When to Use WordPress for Ecommerce and When to Avoid It

When to Use WordPress for Ecommerce and When to Avoid It

If you plan on pursuing an SEO or content marketing strategy for your business, WordPress is the only legitimate choice for your site. Nothing else comes close to giving you all the features that you need to manage so much content along with all the extra functionality for SEO and other traffic sources. What Shopify does best = Ecommerce If you want to sell stuff with an ecommerce store, Shopify is by far your best choice. Why You Should (Almost) Always Use Shopify for Your Ecommerce Site As much as I personally love WordPress, it just doesn’t compare to Shopify when it comes to ecommerce, even if you add an ecommerce plugin to WordPress. Your best best bet will be to use Shopify for your store and WordPress for your blog. The Easiest Way to Use Shopify and WordPress at the Same Time Put one of them on a subdomain and the other on your main domain, like this: WordPress installed at company.com Shopify installed at store.company.com This is easy enough that you’ll be able to get this set up with your WordPress host, domain registrar, and Shopify account on your own. Should Shopify or WordPress go on the subdomain? In SEO, the main domain will always carry a bit more weight than a subdomain. The One Reason to Use WordPress for Ecommerce It does make sense to turn your WordPress site into an ecommerce store if you meet these conditions: You already have a large WordPress site built with lots of content. But it doesn’t make sense to get an entire ecommerce platform set up on your site since you don’t plan on making it a major priority.

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Before you decide on WordPress for your ecommerce platform, you should read this guide. You might think twice.

If you’re building a site that’s 100% focused on content or 100% focused on ecommerce, the best choice on how to build your site is very clear.

What WordPress does best = Content

WordPress Dashboard

WordPress is now a decade old and is still the reigning champ for managing sites with a ton of content. If you plan on pursuing an SEO or content marketing strategy for your business, WordPress is the only legitimate choice for your site. Nothing else comes close to giving you all the features that you need to manage so much content along with all the extra functionality for SEO and other traffic sources. It’s the default content management platform for a reason.

What Shopify does best = Ecommerce

Shopify Dashboard

If you want to sell stuff with an ecommerce store, Shopify is by far your best choice. There really aren’t any legitimate contenders anymore. The functionality, the ease of use, and the price are unmatched. Even more impressive, Shopify will scale with your business no matter how large it gets — they’ve pushed into the enterprise segment in the last few years and are now considered ”best-in-class” at all tiers of ecommerce. From trying to sell your first product to selling one million products, Shopify is the default choice.

The problem is knowing what to do when you have a content and an ecommerce site?

This is when things get a bit trickier and more nuanced.

Why You Should (Almost) Always Use Shopify for Your Ecommerce Site

As much as I personally love WordPress, it just doesn’t compare to Shopify when it comes to ecommerce, even if you add an ecommerce plugin to WordPress.

There are a bunch of unique features that any ecommerce site needs:

  • Shopping carts
  • Check-out and payment flows
  • Integrations with payment providers
  • Fulfillment options and integrations
  • Integrations with shipping providers
  • Easy ways to manage all your product pages
  • Revenue reporting
  • Refund and return management
  • Integrations with ecommerce platforms like Amazon

Shopify was built from the ground up around all of these features. WordPress wasn’t.

With Shopify, you get every ecommerce feature you could ever need right out of the box. A bit of easy configuration and your site is ready to go. Of course, Shopify also has the ability to deeply customize anything you could want. With how popular Shopify has been, there’s now a large community of developers and marketers that can use the more advanced features of Shopify to tailor it to your exact situation.

Shopify also has Shopify Lite. It’s a super streamlined version of Shopify, perfect for adding a couple of buy buttons to your WordPress site or your Facebook page. So even if you want to run a few small tests to see if you can sell items on your site, it’s still worth starting with Shopify.

We really can’t over-hype the benefits of using Shopify — they’ve done an amazing job at building a tool to solve the…

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