 Shopify, Wix, WordPress. Who is the winner? Hey, in this video, I'm going to look at the top three website builders, and we're going to analyze each one of them and decide which one is best for you. And I think you're going to be surprised in the very end. Stick to the very end, and you'll know exactly which one of these three that you should be using for your business. Hey, starting a website, it's exciting, it's exhilarating, it's daunting, it's scary, it's technical, it's tough. Okay, so when you start your website, you want to use a platform that's going to last for you for a long, long time. One that you can change, one that you can grow with. You don't want a fly by night company that's going to be disappearing, and then your website goes down. You want one that's going to be solid. Now, these three are pretty solid, but they've got some major differences that I have to share with you. So what I'm going to do is categorize them in price point, ease of use, and number of features. And that way, you can decide what's going to be best for you. Now, of course, price is obvious. Okay, when we're starting out, we don't have a lot of money. We don't have a lot of money to invest, so we want to get the most bang for our buck. So I think it's really important that we look at price in the very beginning. The next thing, of course, ease of use. Ease of use, you know, maybe you're, maybe you're a coding ninja and you know all this stuff, or maybe you just like some drag and drop and you want to build something. After I go through this, you'll see which one of these is going to fit you better for ease of use too. Features, features, features. Here's the funny thing about features. You probably don't even know what features you need yet. What happens with me and with most people, once they get involved with something, they start to learn things they want and then they start to look for the feature. You can't know what you need in advance if you don't know what they are. So in this video, I'm going to explain all this to you. And a light bulb is going to go off in some of these cases and you're going to go, oh, I didn't even realize I needed that. But that's cool. Yeah, I want that. So that's another thing I want to get into also. Then, of course, the last thing is level of customization. All of these things are going to work right out of the box, but maybe there's certain things that you want to do, certain things you want to customize, certain things you can customize on some of these platforms and certain things you cannot. So I think it's really important to know that up front too. Okay, let's check out our first contender. It's going to be Shopify. Let's check it out. When you start the process, you may think you need a website builder to simply get your website up. However, while that may be your initial goal, you're going to later find that there's a big difference between tacking on commerce features like listing products, accepting payments, all that kind of stuff, inventory fulfilling orders to a website builder, as opposed to having one that is built for that. If you're truly looking for a website builder, you might not need all the additional commerce tools that Shopify has. However, if your goal is to create a thriving e-commerce business, you're better off going with an all-in-one commerce package from the very first day. That way you don't have to add a lot of stuff to it. Shopify is an all-inclusive subscription-based e-commerce tool, and it's perfect for stores of any size at any stage. Now, let's look at some of the individual components to Shopify. First off, it's simplicity. It's easy for anyone to get started on Shopify, and it remains easy as you use it to scale. You can go underneath the hood if you want to, but you can also maintain customize and scale your store without learning how to code. Next thing I want to talk about is performance. Let's check out performance. Shopify has a super fast load time, and the best performing checkout on the internet. You don't need a managed host for your domain, and you don't need to hook up a third-party checkout tool. Shopify's built-in stuff is world-class. And the last thing is Omni Channel. You can sell literally wherever your customers are. Shopify is always helping merchants bring their products to new markets. There is a TikTok sales channel. Shopify also has a Facebook and Instagram partnership, so it's really pretty amazing. Now, as far as price goes, Shopify has a free 14-day trial. I will put a link in the description so you can get that. And then the next stage is you're going to have to pay $29 a month as soon as that 14-day trial is over with, which is great for new startup businesses. Now, if you have a business that you're scaling and you're growing, they have the next platform, which is $79. But let's say you're huge, and you're already doing a lot of business, and maybe you have a couple stores, their top level one is $299 a month. Now, let's check out those categories I talked about. Ease of use. Shopify is probably one of the easiest to use. They have 24-7 support that is really, really good, so it's going to be a very easy platform for you to get into if you have a lot of technical skills or even if you don't. Now, features. Well, I think customer support's a feature, don't you? I mean, if you ever tried to use customer support and you didn't have it, you'd go, boy, I'd like to have that feature. So, I'm going to include that in there. But in addition to that, Shopify has the most amount of features. They really do. They also include 100 really nice themes that are included with your Shopify membership. And in addition to that, they have over 4,000 integrated tools. So, you're going to have everything you need there as far as features. So, I'm ranking them right now top of the list on features. Now, as far as level of customization, every single page, every single thing in there, you can customize. You can go in there and do your own code if you choose to do so. That's something that Shopify allows. Now, the next one we want to look at