 Wix versus Shopify. What is the difference between these two e-commerce website building giants and which one of these platforms is most suitable for your e-commerce business? That is exactly what we are going to be going over in this video. So do not go anywhere. Quick intro and let's go. Welcome back to this video comparison of Wix versus Shopify, the two biggest platforms for hosting your e-commerce store today. Nowadays, you do not have to be a website design professional to create a good looking website. There used to be a time when we would spend so much money to hire freelancers or companies to create a website for our business. But now with big platforms like Wix and Shopify, you too can create your own professionally made online store, even if you have no experience in graphic design, website design or anything of that sort. Everything today is plug and play and very user friendly. That is why we are going to cover Wix and Shopify and see which platform is really the best for you. Let's begin. One second before that, do not forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel to always learn about your next step in your e-commerce business with case studies, drop shipping success stories, interviews, product finding, what items you need to sell, how to tutorials and so much more. Subscribe to our YouTube channel and keep learning. So let's get started. Wix versus Shopify, which is really the best platform of choice. Everything that I'm going over in this video, you'll also have a link to the blog article below so that you can also read, but do stay tuned in this video because I always like to throw in extra bonus content. What is Wix? What is Shopify? They are both an online platform, a software as a service platform that simply allows you to host your online store. This means that you simply want to create your own online store. You want to sell your products on your e-commerce store and you want your website to look good. And that is exactly what Wix and Shopify are here to do, but you do have to have some knowledge in how to get started and what steps to take the right way. For that, if you want to learn how to do it the right way, we have a free Shopify course on our website, simply hover over resources, click on dropshipping courses, and here you will have a free Shopify course where you can learn how to create your own professional Shopify website from A to Z, including product research, audience research, creating your own Facebook ads and building your store from the ground up, including your legal pages and everything that comes with the territory. So enroll for this course. It's absolutely free and I'm sure that you're going to learn more than a thing or two. Now, we do not have a Wix course yet, but if you want to see that, let me know in the comments below and I might just go ahead and create that for you. Now, let's go ahead and see the biggest differences between Wix and Shopify. To do that, we're going to have to go through the pros and cons. But just to give you a quick overview before that, this is what Wix's dashboard looks like after you sign up and while you're creating your first store. So we've got a nice onboarding process and we've got quick links to help us gain more traffic and increase our sales conversions to our stores, including SEO tools to further push our website up in Google ranking, an app market where you can download hundreds of apps to help you cross sell, upsell, send promotions and do so much more on your Wix store, Facebook and Instagram ads, social media posts, promotional videos, an inbox to read your customers messages, email marketing, analytics and reports, a free logo maker, financial tools and more. And this is what Shopify's dashboard looks like. They changed their icon for summer of 2022 while I'm recording this video, but this is the main dashboard and they also have an onboarding process. I just pretty much finished it. This is what their products page looks like. So you can see all of these products that I have on one of my Shopify stores and that's just a brief overview. But in general, everything is right there in front of your face. Everything that you need to do, everything that you need to optimize and simply building your website from the ground up is very, very simple once you learn the steps. And for that, once again, go ahead and enroll in our Shopify course and learn your way up from there. But this is just to give you a quick glance of each one's dashboard. Now let's go over the pros and cons. Starting with Wix, let's go with the pros. So it's a fully customizable platform just like Shopify. It has a very easy to use interface, which is great for beginners just like Shopify. You have no seller limits on Wix, meaning you can import thousands of products on your first day. And this is much better than other selling platforms that we know of like eBay that only allows you to list three to 10 items after you create your first seller account. But here on Wix, you can even import 1000 items on your first day and more on Wix. You also have global audience targeting, meaning you don't only have to target one specific audience in one specific region, you can have all of your products sell to all of the customers worldwide who are willing to buy your product. You also have advanced e-commerce tools like the ones I just listed a minute ago, and it requires a low startup investment. We will get to the pricing section soon. Now let's go over some of the cons. You have no organic traffic, meaning now that your store is up and active and you did your product research and you made your store