Top Shopify Alternatives to Consider
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E-commerce has grown and changed over time to become the most well-known, favored, and widely utilized method of purchasing and selling items.
To perform online marketing and sales activities and control logistics and fulfillment, most businesses with an e-commerce presence use an e-commerce shop or an e-commerce platform. An e-commerce platform is required to administer and personalize an e-commerce store for it to be successful. The majority of individuals utilize Shopify as their e-commerce platform of choice.
What is Shopify?
Top Shopify Alternatives
- WooCommerce
- Ecwid
- Pixpa
- Shift4Shop
- Sellfy
- PinnacleCart
- BigCommerce
- Wix
- Magento
- Square Online
- Squarespace
Step-By-Step Guide for Beginners to Setting up a Shopify Store
What is Shopify?
Shopify Inc., a Canadian worldwide e-commerce platform for online businesses and retail point-of-sale systems, was launched in 2006. The Shopify platform provides several services to online shops, including payment processing, marketing, shipping, and customer involvement.
To try Shopify for yourself, you may join up for a free trial. During the trial period, you can create your online store, try free Shopify apps, and even make a sale. You can select from three different plans depending on your needs. For fledgling e-commerce businesses with occasional in-person sales, the basic plan is Rs 1,994/month, Shopify costs Rs 7,447/month for expanding businesses selling online consistently, and Advanced Shopify costs Rs 30,164/month for booming businesses that require advanced reporting.
Although Shopify is considered the most easy-to-use platform for small and large e-commerce businesses, some people, like yourself, may be looking for alternatives. Why?
Let's look at some of the drawbacks of Shopify:
- There is no fixed price for Shopify. You have to pay for different marketing apps, transactions, and extra charges after buying a subscription if you don't use Shopify payments.
- Presently only a limited number of free templates are offered by Shopify. You'll have to pay a one-time charge to utilize any other themes other than the free ones.
- If you're encountering technical difficulties, general support may or may not be able to assist you. Instead, you might have to ask your question in a forum and wait for a response from a developer. Only the United States, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Australia have phone numbers for customer support.
- Some retailers may need to ask consumers to upload a file, such as a picture printed on a pillowcase or mug. Shopify will let you collect this information, but you'll have to add some HTML code to your template manually. The second option is to pay for an app to do the work for you, but that isn't ideal.
- Shopify isn't a content management system, it's designed only to sell goods. Shopify is not the best option if you want to include rich material on your sites, such as movies, carousels, and other things, in addition to the products you want to sell.
Ansh Mehrey
Top Shopify Alternatives
Here is a list of the top alternatives to Shopify to consider:
WooCommerce
WooCommerce is an open-source platform (plugin) for turning WordPress blogs and websites into e-commerce stores. You may customize your store to your heart's content using code. WooCommerce is free to install, and the extensions are often inexpensive, allowing you to expand your store's capabilities at a minimal cost. However, you might struggle to construct a highly customized web store you want on WooCommerce unless you have any technical experience. The basic WooCommerce plugin is free to use but add-on features are chargeable.
Ecwid
Ecwid is ideal for people who just wish to add e-commerce functionality to an existing website. It easily links to your existing website to offer more sales and e-commerce functionality. You don't need to start from scratch. No coding knowledge is required to add e-commerce features to your website.
Once you set up your Ecwid store, you can sell not just via your website but also through your social media account and other marketplaces like Amazon. Users can also create, manage, and track advertisements from the Ecwid dashboard.
The free plan costs $0/mo, the Venture plan costs $15/mo (Rs 700/mo), the Business plan costs $35/mo (Rs 1500/mo), and the Unlimited plan costs $99/mo ( Rs4990/mo). You pay even lesser for all the plans when you pay annually.
Pixpa
Pixpa is an easy-to-use, all-in-one website builder platform specially designed keeping in mind the needs of creative professionals and small businesses. Pixpa stands out from other website builders with its focus on simplicity, flexibility, and powerful editing features. It's full-featured ecommerce store builder is powered with all the tools required to run your online business - products and inventory management, discounts, taxes, shipping, abandoned carts, and easy order processing.
E-commerce galleries enable photographers and creatives to sell prints or digital downloads of their work through their websites. Print orders can be auto-fulfilled through integration with WHCC photo labs. Client galleries enable photographers to shift to a digital workflow and make it easy for clients to view, proof, purchase and download images.
With a host of built-in tools such as SEO Manager, Marketing Pop-Ups, Announcement Bar, and much more, you don't need any extra plugins to start growing your traffic and converting more leads.
Pixpa offers 24/7 fast and proactive customer support through live chat and email. There is also a comprehensive help centre with guides and step-by-step tutorials.
Pixpa Pricing
Pixpa’s all-inclusive pricing plans range from $5 to $25 monthly. Discounted annual and 2-yearly options are also available. All plans offer generous resources, unlimited bandwidth, SSL certificates and 24/7 support.
Shift4Shop
Shift4Shop has been providing SEO-focused e-commerce software since 1997. Shift4Shop's e-commerce platform is free to use monthly. There are over 100 online payment methods, including international processors. Furthermore, because Shift4 specializes in payment processing, they may provide you with significantly lower credit card processing rates than Shopify.
Shift4Shop may be a better fit for you than Shopify if you're an SEO nerd who depends heavily on organic search.
Shift4Shop's basic plan comes at $29/month, the Plus Store Plan comes at $79/month and the Pro-store plan comes at $229/month. All the plans come with features like Domain registration, secure web hosting, a built-in blog, API Access, a shopping cart, and more than 50 mobile-ready themes among many additional features.
