Starting an online store can be extremely daunting, especially if this is your first go at it. But we’re here to help ease your way into setting up an ecommerce store by helping you find the ideal ecommerce platform to use.
Two names that come up when most business owners are in the planning stage for their online stores are Shopify vs Weebly. These are two different platforms, so how do you ensure you pick the right one?
Shopify is an ecommerce platform integrated with ecommerce and marketing features to make it easy to generate sales for your online store. On the other hand, Weebly is a website builder. While it has a non-ecommerce focus, you can easily integrate other apps to make it well suited for an ecommerce purpose.
While Shopify appears to be an obvious choice, after all, thousands of other online businesses employ this ecommerce platform, so it’s important to keep an open mind. Learning about alternative options will help you pick the best platform to build a successful online store.
Keep reading to find a detailed comparison of Shopify vs Weebly.
Article Overview:
What is Weebly?
Shopify vs Weebly: Overview
Shopify vs Weebly: Detailed Comparison
Pricing
eCommerce
Marketing and Optimization
Security
Support
Integrations
Weebly vs Shopify: Why Use Weebly?
Weebly vs Shopify: Why Use Shopify?
Conclusion
FAQs
What is Weebly?
Since Shopify is more popular, it’s important to give a refresher on what Weebly is for those that don’t know about this website. As mentioned, Weebly is primarily known as a website builder. As with any other website builder, the primary features available in this website are to assist users with building their online stores from scratch.
But since the Square payment gateway acquisition of Weebly, it has shifted its focus to incorporate more ecommerce and marketing features. Therefore, it is emerging as one of the Shopify alternatives as an ecommerce platform.
Shopify vs Weebly: Overview
Whether you’re expanding or new to creating an online, Shopify and Weebly make good options to help you create that online store from scratch. These two platforms are beginner-friendly, which means you can set up a store for small businesses without hiring a professional web designer or coding skills.
These two websites were launched around the same time. Shopify was launched in 2006 while Weebly made its services available in 2007. Both Weebly and Shopify are excellent for small businesses looking for a user-friendly website builder with ecommerce functionality. But once you dive deeper into the features, you will see major differences with each website that could impact your choice of which to use for your online business.
Weebly prides itself on providing several themes for online business owners. You can create an amazing online store using any themes available from Weebly, allowing you to visually stand out from the competition. In addition to the online store themes, you can access SEO support and product filter searching. It’s clear that Weebly puts a higher value on making sure that the website is user-friendly.
With Shopify, it’s still a website builder but is more eCommerce-focused. The ecommerce tools designed to launch a successful online store are available including dropshipping solutions, free SSL certificates, and social media integrations. It’s clear that Shopify is one of the biggest ecommerce platforms on the web.
But how do these two stack up against each other? We’ll find out in this Shopify vs Weebly comparison to get more details.
Shopify vs Weebly: Detailed Comparison
When comparing Weebly vs Shopify, it’s best to break them down to the most critical factors that help you decide the right platform for your ecommerce store.
Pricing
Before you dive into the tools that are available to create ecommerce sites, it’s crucial to determine if you can afford the website builder or ecommerce platform. But pricing – whether you like it or not – will impact your decision between Weebly vs Shopify.
Weebly offers flexible pricing solutions that match your budget and ecommerce site needs. Weebly offers a free plan, which means you pay nothing to set up this account. For the free plan, you can get free SSL certificates and a third-party embed code. The free plan and Connect websites will have the Weebly trademark on the website, which might not be the most ideal option for online businesses looking to build their own brand.
Here is an overview of the Weebly pricing plans:
- Free – $0 per month for basic use
- Personal – $13 per month (or $10 per month annually) for a custom domain
- Professional – $16 per month (or $12 per month annually) for a custom domain and added customization
- Performance – $29 per month (or $26 per month annually) with SEO and marketing features
With Shopify, you will pay more to build your ecommerce sites. But while Weebly offers limited features, you can access more ecommerce tools, marketing features, and SEO tools with a Shopify store. The ecommerce functionality is also more advanced and suited for growing businesses.
- Starter – $5 per month
- Basic – $25 per month ($19 per month annually)
- Shopify – $65 per month ($49 per month annually)
- Advanced Shopify – $399 per month ($299 per month annually)
Clearly, Shopify pricing is more expensive than subscribing to the Weebly platform. You can adjust your chosen Shopify plans according to your budget and where you want to take your online business. Small businesses that require advanced ecommerce functionality, reliable web hosting, free domain name, and other ecommerce tools can benefit from these Shopify features.
There is a huge gap between the cost of the basic Shopify plan and the Advanced Shopify plan. You can choose among the Shopify plans that offer the best fit for your website goals and your current budget. While Shopify pricing will be more expensive, you can look at it from a value standpoint. It will prove cost-efficient in the long run as it facilitates more business growth.
eCommerce
Shopify wins the ecommerce battle due to the extensive array of ecommerce Shopify features, available to online business owners. Since the Weebly platform is primarily a website builder whereas Shopify is an ecommerce platform offering ecommerce and marketing features.
Any ecommerce site owners aspire to have access to ecommerce tools and functionalities, whether you have a simple online store or a full-feature ecommerce website.
However, when you compare Weebly and its ecommerce features to Shopify, they do have some cool features like text alerts to customers and curbside pickup. However, these features are not enough to overcome the impressive ecommerce functionality available to Shopify, such as but not limited to the following:
- Abandoned cart recovery
- Checkout tools and customization
- Customized invoicing
- Multi sales channels
- Various integrations from the Shopify app store
- Shopify Payments and other payment gateways
Shopify offers other functional features, such as inventory management and support for unlimited products. The shipping options integrated into a Shopify store make domestic and international shipping possible. There are solutions available for online businesses that handle a huge volume of orders. Therefore, these features are ideal for ecommerce sites that want to scale and get maximum flexibility.
