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I recently had the opportunity to sit around the dinner table with seven other super smart business owners and talk shop.

Among them, a real estate agent, a fitness and supplement brand, a leotard / apparel company, an internet service provider, and a couple other agencies.

The topic quickly turned to how to best build an eCommerce store - with two major platforms at the top of the list.

Shopify vs. WordPress with WooCommerce.

The two Two B2C brands swore by Shopify (one selling Leotards, the other selling Supplements) because of its support, backend and partnerships from the corporate level. They also cited Shopify's wanting to become the storytelling platform opposite Amazon in the marketplace, as well as become the eCommerce leader in selling weed online (apparently in motion in Canada)

One other agency owner said she used to use WooCommerce but switched to Shopify because it’s “easier.”

Well, I agree with all of this, if all you want to do is have your basic homepage, terms, contact pages and sell products.

But if you’re like 55-75% of sites out there, you have enormous content depth, multiple page types AND you want to sell products, then all of the sudden WordPress with Woo and Shopify have a neck and neck battle.

They both do the same thing, you can sell products.

And if that’s ALL your business needs to do, then then turnkey $29/month hosted Shopify solution is for you.

But if you’re on Shopify, and you want to add content marketing, funnel optimization or drop campaigns later, you’ll need serious content library and content organization capabilities, as well as the ability to build out addition custom page and possibly custom post types, which is where you’ll hit a wall with Shopify and wish you went with WordPress and Woo.

We tell all of our clients and prospective clients the same thing. Looking to get up and running tomorrow with an online store? Shopify is for you.

Looking to have a more customized design, multiple types of products, and much better content marketing, digital marketing and analytics tracking capabilities?

Then, DEFINITELY go WordPress with WooCommerce. You will not hit walls or be limited to theme developers with these platforms. With Shopify, you'll be locked in. Which, for many B2C brands, is still the best fit.

If you'd like to talk more about which one is the best fit for your business, email me to set up a phone call at paul@datadriven.design.

Thanks for reading, and have a great day!

Paul Hickey, Founder / CEO / Lead Strategist at Data Driven Design, LLC has created and grown businesses via digital strategy and internet marketing for more than 10 years. His sweet spot is using analytics to design and build websites and grow the audience and revenue of businesses via SEO/Blogging, Google Adwords, Bing Ads, Facebook and Instagram Ads, Social Media Content Marketing and Email Marketing. The part that he’s most passionate about is quantifying next marketing actions based on real data.

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