look really good and you've even got your own brand running there and you've got a nice logo, a nice cover image, you did your product research and everything aligns correctly. But that doesn't mean that anyone knows that your store exists. And that is one of the main issues that we have to face when creating our stores on places like Shopify and Wix. And this means that we'll have to learn how to market our stores and how to get our stores, our products and our brand in front of our target audience. This of course requires a budget so that you can run PPC ads or pay per click ads influencer marketing where you can hire an influencer, influencers of course that have a relevant audience to the product that you are trying to sell. You also have email marketing. You can run your own blog page and get organic traffic and so much more. And if you want to learn about these methods, once again, check out our Shopify course. And if you want to learn the best methods to hire influencers to find and hire them so that they can shout out your store or your products to the right audience that will get to your store and convert. We have an article and a video on influencer marketing platforms. So head over to our YouTube channel at youtube.com slash auto DS and search our videos for influencer marketing platforms or our blog page at auto DS.com slash blog or auto DS.com hover over resources and click on dropshipping blog search for influencers or influencer marketing platforms. Another con from Wix is that we have to pay a monthly subscription fee in order to get to their full features. We're going to get to the pricing section soon. So stay tuned for that. And besides that it requires time and patience to learn just like anything. But the learning curve here is much, much smaller than it used to be. If you would want to host your own online store a few years ago when Shopify and Wix did not even exist. Now let's move over to Shopify pros and cons starting with the pros on Shopify. We've got a wide selection of e-commerce templates. So as you can see right here, here I have my store themes and here I can customize this this theme or I can choose any other theme for my store. Some themes are absolutely free. Some themes come at a cost but they have lots of online store themes that you can use and some are really successful. Some free ones are really successful like the beautify. That is one of Shopify's most popular themes. It's absolutely free to use on your store and it does help you get a professional looking store that can and will convert. Besides that you also have the famous Shopify app store. Now of course Wix also has an app store but Shopify's app store is simply so much bigger and so much better at least at this point while I'm recording this video. They've got thousands and thousands of apps that you can use and they also have customer reviews. Of course it's split into different categories and you can easily add them to your store by simply clicking on the app that you want. Like for example let's go with adding Pinterest. Okay I want to get my products in front of shoppers also on Pinterest and you can do that. You can post from Shopify to Pinterest and check out this wonderful app with almost 5000 positive reviews. All you're gonna have to do is click on add app and it's that simple to get it installed on your Shopify store so here it's telling me to choose an account so I'm gonna go with this one. So after you click on an app simply choose what store you want to add it to and that's pretty much all there is to it. It will get installed on your Shopify store. The process is also easy on Wix but Shopify really has the upper hand here with the amount of apps that they have available to help you gain more sales conversions. Shopify also has 24 hours a day, seven days a week support. It's a good thing to have as a customer. Every time you need help you'll always have someone to talk to and they have a built-in blogging feature which in my opinion is great because you need to have a blog for your store. You need to have a blog for your niche and you need to catch those keywords on Google according to your blog's titles and the value the information that it has inside do not copy and paste other people's blog articles but rather write your own. This way if people are searching for those keywords and you do provide original content on your blog pages then Google will be able to direct organic traffic to your store and that way you don't even have to pay for online marketing. Of course it's a good thing to have a little bit of everything but one of the great things here is that the blog feature is included inside your Shopify store subscription. Now some of the cons on Shopify no organic traffic as we know also from Wix and it requires a budget for marketing same thing of course as Wix and of course costs for a monthly subscription selling fees and apps. So all of these expenses are the same on both platforms the pros and cons are almost the same for both. Now let's move over the pricing plans. Let's start with Wix. Wix has website plans and business e-commerce plans which is right for e-commerce stores because you want to swipe your customers credit cards and you want to be able to have them pay you on your online store. So we're going to stick with business and e-commerce plans and here there are three plans. You've got business basic business unlimited and business VIP. Now if you're just starting off the unlimited or the basic is enough this is the cost for an annual subscription that they charge you one time for the whole year up forward. If you want to go for