Sellfy
Sellfy is a customizable store builder for companies that sell digital, physical, or subscription items. With an easy-to-use UI and various connections, Sellfy is one of the best Shopify options for selling digital products. Users can either build a store on Sellfy or integrate Sellfy into an existing website. Sellfy comes with amazing features like the availability of custom domains, third-party integrations, store customization, and sales analytics options.
There is no free plan, but there is a 14-day trial. After that, the Starter plan costs $22/mo, the Business plan costs $59/mo, and the Premium plan costs $119/mo. On the negative, customization abilities are limited.
PinnacleCart
PinnacleCart, created in 2003, is a shopping cart solution for small to mid-sized businesses with a strong marketing focus. You can choose to have PinnacleCart host your website or manage it yourself. As your traffic grows, you'll either have to pay more or switch to a more costly plan with unlimited capacity. PinnacleCart offers just 12 themes, unlike Shopify, which has a large number of them.
You can get a 14-day free trial, and after that, you can either buy the Standard subscription at $79.95/mo or the Advanced subscription at $199.95/mo. If you have a large business, then you can buy an Enterprise subscription by calling them. The Free and Standard plan offers features like up to 5 admin accounts, unlimited product categories, and customer service via live chat. The Advanced and Enterprise accounts include features like Customer Support via Phone, product filters, recurring billing options, split shipping, blog options, and over 30 payment options.
Sushree Sangeeta Behera
BigCommerce
BigCommerce has been one of Shopify's primary competitors since it was created to assist massive, fast-growing businesses reach their full potential. BigCommerce boasts the most built-in functionality of any e-commerce platform, so you won't have to rely on applications as Shopify does. There are over 55 payment channels available, with no additional transaction fees. Around 85% of difficulties are resolved on the first call, and support is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. BigCommerce offers outstanding SEO and multi-channel selling capabilities, but some users may find it a bit less user-friendly than Shopify.
Despite having many premium themes, BigCommerce only provides five free themes compared to Shopify's nine. There is no free plan, but there is a 14-day trial. After that, the Standard plan costs $29.95/mo, the Plus plan costs $79.95/mo, and the Pro plan costs $299.95/mo.
BigCommerce also offers an enterprise plan for big businesses for which one may get in touch with the BigCommerce Sales team.
Bharath
Wix
Wix is primarily a website builder, but it now offers e-commerce options that start at $20/mo (paid annually), making it a more cost-effective alternative. But it's not the only feature that sets it apart from Shopify's rivals. It also has some fantastic sales features and outperforms Squarespace and BigCommerce in design functionality. Users can either use the drag and drop features to build a website from scratch or just answer some questions, based on which the WIX ADI(Artificial Design Intelligence) designs a website just within a matter of minutes. Wix's open development platform called Velo lets tech-savvy users build advanced web applications. Other than these, Wix comes with many other amazing functionalities.
On the negative side, Wix can't handle larger stores like Shopify, but it's still great for small businesses that prioritize branding.
Magento
In terms of self-hosted solutions, Magento is arguably the most well-known e-commerce platform. It was initially released in 2007, and Adobe purchased Magento in 2018, allowing small businesses to use Magento Commerce and Magento Open Source.
Now named Adobe Commerce, Magento has a worldwide developer community of over 260,000 people that contribute to the platform's development. You gain access to an extensive partner ecosystem for third-party applications and add-ons, and you can customize everything in your business from the backend because it's open-source. Adobe Commerce's pricing details are not available on the site. Interested ones can fill in their details in the given form and get in touch with the Adobe team.
Square Online
Square online is a simple, powerful, and highly customizable tool that allows shop owners to manage their money, employees, and client base from a single screen. The Point of Sale App from Square is completely free. Downloading it is free, and there are no hidden costs. Building a site, selling, and hosting on the Square subdomain, everything is free. Users need to pay just the transaction fee on the orders placed on the site. However one needs to pay for services like a custom domain name and email address. Below are Square Online's pricing plans-
Square also includes several features and subscription services aimed at restaurants and other service-based businesses that aren't available on Shopify. However, customization possibilities are limited in Square.
Squarespace
Squarespace is best recognized as a simple website builder for small company owners, freelancers, and creatives in a variety of industries that require a digital landing pad but not necessarily a fully equipped online store. Squarespace is well-known for its attractive templates. Around 70 attractive, contemporary website themes are available. On the negative side, their tools are limited, especially in terms of SEO.
You may select between two plans: the Personal plan, which costs $16/mo or $12/mo if paid yearly, and the Business plan, which costs $26/mo or $18/mo if paid annually. Personal and Business Plans are suitable for websites, while the basic Commerce plans and Advanced Commerce plans are suitable for online stores. Here are Squarespace's pricing plans-
FAQs
What are the alternatives of Shopify?
Some of the top competitors and alternatives of Shopify are:
- WooCommerce
- Ecwid
- Shift4Shop
- Sellfy
- PinnacleCart
- BigCommerce
- Wix
- Magento
- Square Online
- Squarespace
What is the most successful store on Shopify?
Some of the most successful Shopify stores are:
- Fashion Nova
- Gym Shark
- Allbirds
- MVMT Watches
- Kylie Cosmetics
- ColourPop
- Ruggable
- Raycon
Who is Shopify's biggest competitor?
BigCommerce is considered the biggest competitor of Shopify.
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