is Wix. You know, a few years ago I started getting bombarded with ads for Wix. Wix was everywhere. So, let's check out Wix and see what all the commotion's about. It's one of the most well-known website builders out there because it offers a whole bunch of different plans based on what you need. It really does kind of fall short of inventory tracking and many e-commerce features require an upgrade to the highest tier of the plan. Still, Wix does have some options for plan subscriptions and recurring payments. So, if you sell a product, customers subscribe to this builder. It may be perfect for you. Now, as far as price goes, their basic plan is $23. If you want the unlimited plan, you're going to have to go with the $27 a month plan. Now, if you want their VIP top-end, everything included, it's $49.99 a month. Now, when you start at Wix, any plan you start with that you purchase that you cancel within the first 14 days, they will refund your money. Now, if you're looking for ease of use simplicity, Wix is simple. It's just drag and drop and that's how it works. Now, I will say Wix has a lot less tools than a lot of the ones I'm going to talk about. They don't have the inventory management. So, if you're looking for something like that, you're going to want to look further. There's not a lot of things in there that these other site builders will offer you that Wix does. It's very, very basic. You're going to need to go with pretty much the business unlimited or the VIP plan. However, if you're looking to do drop shipping, you can't do that in Wix and that's a feature you're just not going to have. As far as level of customization, you can customize it any way you want. So, that's not an issue. Let's move on to the behemoth. The behemoth being WordPress. WordPress is huge. There are more sites that are built on WordPress platform than any other platform in the world. That's pretty big. The thing with WordPress is if you're code savvy, you can build the entire website there. Everything you want to do can be customized if you want. WordPress is what's known as an open source code, which means you can go in there and change the code to whatever you want. However, with WordPress, there is a steep learning curve. It is probably the most difficult of the three to build a website at, but it also offers more possibilities for you. As far as price goes, WordPress does offer a free version. However, if you're really going to be serious about selling stuff online, you're going to have to go with one of the paid ones. The business plan currently is at $33 a month, and if you're looking to do e-commerce, that's going to cost you about $59 per month. Now, keep in mind you can get some discounts if you go on their annual plan, which I would highly recommend. Now, as far as ease of use, I've already mentioned that it's probably going to be one of the most difficult out there. But here's the funny thing, and I just got into this over a decade ago. I knew nothing. I couldn't even hardly send emails. The more you play with the stuff, the better you get at it. The more you learn stuff, the more you realize you can do. So, if you're willing to learn, it's a great platform. If you're not willing to learn, it's not a good platform for you. Now, the upside is, since it is so popular, a lot of people know how to work in WordPress, and you can certainly hire a freelancer at Upwork or Fiverr or Freelancer.com to help you out. Now, as far as features go, to get full usability, you're going to have to use a WooCommerce plugin, which works great, and it will really help you out and build your store, but you are going to need that extra software to get the thing going to where you want. Since it is so large, there's a lot of different plugins or extra pieces of software that are going to help you out. So, matter of fact, at the time of this video, there were over 50,000 plugins that you could add to WordPress to help you achieve your goals. Now, as far as level of customization, like I told you, it's open source code, so you could literally build your entire site on your own if you understood HTML and how to do that. I'll also tell you, it's a very easy platform to break. Okay, if you put something in there wrong, you could destroy the site pretty easily, so you want to keep that in mind. Either have the knowledge or hire somebody who has the knowledge to fix your site when it does break. You will have a little bit more issues with WordPress. It is attacked a little bit more by people who are trying to hack your site. I've had it happen to mine, so you probably will want to get some type of protection for that site. Now, as you can see, we're at the end of the video, and I haven't told you which one I prefer. Well, I got to tell you because of the knowledge I've gained over the years, I would go with WordPress. I would overall go with WordPress. The other two platforms are great. I think, actually, if I had to only do e-commerce, and keep in mind I don't just do e-commerce, I would probably pick Shopify if it was only e-commerce. If you want to all oversight, I would pick WordPress, but if you're just going for e-commerce, you want to sell some products, you know Shopify is probably the best way to go, and it has the best support out of all three of them. They're so willing to help you out. They have a great blog there. There's a lot of information you can learn there. You can get technical support really quick there, and it's really designed for somebody selling online. So that's my overview. I would put Wix at the bottom at this point. Very, very basic. It's for somebody who has no skills whatsoever and doesn't really want to learn anything, but there is certainly a market for people like that. So if that's you, then go with Wix. I prefer WordPress second, probably Shopify, and I wouldn't do Wix. It's just not me. It's not for me. I like to customize. I like to build and do stuff. I like to make things work the way I want. I hope you enjoyed this video. I hope you got a lot out of it. 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