Important features to look for when considering an alternative eCommerce software to shopify include a large number of themes, freedom to make customization, total ownership of the store, ease of hiring developers, and a large number of 3rd party plugins.

Woocommerce, Jumla, Magento, and OpenCart are top alternatives to Shopify.

Reviews for these top alternatives generally praise features like open source, a wide number of plugins and themes, and complete ownership of the store.

eCommerce teams unsatisfied with Shopify’s eCommerce plans still need many more core features – such as easy inventory management even if  they have decided to move to a different  platform

But what will change is how your team will install update and manage the inventory 

So when evaluating shopify alternatives, I recommend asking these 4 questions

Does the ecoomerce software offer easy inventory management 

Does the ecoomerce software provide secure payment gateway

Does the ecommerce software provide mobile app for admin

Does the ecommerce software provide easy installations

Some companies are moving away from shopify because they need a ecommerce that incorporates the features above, plus more themes ……………….

This post will Cover 5  competitors highlighting their key features, the cost and how they might import your current product catalogue

Our list Includes

Woocommerce 

Jumla

Magento 

Opencart

Woocommerce.

Woocommerce is a free plugin for WordPress and WordPress powers 45% of websites on the internet according to a w3tech survey, it runs on PHP which is one of the easiest backend languages.

The first language that I learned in 11th grade was PHP and ever since I am just amazed at how simple it is.

The syntax is almost like regular English language and hence the learning curve is much less compared to other backend languages.

Hence finding developers at affordable rates is quite easy.

The common argument I heard about WooCommerce is that it can not handle large websites but with dedicated hosting and dedicated bandwidth, WooCommerce is one of the most capable e-commerce stores with brands like The Sweet Setup.

For a resourceful person, the cost of running WooCommerce is only a hosting plan and domain name which can be as low as 50 dollars for a year.

Please refer to this article by WooCommerce if you need detailed costs to run a WooCommerce store. With some search of the WordPress Plugin directory, many of the paid WooCommerce extensions given in the article can be substituted by free extensions and the costs can be further brought down.

And if you need an agency specialized in WooCoommerce then wooCommerce also provides a list of Agencies vetted by Woocommerce for total peace of mind and quality.

So when it comes to comparing WooCommerce and Shopify, there are a few differences to consider

Large numbers of free and paid WordPress themes with the liberty to make customizations according to one’s liking. With shopify, your options are very limited.

WordPress is the most popular blogging CMS and hence you can leverage its blogging capability for SEO while shopify severely lacks in the blogging field. Hence Woocommerce gets an SEO advantage over shopify.

Shopify uses the development language Liquid for templating and storing content and developers need to learn Liquid to make the tweaks. 

The problem with Liquid is, that it is a proprietary language and hence, the developers are fewer than PHP, which drives the cost of hiring significantly up.

Shopify charges transaction fees in addition to the 3rd party payment gateways whereas WooCommerce does not charge fees for transactions. You will be only paying fees charged by Payment Gateways.

With large numbers of 3rd party plugins for WordPress, you can think of any functionality and rarely there will be not a free plugin available for it. This again is a place where shopify lacks. 

So if you are mom and pop kind of store and do not care about the look of the website, do not need an SEO advantage over competitors, do not mind hiring a costly help to add a little functionality, and are OK with paying extra transaction charges, then shopify gives you the ability to open e-commerce website within few steps

But if you need creative freedom, total ownership of your store, and plenty of free extension options WooCommerce is the best option out there

Getting started with WooCommerce is easy.

Most hosting companies like Hostinger provide WordPress Hosting Plan supporting installation with easy steps tutorials you can use to get started within a couple of minutes.

Once you have installed WordPress all you have to do is go to the plugins menu in the WordPress dashboard click Add New Plugin, type in the search box ‘WooCommerce’ and install it, or you can go to the WordPress plugins directory, download WooComerce zip file and upload and install it to WordPress and, later activate it.

Refer to this article Installing and Uninstalling WooCommerce by WooCommerce for detailed steps or you can  watch this video too

Upon activating it will take you to the WooCommerce Setup Wizard where the setup wizard will ask you a bunch of questions and you can select the answers from the given list. It helps the wizard understand your specific needs and tailor the setup experience accordingly.

Based on the answers provided the wizard suggests free features that can benefit your store.

After that wizard will ask you to install JetPack

Store Setup Checklist

Choose your theme

Here, we will help you get started with customizing your store’s look and feel.

The Add Themes page displays a variety of themes available from the WordPress.org theme repository which has over 12000 free themes and many paid themes that provide you with customer support and customization support post-purchase.

WooCommerce is designed to work seamlessly with themes you know and love, including each year’s default WordPress themes and many popular themes from around the web.

Woocommerce has its own official Storefront theme which is light and quick.WooCommerce also has many premium themes available on the Woo Marketplace.

