Let's Talk
It is evident that e-commerce has become a necessity in business today as many companies opt for online sales. It is pivotal to select the right e-commerce platform to organize and manage an ideal online shop. Weebly and Shopify are among the best e-commerce website builders, so it becomes challenging for companies to determine which is most effective for their operations. The ultimate guide to Weebly vs. Shopify includes an overview of key differences, benefits, drawbacks, pricing models, and other nuances that can help you define the e-commerce platform to choose.
Launched in 2007, Weebly is one of the most straightforward drag-and-drop website builders in the market. While Weebly was initially just a site builder, now they have advanced e-commerce solutions in addition to Weebly Commerce.
Some key things to know:
Shopify was launched in 2006 and has grown to be used by over a million businesses because of its functionality in running an e-business. Some key things to know:
Another unique aspect is the convenient site-building tool that allows for dragging objects on the site’s surface, making Weebly stand out from other similar services. It is straightforward to create a website with any level of technical skill, and one can achieve a professional appearance in a few minutes. The most simple operations like inserting new pages, changing the overall appearance of the site, working with text and picture boxes, videos, and much more can be done with the help of a mouse and just one click. It recommends you use the correct title, meta tags description, title attributes, alt tags, etc. The editor allows the mobile preview from the editor and ensures that your website will look good on any device. Developer tools are more customizable if you have some background in HTML and CSS.
This is not as easy as Weebly in terms of ease of use for beginners. Regarding the backend admin area, Shopify is quite intuitive. Still, the setup and design of your shopfront are a bit more challenging. If you change themes and templates, it is desirable to have at least the HTML/CSS knowledge. The third con about Shopify is that it employs a programming language known as Liquid, which is time-consuming to learn. However, with a variety of responsive themes, documentation, and a community forum, Shopify offers a helping hand and makes sure that you can create high-converting professional e-commerce stores even if you are not a programmer or a coder.
Verdict: Weebly is designed for users who do not have any coding experience, while Shopify can be used by users with at least basic coding knowledge.
As for the design, Weebly has more than 500 templates in over 40 categories. All the themes are new, responsive, and customizable using the graphical editor available on the website. You have some degree of control over the content formats that you can use. It is possible to change the positions of the items on the page in a short time. However, some sections, such as headers, footers, and sidebars, can only be coded in developer mode. This gives fewer options of customization as compared to Shopify. Another aspect that Weebly has over Shopify is that Weebly’s themes are also less flashy and complex than the beautiful designs that Shopify provides. Nevertheless, even if the customization is limited, it is possible to create quite aesthetically pleasing e-stores for internet-based selling.
Shopify has more design choices, over 70 categories, and hundreds of themes. They arrive ready-made for beauty, fashion, electronics, jewelry, and many other categories. Even more uniqueness can be achieved by swapping the sections between the themes. Shopify themes and their design can be tweaked in almost every aspect, and most can be done without coding. Power users can also adjust HTML/CSS/JavaScript to make further adjustments to the look of the Blog. It also allows you to import themes from other sources, unlike the case with Weebly, which provides you with the themes it has developed. In conclusion, Shopify offers more design options to create conversion-focused stores.
Verdict: Shopify is much more designed and provides more options to serious eCommerce stores. However, Weebly offers sufficient good-looking themes and customization for simple stores.
Weebly Commerce is the most basic level of selling online, where some of the essential features are available. It lets you build online catalogs, control prices and stock, set tax and shipping rules, launch promotions, etc., and supports payments via Stripe and PayPal. It is important to note that you can manage orders through your Weebly account. Some of the valuable sales reports can help management understand the performance of the products. There are no such features as customer categories, purchase orders, drop shipping, and others in advanced platforms; Weebly also does not have integrated tools for email marketing, affiliate marketing, or accounting.
Shopify has more capabilities that are designed natively for e-commerce than Weebly. Product, order, shipping, and inventory management are far more effective. It supports physical products, digital products, and service-based products. Practicalities such as customer groups with pricing rules, purchase orders, drop shipping, and multi-channel selling enable running complex e-businesses. Seamless integration with email, shipping carriers, accounting, marketing, and POS systems makes the process easier. A robust reporting system generates valuable information. It’s as clear as night and day that Shopify is in a different ballpark regarding heavy-hitting e-commerce features.
Verdict: Shopify is far more equipped for e-commerce if you run a high-traffic online business. Weebly is only suitable for small catalogs and order volumes.
Use of payments: Weebly Commerce connects seamlessly to the Stripe and PayPal gateways to accept payments. If you use these gateways, Weebly does not charge any transaction fee from you as you are using Weebly. You will only be charged the average credit card processing fee of 2. 9% + 30 cents per transaction. But if you want some other gateways for things like recurring billing, etc, then you need a third-party application. These charge monthly and per-sale transaction fees, typically between 1% and 3%.
Shopify Payments is the default payment method that comes with competitive credit card fees at 2. 9% + 30 cents per transaction. However, Shopify also allows you to use more than one hundred third-party payment gateways for more choices. While some gateways, such as Stripe and Braintree, offer free accounts, other third-party integrations come with extra transaction fees of between 0. 5% and 2%. Transaction fees can also be incurred directly by Shopify based on some of the more expensive plans that are offered. You can avoid these, though, by using Shopify Payments.