On the other hand, the Weebly platform and its ecommerce tools are best suited for brick-and-mortar stores that want an online presence.
Design
The ecommerce site design is critical for the success of online stores, which makes it appealing to potential customers. It’s especially crucial for businesses that want to build a unique brand that stands out from the crowd.
Weebly offers a drag-and-drop website builder functionality, which makes it easy to use even for users without coding knowledge or skills. First, you can choose Weebly themes that fit your branding goals and your industry.
You can choose from up to 50 Weebly themes and there are many free themes for those using the free plan. While the selection of Weebly themes might be small, they are quite impressive as most of them are stylish, neat, and professional-looking. Again, you have vast customization options with these themes to match your design idea.
The Shopify themes are not much higher in terms of options than what Weebly offers. Currently, you can find 73 Shopify themes, but only 9 are free themes. That means you have to pay for the Shopify themes that fit into your design concept. But even the free themes are impressive, so unless you don’t find the design you want, you won’t have to pay more!
The only downside to using the free themes on either Weebly vs Shopify will make your website look like many others on the web. Therefore, it is recommended you use the customization options to tweak the designs and give them a unique look.
Marketing and Optimization
Marketing and optimization are critical for online store owners because you want to grow online sales through your website. While the marketing features on the Weebly platform are neither impressive nor expansive, it does really well in the email marketing department. The Weebly Promote is one feature that gives you access to various email marketing features. However, the stock version is limited and you must pay $8 to $75 monthly for the premium version.
With Shopify, it has an impressive array of marketing features and SEO tools. These Shopify features complement the existing SEO tools to optimize the visibility and performance of your ecommerce sites. Like the Weebly platform, the Shopify email marketing feature offers numerous templates and can send up to 2,500 emails for free per month.
If you want to boost the existing marketing features available to Weebly and Shopify, you can employ a third-party market and product research tool. It is easy to integrate these tools into your overall marketing campaign to ensure you can optimize your product listings, such as identifying the top trending products in Shopify or other ecommerce platforms. You can also employ a product research tool to identify the top trending keywords that you can target for your online listings to maximize ranking on the search engines. Make sure to integrate these tools when managing an online store for maximum results and online sales growth.
Security
Security is a primary consideration when choosing between Weebly vs Shopify. Thankfully, both platforms offer an excellent security level starting with free SSL certificates and website encryption. Even the free plan from Weebly has a free SSL certificate, which is really impressive!
Both platforms allow you to create password-protected pages if you wish to limit access to certain pages on your online store or website.
Support
Amazing customer support can make or break your choice between Weebly vs Shopify. To keep your business running smoothly, it’s important to have access to customer support to ensure that you can promptly address any issues. No matter how easy the platform is to use, a good customer support team makes it more efficient.
Shopify stands above Weebly in terms of its quality customer support. Weebly has limited support options while Shopify gives you access to 24/7 support via phone, live chat, or email. The website also offers a multitude of resources for support, such as community forums, help guides, and more. With Weebly, you need to subscribe to higher subscription plans to ensure you can get quality customer support.
Integrations
Access to apps and various integrations can maximize the performance of your ecommerce store. Therefore, it’s a crucial factor to consider when choosing between Weebly vs Shopify.
The Weebly App Center is intuitive and offers several good options. However, most of the Weebly apps are premium so you must be willing to pay to enjoy the added functionalities.
But the Shopify App Store also provides numerous app options that can be easily integrated, whether you want to enhance the ecommerce functionality or access more SEO tools for your website. The best part is you can find several excellent apps for free.
Weebly vs Shopify: Why Use Weebly?
In this Weebly vs Shopify great debate, based on the features discussed above, you can discern when to use Weebly over Shopify.
Weebly is the ideal solution for online stores that sell 10 products or less. It is also recommended if your website has a blog and you need to build a portfolio. Weebly is a more economical choice, making it suitable for budget-conscious individuals or small businesses. And yet, you can access a drag-and-drop website builder functionality and Weebly themes with tons of customization.
Weebly vs Shopify: Why Use Shopify?
On the other hand, choose Shopify when you are building a fully-featured online store wherein you want access to ecommerce tools designed to optimize your online sales. A Shopify store is also the ideal choice when you are migrating from another platform.
Another reason to choose Shopify vs Weebly is that you need extensive customer support to facilitate running an ecommerce store. And if you have a large product portfolio with various product variants, you can rely on the ecommerce features available on the Shopify platform.
Finally, it is easy to integrate your Shopify store with Shopify apps, giving you more customization and ecommerce capabilities for your website.
Weebly vs Shopify: Conclusion
The choice between Weebly vs Shopify ultimately boils down to your business model, the size of your business, and your goals. Shopify stands as the superior choice for those wanting to build an online store and planning to scale it for growth later on. It has ecommerce tools designed to support your needs as you focus on expanding your sales and facilitating business growth.
Take time to review the information provided here to give you a better picture of what Weebly vs Shopify can offer – from setting up your store to running your online business.
Shopify vs Weebly FAQs
Is Weebly cheaper than Shopify?
Yes. Weebly has a free plan while Shopify pricing is more expensive compared to Weebly’s plans. Therefore, Weebly is suited for you if on a budget and for small businesses. Even the cheapest Shopify plans are not cheap by Weebly’s standards.
Can I use Shopify with Weebly?
Yes, it is possible to import your Shopify store (or any other store) into the Weebly website. It is fast and easy to set up. Once you import your ecommerce store, you can use the features and customization options within Weebly to tweak the design or customize it to your liking.
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