Add shipping costs

You can confirm your store location or add it if you haven’t done it before. You can also set the shipping costs for your country and the rest of the world as well. Shipping costs for the rest of the world are disabled by default but can be enabled in this step.

If your store location is in the US, you can install WooCommerce Shipping and connect your store to wordpress.com to enable label printing at home.

Set up tax

You have three options available in this step: use WooCommerce Tax, use Avalara, set up taxes manually, or do not charge sales tax.

You can confirm your store location or add it if you haven’t done it before.

If you selected WooCommerce Tax and have Jetpack installed, you can start automatically calculating taxes by connecting your store to WordPress.com. Visit this page if you want to learn more about automated taxes and the countries where it’s available. 

If you select to connect your store, you’ll be redirected to the WordPress.com flow, so you can create an account or log in to an existing account. 

After you finish that process, you’ll be redirected to the tax task, where you can enable the automated tax calculation by selecting “Yes please.”

If you choose to set up tax rates manually you will be redirected to the WooCommerce Settings. See the documentation on setting up taxes in WooCommerce to learn more about how to set them up manually.

Set up payments

In this step, you can select and activate one or more options to accept online payments and offline payments. All payment extensions are free and we automatically install and activate them upon selection.

In some payment gateways, such as WooPayments, Stripe, and PayPal, we help you create an account in the payment provider, go through the authentication flow, and complete the process within this step, so you can start accepting payments right away.

There are a few possible scenarios, depending on where your store is located and the information you provided during the store profiler.

WooPayments is currently available in 15+ countries. You can see the availability here. If you have WooPayments pre-installed or if you install it during the Store profiler flow, we’ll display a specific task to finish the WooPayments setup.

If you live in another country than the United States you’ll have Stripe and PayPal at your disposal if these providers are available in your country. We also show other options, depending on your store countries, such as Square, Klarna, Mollie, PayFast, PayU, Razorpay, Mercado Pago, PayFast, and Eway.

Through the Payments task, you can also easily set up offline payments, such as Cash on Delivery and Direct Bank Transfer.

Set up marketing tools

Through this step you can easily install and finish the set-up of our recommended marketing extensions: MailPoet, Google Listings & Ads, Mailchimp for WooCommerce, and Creative Mail for WooCommerce.

Store Management

Once you complete the Store Setup Checklist (or choose to hide it), it will be replaced by the Store Management widget, which contains useful links to most of the most used WooCommerce pages for managing your store.

Accessing the Onboarding Wizard and Setup Checklist

If at any point you’d like to return to the onboarding wizard or the setup checklist. For example, if you dismissed the Setup Checklist by accident. You can find them again by:

Navigate to either the WooCommerce > Settings page or the WooCommerce > Status page.

In the top right corner of the screen, select the Help menu to toggle it open.

In that Help menu select Setup wizard in the options on the left.

Selecting said button to re-enter the Setup Wizard or Enable either the Task list or the Extended task list.

After selecting one of the buttons, you’ll be taken to the relevant task list or to the beginning of the guided setup of the Onboarding Wizard.

Unrestricted customization: You can edit any part of your site, from the homepage layout to the buy button to stand out from the crowd. One can customize the look and functionality of the store in various ways. 

While themes can be made from scratch to specifically give a unique look to the store many changes can also be made using a customizer to the existing themes.

Customizer comes with a CSS editor where you can write CSS to the existing elements thus providing you the ability to change the looks of themes that are not allowed in Customizer.

The ability to make changes in customizer changes from theme to theme, some themes have freemium plans where to make advanced changes one needs to buy the themes.

But if you know HTML, CSS, Javascript, and PHP you can install snippets plugin and 

do the changes yourselves, or you can just hire a developer and get changes done without touching the core files. 

If something goes wrong like the theme breaks all you have to do is disable the toggle button for the particular code in the snippets plugin and your website will be fine.

Built–in blogging: Using WordPress CMS you can easily create blog posts to educate your audience and convert them into customers using CTA or product blocks.

Use WooCommerce to integrate eCommerce with the world’s most popular content publishing platform.

Embed products, checkout, and more on any page: Use shortcodes to add your products to blog posts, or create landing pages that go straight to checkout.

Shortcodes are short lines of code that can do a large number of functions 

Categories, tags, and attributes make products easier to find: Help customers find what they want by adding tags to describe a product. Add attributes like size so customers can search for items most relevant to them.

Product ratings and reviews: Show customer feedback directly on the product page, including a ‘Verified Owner’ label.

Customize for your location: Set the currency, language, and measurement units (inches, centimeters, or anything else) that are right for you.

Product sorting and filtering: Let customers sort products by popularity, newness, rating, price, or attribute to find the right fit. 

Unlimited images and galleries: Include any number of photos to show off your products. Set a featured image to highlight the best photo site-wide.