the monthly plan simply add another five to seven dollars for each plan and that is how much you will be charged. So let's see what we've got under each plan. Secure online payments plans and recurring payments sell on social media channels and sell on marketplaces. Now sell on marketplaces is not available on the basic plan and this is something that I would recommend to do because this way you can have a Shopify store but you can post the same products that you have on your store on other selling channels on other marketplaces and then people can click on your products in those marketplaces and get to your Shopify store. So it's another way to gain traffic to your store and of course more sales. That is why I would go with the business unlimited plan and pay a few more bucks a month. Let's see what else we have here. Custom domain name meaning now I can have my own www.mystorname.com this of course comes with an extra charge on Shopify on wix or anywhere else that you want to have your own custom domain name but if you go for a standard name it should cost around $12 to $20 a year which isn't that much. Free domain for one year so all plans have this remove wix ads so no ads on my store and customer accounts. So your customers can create accounts on your website and that way you'll have their information and you'll also be able to send them email marketing promotion campaigns later on when you have a big email subscriber list. So all of the features that I went over are available for all of the plans except for the selling on marketplaces which isn't available on the basic plan. Let's continue down to the features on promote and grow your site. You're going to get an ad voucher which was mistakenly converted to my local currency. So let's just fix that that should come out to around $450. So you're going to get a $450 voucher to use on ads to use to get people to your store and that is a good thing to have especially in the beginning when you're not sure exactly how much you need to spend and what's actually going to work. So you can test it out a little bit using their voucher and then start to put your money inside start to mix it in start to optimize and grow without testing you're not going to get anywhere and of course you're going to need to test more than one ad and again you have all of the lessons for how to run successful ppc ads on our free Shopify course that is why I mentioned it a few times during this video. Let's see what else we have customized reports is only available for business VIP and this is once your store really starts to scale. So once you already have a business that's running pretty well you have sales every day and you need to have customized reports to understand what's going on in your store get good analytics reports much better than the basic plans then you will move to the business in VIP $59 a month is nothing compared to the size of your store and how much you'll be selling and profiting before you'll even need to move to this plan. So how many video hours can I have on my store you can have for example a 10 hour limit on the unlimited plan. So if you have 10 videos and each one is an hour long which is not likely but that will be your limit. Now you do want to have videos on your online store every product page should come with a product video. This is one of the best ways to get your product in front of your target audience and really show them what this product is doing what problem it's going to help them solve and why they actually need it. It does a better job than images it does a better job than product descriptions it doesn't mean you don't need them you need all of them but a video has one of the largest effects that helps the customer gain the understanding and trust that they need for this product and to continue with the checkout process. So 10 hours I think is more than enough to get started five hours is really not too much and unlimited is unlimited and of course it will come with the business VIP plan. Once you start to grow and scale there's no reason to start with a business VIP package if you haven't started yet and you're not really sure what you are doing we don't want to throw money in the trash we want to be able to profit and with our profits we invested back into our business to help it grow grow and flourish. Then we've got storage space so how many files can I upload to Wix how many images can I upload what is the total bandwidth that I'm getting here so with the business VIP plan you're going to get 50 gigabytes of storage space which is more than enough because what are you hosting just images and videos then you've got the business unlimited plan 35 gigabytes and only 20 gigabytes for the basic plan then you've got the customer care so what type of customer service am I going to get here with the VIP plan you're going to get priority customer care if you ask me I don't know what the difference is for the other two you've got 24 seven customer care which is more than enough on Wix you're going to get unlimited products and we spoke about this you can list as many products as you want so research research test test test now of course you cannot really upload or import thousands of products and be able to know what's going on with the stock status and the pricing if the supplier changes the prices or changes the stock status it also needs to change on your store and that is why you also need to have a business automation that is what AutoDS is for to help you with price and stock monitoring quick product importing meaning you can import all of those products from your dropshipping suppliers