Weebly vs Shopify: Best Place for Your Ecommerce Business

Arthur Cahill
6 min readApr 28, 2019

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As a business owner, picking one reliable web builder for business is a crucial step. Time efficiency, ease of use, and affordability are some of the main points to look for when choosing the best platform. When it comes to Weebly vs Shopify, both of the platforms offer great features for an ecommerce site. But which one is better?

In this article, we will review both of these heavyweight champions of website design and see, which one is better for you and your business!

Web Builders — an Easy Way of Building a Website

Creating a web for an ecommerce can be exhausting if you need to build it from scratch using coding language. That’s what web builders are for. Web builders are tools that allow you to create a website without an excellent understanding of coding.

Since you don’t need to understand code languages, the web building process can be more convenient with the availability of plugins, widgets and even templates. You can just install them and use drag and drop feature to get a desirable website appearance.

Aside from user-friendliness, a web builder is also considered as an affordable way to create an ecommerce site. You don’t need a web developer to make the desired site template.

However, website builder also comes with several drawbacks such as limitation in customizing the website’s template. You’ll be limited to use pre-created templates. Plus, it’ll be a hassle to resize images, customize pages and put some links.

Besides, most web builders have limited access to create a mobile-friendly template for their site. In order to make one, you have to modify the source code. However, the web builder doesn’t let you do so. Thus, it is likely hard to be done.

Weebly or Shopify?

Weebly

Weebly is one of the most favorable web builders. It’s user-friendly, affordable, and appealing template appearance. Moreover, Weebly’s reasonable pricing policy and flexibility also are the reasons why people choose it.

Weebly is created to ease anyone’s job on making a site. They provide responsive templates so it’s possible for the users to click and drag the content get the suitable web design.

More than selling the appearance and its user-friendliness, Weebly also has features to offer such as:

  • SEO support
  • Free plan
  • Many free templates
  • Product filter search

But, it’s undeniable that compared to Shopify, Weebly emphasizes on its user-friendliness. For a business owner who aims for an attractive online store, Weebly might be suitable and convenient to use.

Shopify

Shopify is that supportive buddy for your business. Its big number of powerful customization tools and integrations, suitable yet high-quality templates are the reasons that this platform is worth to try.

Shopify is here to fulfill the founder’s expectation about ecommerce web builder. The founders provide Shopify with a variety of ecommerce business support tools.

The features will fully support your ecommerce project. Some of the features are:

  • Supports multiple languages
  • Up to 70 payment methods available
  • Provides numerous email templates
  • Social media sharing
  • Marketing and SEO support; and more

Shopify focuses on creating an ecommerce website, thus the features are much more supportive for the business maker who aims for effectivity in business enhancement.

Different Niches, Same Goal

There’s a distinction between Weebly vs Shopify. Shopify is focusing on ecommerce web builder, but Weebly is a general web builder that has ecommerce web builder feature. However, both of them can be different on how each web builder creates an ecommerce site.

Weebly vs Shopify: Native Features

Both Weebly and Shopify support have their own plus and minus.

Weebly, as a general website builder, provides templates, apps integration, and also smart marketing tools. Meanwhile, Shopify, as the ecommerce web builder platform, emphasizes on their supportive features for marketing.

If you want to use Weebly or Shopify’s advanced features, you can choose the premium plan and subscribe to it. Both of them have some attractive plans that you can choose depending on your need.

Weebly offers three plans that give various benefits. You can pick between the trio: Pro, Business, and Business Plus according to your desired features that you want to get.

Shopify also offers three premium plans for your ecommerce website. Wisely choose between Basic Shopify, Shopify, and Advanced Shopify to get supportive features for your business.

Picking the suitable platform and plans might be easy. There’s a scenario when you want to move your ecommerce data from the old platform to the new one.

Fortunately, Shopify supports site migration from other platforms to theirs. All you need to do is creating an account in Shopify and import products and customer info with a CSV. But, you can’t do the same with Weebly.

Apart from that fact, both Shopify and Weebly have ecommerce plugins store. You can integrate the app to the web so the web appearance will much more compelling and powerful.

Shopify App has thousands of application plugins. They are divided into several categories such as store design, sales and conversion marketing, customer support, finances, and more.

In comparison to the Shopify App, Weebly App Center provides around three hundred apps for the ecommerce services only. The features are divided into ecommerce, marketing, communication, social and site tools & features.

An Alternative to Web Builders All Together — WordPress

Of course, there’s also another option if you think that those two platforms don’t support suffice customization options.

Choosing a CMS to explore more customization is worth to do. WordPress.org is one of CMS platforms that supports numerous customization to enhance your web performance.

Different from WordPress.com, Wordpress.org allows you to use your own web hosting account. Meanwhile, WordPress.com lets you set up a blog and website that runs on WordPress.

So, using WordPress.com as CMS will give full deliberation to you in creating web and doing marketing strategies. Moreover, it lets you utilize its functionality as much as you want.

While you might use coding languages in order to apply some advanced features, applying various plugins and widgets can be enough to cover your needs.

Unlike Shopify and Weebly, you can start your web for free and utilize its features. Moreover, you don’t have to pay tax, you can use your own domain, create more dynamic templates by using HTML/CSS and programming languages, and many more.

Weebly vs Shopify: Conclusion

You can choose between Shopify vs Weebly according to your need. If you want a beautiful appearance for your ecommerce with affordable plans, you can go with Weebly.

But if you want a supportive platform for your business, you can go with Shopify since it focuses on creating an ecommerce platform.

If you think that using a web builder can’t give any satisfaction in creating a web, you can use WordPress.org. WordPress allows you to explore more customization options to enhance your ecommerce website in the future even though it’s hard to master.

In the end, you should weigh between platforms thoroughly before choosing the most suitable place for your ecommerce. You have to make sure that the features of the web builder can support your ecommerce activity to ensure that your investment is not wasted.

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Arthur Cahill

Full stack developer. Internet fanatic. Brit rock expert. Explorer. Writer.