Both companies support live chat, email, and phone support. Plus, they each come with an extensive range of knowledge base resources for self-service. There are even community forums available for both platforms, so you can pose questions to other store owners.
I do think that Shopify offers slightly more hands-on support, however. For instance, on any Shopify plan, when you’re building your website, you’ll see links to FAQs and pages you can visit for more information about how various features work.
The community experience is also more advanced on Shopify, as it’s a very active environment full of people sharing tips and advice. Plus, you can choose to hire certified Shopify experts to help you optimize free templates, customize your ecommerce site or storefront, or help with SEO.
Wix vs Shopify: Final Thoughts
Overall, both Shopify and Wix are excellent platforms. However, in my opinion, Shopify definitely offers better ecommerce functionality, more tools for selling, and more scalability for business leaders. Plus, it helps to know that you can integrate your site with a host of different solutions using the Shopify app store.
While I love the Wix editor for its ease of use, and the range of marketing features you get with each of the ecommerce plans, I do think this platform has more limitations. It supports fewer sales channels and payment processing options, and offers limited tools to optimize your conversions.
Plus, it’s a little frustrating that you can’t just switch themes with Wix without having to rebuild your entire site. With all that in mind, I’d say Shopify is the best platform for ecommerce, while Wix is a good option if you’re looking to build a basic website (and sell a little on the side).
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
While you can build a great website with Wix, Shopify is definitely the better option for ecommerce. You’ll have more omnichannel selling tools inventory management solutions, and access to an advanced point of sale system, dropshipping apps, and analytics.
You can definitely run an ecommerce store through Wix, but you won’t have as much functionality as you’ll get from Shopify. I’d recommend Wix more for smaller companies that are selling a few products on the side, rather than fully-fledged online sellers.
Shopify is great for small businesses who want a beginner-friendly platform, with a range of excellent tools. All of the capabilities on the platform are easy to master, and you’ll have no trouble scaling your company as your sales begin to grow.