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If you are thinking of starting an online store, then two names you may have heard of are Shopify and Weebly. Both Shopify and Weebly are great options for anyone starting an online store. They both give you a lot of great features. They both will host your online store with unlimited bandwidth, meaning this is how your store will be up on the internet – and the unlimited bandwidth means your site should stay online and be able to handle a lot of customers visiting your store at the same. Both Shopify & Weebly have easy to use design systems with lots of templates you can work from, meaning that without having any coding experience or experience building websites, you can design an incredibly professional looking online store. Shopify & Weebly both give you a lot of great extras, like $100 in free Google advertising to help you promote your business. So no matter which you choose, you’ve chosen a great way to get your online store started.
So the question is, how are they different?
Weebly
The main advantage of Weebly is price, price, price. Weebly helps save you a lot of money. First of all, the plans are a lot cheaper. For online stores, you can get a Pro, Business or Performance plan and the prices range from $18/month to $38/month to $46/month respectively (you can also save money by paying for a year in advance but I am just giving you the numbers of paying by month). Compare that to Shopify. They also have three plans: Basic Shopify, Shopify and Advanced Shopify. Their prices range from $29/month to $79/month to $299/month, respectively. So even if you pick the highest option for Weebly (which I recommend because you get so much more), you’re still less than the middle option for Shopify – and the highest option for Shopify is, well, a lot.
On top of the monthly fees, there’s another way you’ll save a lot with Weebly, and that’s the transaction fee. Since you’re going to be charging customers, you’ll need to pick a payment platform, like PayPal, Stripe, Square, etc. These payment platforms will charge you a small fee every time you sell something, which will cut into your profits (it’s not a lot, but it does add up if you’re doing a high volume of sales). Weebly has no additional transaction fee on top of the fee you’d pay for the standard processing fees for PayPal, Stripe, Square, etc. Now, Shopify on the other hand, does have transaction fees on top of the processing fees your payment provider will charge you. Again, this isn’t a lot of money, but it does add up over time if you’re selling a lot of products (and hopefully you are!).
Shopify
So you might be thinking, since Shopify is so much more expensive, why use it? Well, they do give you things that Weebly does not. The best feature of Shopify, in my opinion, is that you can list your products through Amazon and Ebay all through Shopify. Amazon and Ebay are obviously the two gigantic players in the online selling world, and it is really awesome that you can have your own store through Shopify and list your items through Amazon and Ebay through no additional cost. This makes things a lot easier for you and gives you so much more exposure, especially when you’re just starting out.
My other favorite feature of Shopify is that you can sell your products directly through your Facebook Page, Instagram, Messenger Channel and more. By being able to sell directly through social media accounts, this could increase the amount of sales you make. You always want to make it as easy as possible for people to buy your products. The more steps it takes for them to buy your product, the higher the chance that they could start to question whether they want to buy the product and then they could end up leaving your website, which of course you don’t want. So Shopify not only increases your reach of people who can find out about your store but they make it easier for them to pay, which should increase your volume of sales a lot.
Conclusion
So how do you then decide who to go with? You really can’t go wrong with either, because they are both great. This is how I would determine it:
I would go with Weebly if:
- Money is tight when you’re starting out and you want a low risk store where you wouldn’t be out a lot if you changed your mind on having a store – and you’d be able to make more money for each sale
- You already have an online presence so you know you can get people to come to your website so you don’t need to sell through Amazon or Ebay as much and by selling through Weebly, you can make more money by not having to pay those extra transaction fees
I would go with Shopify if:
- You have money to work with, you believe in your idea, and you know that with extra exposure you will sell so many more products that it makes up for the difference in cost – and then some
- You are brand new to having an online store and you need the extra exposure from Amazon & Ebay
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