in a matter of seconds to your store even if it's 10 products even if it's 100 and even if it's in the thousands then you've got abandoned cart recovery which is a nice feature to have where Wix will send email to your buyers or to your potential buyers who added products to their cart but they didn't continue with the checkout process so Wix is going to try to reach out to them for you and try to get them back to your store and continue that checkout process you're going to get that on all of your package plans then you've got subscriptions subscriptions will give you the option to allow your customers to subscribe to your store if you're offering any type of service and this way you can collect recurring monthly payments from your customers this is available on the business VIP and the business unlimited plans not included in the business basic plan along with the rest of the features that I will name now you've also got multiple currencies which is only available on the top to subscription plan stores meaning your customers can pay you in more than one currency and this of course is very important if you want to have your store open up to the worldwide audience and not just to a specific region you also have automated sales tax so Wix can collect tax on your behalf automatically for 500 transactions or 100 transactions in the unlimited plan and those are all of the important features that you need to know along with the subscription plans that come with them using Wix's platform so on Wix you can host your online store absolutely for free without paying them anything the thing is you're not going to have your own custom domain name and you're going to have Wix ads inside your store so that is not a very comfortable thing to have but you can still host your store and you can still drive traffic to your store and that is good enough for many beginners before they start to pay for a subscription once they start getting sales now on the other hand for Shopify if you want to open up your Shopify store to the public then you'll need to have a subscription Shopify will give you a 14 day trial to get started to build your online store but if you didn't get your store up and running in that time because you were stuck maybe doing product research maybe looking for some virtual assistance and you simply didn't have the time to create your store once your 14 day trial is over you cannot even go back and continue editing your store you're going to have to pay for the subscription now even if you have the 14 day trial and let's say after two days you finish creating your store and now you want to go live in order to go live you're going to have to pay for a subscription plan so the 14 day trial is just for building your store which is not as good as what Wix has to offer so Shopify has a $29 a month basic store plan and this is a monthly plan it's not annual they also have a $79 plan and an advanced $299 plan which is equivalent to Wix's business VIP at just $59 a month but let's see what each one has to offer so of course to have an online store which includes the e-commerce website and a blog page like we talked about you have that on all three subscriptions unlimited products from day one just like Wix on all three subscription plans staff accounts meaning you can have virtual assistants to help you maintain build and grow your online store but on the other hand if you're also using AutoDS and you connect with Shopify or Wix you can also have virtual assistants take control of only what aspects you want them to on your AutoDS account some of those features that you can delegate to them includes researching for products importing products taking care of your customer service processing your orders and so much more okay so besides staff accounts you also have 24 seven support available in all three packages with no extra VIP support whether it's real or not for the advanced $299 a month plan then you've also got sales channels which is available for all three subscription plans inventory locations so this is where you can specify where your products are being shipped from that is your inventory location whether you're sourcing inventory or not and here on the basic plan you have up to four inventory locations the regular Shopify plan or the middle plan offers up to five item locations and the advanced plan up to eight of course starting with the basic at $29 a month is more than enough for new store owners then you've got manual order creation so you can do that on all three subscription discount codes to be able to offer promotion codes to your buyers that they can enter during checkout and get some type of a discount available in all three subscriptions free SSL certificate this will simply gain more customer trust and allow them to gain more confidence in the checkout process abandon cart recovery just like Wix they will reach out to your customers who added products to their cards but didn't proceed to the checkout process they went somewhere else they'll get a message from Shopify asking them to come back gift cards are available on all three subscriptions and you also have basic reports on the basic subscription a standard report on the standard subscription and an advanced report in the advanced subscription once again to start off the basic report is enough but when you start to scale and grow and you want to have more analytics data you're going to move on to the standard plan and to the advanced plan once you're really making it especially once you start adding automation now only in the expensive plan the advanced plan the $299 plan you'll also get third