Unlimited products: Add as many products as you want to sell – your only restriction is your inventory.

Sell any product, at any time

A sale is a destination, and your online store is where customers can either abandon things in the aisles or finish strong. With WooCommerce, customers can purchase your products at their convenience.

Physical, digital, or both: Sell physical products that will ship to a customer, digital products they can download, or any combination of the two.

Affiliate products: Show products available on other sites with an affiliate link for customers to purchase them.

Unlimited variations: Offer any number of variations (like color, size, fabric, and so on) for a product with the option to set prices, stock, and images for each variation.

You can sell variable products with the WooCommerce extension Variation Swatches for WooCommerce which comes in a freemium option where you will need to pay for customer support.

With extensions like WPC Product Bundles for WooCommerce, you can create bundles of multiple products and give discounts to increase sales or use it to get rid of unpopular items by bundling them with popular items and giving attractive deals by reducing the price of the whole bundle.

Import and export products: You add and update product information like name, short description, regular and sale price, and more using a CSV file.

If you have a large number of products the best idea is to maintain the information of the products in a spreadsheet and import it regularly into WooCommerce. This way you can ensure you have the backup in case your website comes under attack and product data gets deleted or, due to some technical error, your database gets corrupted which can happen during making tweaks to the website.

If you are exporting then the spreadsheet will follow schema but if you are importing a new spreadsheet with product data then ensure it is following the Product CSV Import Schema

Built-in payment processing from leading providers: You can take payments via Stripe and PayPal. Accept credit cards, Direct Bank transfers, checks, or Cash on Delivery. 

The best thing about WooCommerce is that it does not charge fees on transactions and you only pay the respective payment gateway’s fee whereas shopify will charge you 0.6 to 2% extra per transaction on top of the payment gateway’s fee based on the plan you are on.

Hence WooCommerce saves you quite a deal if have a large number of transactions or you are just starting and can use every little cent you can save. 

During transactions ensure that the transactions happen on the page provided by payment gateways as they are more secure and reduce your liability towards monetary loss of the customer due to technical or security issues.

Shipping options: Give customers the option of pickup, local delivery or shipping. Restrict options are available based on customer location.

Shipping rates: Set a flat rate or define specific rates for different products, like extra charges for heavy products. Calculate and show the right rates to customers at checkout.

Free shipping: Offer free shipping for certain products or certain locations – the choice is yours.

Geo-location support: Auto-detect your customer’s address to make shipping and tax calculations simpler.

Tax options: Show taxes based on your customer’s shipping address, billing address or your store’s base address. Automatically calculate major country and state tax rates.

Manage orders and customers

Get orders out the door in a timely manner and keep customers updated to spark future purchases and happiness. WooCommerce has a set of features to make this easier all around.

Customer accounts and guest checkout: Allow customers to register and choose to automatically generate usernames and passwords, or not. Display a returning customer login reminder. Enable guest checkout for those who don’t want to register.

One-click refunds: Offer pain-free refunds to customers that can be managed directly in your WooCommerce dashboard.

Inventory management: Track stock levels, hold stock after an order is canceled, get notifications for low and out-of-stock items, hide out-of-stock items and more.

Order management: Add customer notes, edit stock manually, mark items you shipped, and manage the fulfillment process.

Email templates: Send notifications to customers at critical stages, e.g., after they make a purchase or when their order is complete.

Add shop managers: Give your team access to manage orders and view reports without making them admin.

EXTENSIONS

Customize your emails and notifications

Add other features to make fulfillment easier

Integrate with your accounting solution

Optimize your store to sell more

WooCommerce comes with features to help you connect your audience with the right offer.

Search Engine Optimization: WooCommerce runs on WordPress, recognized as one of the best platforms for SEO practices.

Coupons: Give customers coupons for a fixed amount, a percentage off or special offers like free shipping. Offer coupons for their whole cart or certain products.

Related products: Show related products to help customers find complementary products or encourage them to purchase more.

Highlight important products throughout your store: Use a widget to showcase top products, a specific category or tag, products on sale, featured products, or recently viewed products on any page of your store.

Reporting: View sales, refunds, and coupons over time. See your top products and categories.

Dashboard: Add sales, orders, and an at-a-glance status summary window to your WordPress dashboard to easily see how your store is doing.

EXTENSIONS

Add social media integrations to your store

Integrate Google Analytics or other reporting features

Level up your coupon and promotion options

Get help realizing your vision

WooCommerce is a worldwide community, and we’re here to help you make your online store a reality.

Documentation: Follow our how-to documentation and friendly video tutorials for WooCommerce and all extensions sold on WooCommerce.com to make your dreams come true.

WordPress.org Forums: Find answers in the public WordPress.org forums.

Customization: Use these resources for small tweaks to full-scale redesigns.

WooExperts: Reach out to these vetted experts who are ready to offer in-depth consultations and custom design and development for something truly special.