Verdict: Each of the platforms has its advantages and disadvantages. However, Weebly is cheaper if you are using Stripe or PayPal. Shopify provides more freedom in choosing the payment gateway, but some cost extra money.
As for the SEO capabilities, Weebly Commerce offers integrated tools that assist with site and content promotion. With the help of the page editor, the user is helped to define proper page titles and meta tags and format the content with headings. The themes used in Weebly incorporate clean source code and fast-loading capabilities for better performance. You also have access to XML sitemaps and image alt text for findability. However, there are no such elaborate options, such as custom metadata, URL redirections, etc., and Weebly website’s compatibility with outside SEO tools leaves much to be desired.
While it is not as easy to use as Weebly, Shopify is more capable of SEO features. It comes equipped with features that enhance search from the start, featuring fast servers and mobile-friendly themes. Other traffic-specific metrics assist in fine-tuning your store even more. Adding, deleting, and modifying titles, meta info, and even the alt text does not require much effort. Third-party applications can be utilized to manage custom meta tags, rich snippets, and dynamic content. Another feature that Shopify provides for SEO is the ability to customize the checkout pages, product descriptions, etc., for specific keywords. All in all, Shopify provides advanced SEO tools in terms of enterprise level.
Verdict: However, the SEO capabilities of Shopify are much more robust, but Weebly also has tools to cover the fundamentals of SEO rather adequately.
Weebly App Center offers more than 200 apps enhancing functionality or adding new features like accounting, email marketing, etc. However, Weebly does not allow using third-party applications. For instance, mailchimp which is a popular app is not fully compatible. There is also a difference in support for the apps depending on the Weebly tier plans that are available. As for the app experience, one might feel somewhat limited compared to other e-commerce sites.
Shopify App Store has the most extensive collection of apps, with over 3000 available. It includes some well-integrated tools such as MailChimp, Zapier, Xero, and others for emails, accounting, automation, etc., and both free and paid apps are well-organized in categories. They also allow for the use of APIs and develop a friendly infrastructure to enable the creation of personalized apps for your requirements.
Verdict: Regarding third-party integrations, Shopify has a rich app store that Weebly can only dream of having.
All Weebly plans include blogging features for creating articles, news etc The blog post creation is as simple as creating any average page using the drag and drop feature. Posts contain images and videos, comments, etc Blog can be created from the basic Weebly themes or blog themes. It also has SEO settings for blog posts, which differ from the general ones with WordPress. However, it is essential to note that as opposed to WordPress, there are not many features available. No support for things like categories, tags, author archives etc.
While Weebly has a blogging platform innately built into it, the same cannot be said with Shopify. Currently, you have to create and install a separate blog app like Shopify Blogs for putting blog entries to your store. Other paid apps such as the Gemblo are other blog tools that come with different tools that are similar to word press. But achieving these involves working with custom code as well as working with a two-platform system. As we have mentioned above, Shopify is not as optimized for blogging as Weebly and WordPress, for instance.
Verdict: Weebly also has blogging powers, which are far better integrated right out of the box. Hence, to have quality blog, third party apps are needed on Shopify.
Weebly pricing starts from free and goes up to $38 for the e-commerce plans. The most affordable “Connect” plan, which costs $12 monthly, offers rudimentary e-commerce tools for small shops with little to no sales. Its highest “Business” plan costs $38 per month but can allow up to 500 products and moderate transactions. It also offers sitewide discounts that can be applied to decrease renewal costs to 1 or 2 year terms. In a nut shell, Weebly is a cheap ecommerce solution for small stores.
Shopify is slightly more expensive than Weebly, with its basic plan starting from $29 per month; however, it is worth so much more. Its Shopify mid-tier plan can host unlimited products and sales channels. The higher tiers include more complex and cutting-edge features, including gift cards and professional reports. Shopify also provides a better discount to people who pay for one full year in advance. Transaction fees are limited to some of the costliest plans only. Shopify is a clear winner in terms of e-commerce capabilities, and it’s relatively affordable in general.
Verdict: However, Weebly is cheaper particularly for essential stores. Therefore, Shopify provides exceptional E-commerce value to growing businesses to make higher costs worthy.
Weebly is one of the most uncomplicated website builders that anyone including those with no any technical skills can use to create small online stores that are cheap to produce. Their drag and drop editor and average e-commerce capabilities make it a viable solution for small catalogs, less sales, and ease of use. However, for those requiring more complex functionality for their e-commerce stores or expecting their business to proliferate, Shopify is a better option.
This is true, but Shopify admittedly has a steeper learning curve than most alternatives while providing tools to handle massive product inventories, orders, and operations. In addition, design flexibility, SEO capabilities, app store, and scalable pricing make it the platform of choice for serious e-commerce stores.
Therefore, consider your specific business needs, catalog sizes, in-house technical ability, and the costs when choosing between Weebly and Shopify. Shopify is far and away the best e-commerce platform. Still, Weebly Commerce is good enough for more straightforward online stores.
Get free consultation for your digital product idea to turn it into reality!
India (HQ)Pratap Nagar, Jaipur, Rajasthan
United StatesLos Angeles, United States
CanadaToronto, Ontario, Canada
United KingdomCardiff, Wales, United Kingdom
Copyright ©2012-2024. All Rights Reserved by Primoz Info Tech Pvt. Ltd.