party calculated shipping rates meaning you can show calculated rates with your account or third party apps at checkout this once again is really an advanced feature to have don't even worry about it not until at least you get to that stage you can also filter and group your customers into all types of segments that will help you analyze it better and prepare a better strategy available in all subscription plans then you've also got marketing automation where you can send automatic emails with pre-made templates or with custom workflows to your buyers or to people who took interest in your website and left you their email address and this is a great thing to have because email campaigns is one of the best promotion tools that have been used since day one of the internet and it's still one of the most effective tools to use today yes many of your emails will get to people span folders and many of your emails people won't even open them but the two to five percent that will or 10 percent if you're really good at it many of them will confirm and the more you have the more sales you will gain this way and when you're sending out those emails or when you're letting Shopify automate those emails you have no expense here besides your standard plan so here it's not available in the basic plan but it is available in the standard and of course it's also available in the advanced plan you also have unlimited contacts so as many customers as they want can sign up leave you with their contacts and you can collect their email addresses the more you have once again the more you will be able to succeed with your promotions and you've also got e-commerce automations which allows you to automate all kinds of manual tasks which Autodesk will pretty much do for you build workflows and grow your business Shopify shipping that's another thing you're going to get here and here you're going to get good rates from shipping carriers like DHL Express UPS or USPS but this is only if you're shipping your own inventory same thing goes for shipping labels and for USPS priority and parcel select cubic pricing if you are dropshipping none of this is relevant to you then you've got Shopify payments and this is an important one because the higher your subscription the less transaction fees you're going to pay but this really works with the big numbers game if you don't have too many sales a day or a month you're not really going to feel a big difference between 2.9% per transaction to 2.6% to 2.4% per transaction but when you're selling thousands tens of thousands and hopefully millions of dollars per month you're definitely going to feel that small change so besides that transaction fee you're also going to pay 30 cents fixed transaction fee for every transaction doesn't matter what plan you have so those are online credit card rates but if you're an international seller those rates are going to be about 1% higher as you can see right here and in person is if you have a physical store and people come to physically purchase from your store which I'm thinking isn't the case for most of you out there same goes for point of sale and everything else like international market management meaning to define geographic market areas so that you're giving each buyer a localized currency depending on where he's at language translation which is a nice thing to have especially once again when you're going international and I highly suggest to do go international because this way you'll be able to test the market more regions more product research will end up in more cells currency conversion we went over that local payment methods and that is pretty much it for Shopify's plans so hopefully that helped you get an understanding of the difference between the two all in all if you ask me both are great platforms for hosting your online store and the best part is you can automate your business like I mentioned with price and stock monitoring automatic product importing automatic orders and so much more when you use auto DS to automate your business between your selling channel and your suppliers let's take a quick look at the suppliers that you can start working with today after creating your drop shipping store and see exactly what type of power you have here so check out all of these suppliers in all of these different regions around the world you can go to their websites grab products research them go to their bestseller section learn about the best drop shipping categories and niches you can learn that from the course from our content and just grab products test them out on your wick stores test them out on your Shopify stores target your audiences market your products and slowly start to move forward from there but here you have a reach of tens of millions of products that you can start researching and start selling them now auto DS sits in the middle between your selling channel and your suppliers so you can grab products from all of these suppliers and import them within a few clicks using the auto DS system to your selling channels in this example Shopify or wicks and it is a very simple and easy process I hope that this video helped you understand the main and biggest and most significant differences between wicks and Shopify and which selling channel is right for your e-commerce business if you have any questions let me know in the chat below and once again do not forget to subscribe to a youtube channel to always learn about the latest and the hottest topics coming out in the world of dropshipping and e-commerce thank you for watching and good luck with your wicks or Shopify dropshipping business