Are you com­par­ing Shopi­fy alter­na­tives to weigh their pros and cons? 

You might have thought about using Shopi­fy to cre­ate an online store. While it’s a pop­u­lar option, it may not be the best fit for your eCom­merce business. 

In this arti­cle, we’ll com­pare the best Shopi­fy alter­na­tives along with their pros and cons, so you can choose the best plat­form to build an online store. 

Is Shopify the Right Choice for Your Online Store?

Shopi­fy is an all-in-one eCom­merce plat­form. It han­dles all the tech­ni­cal details that goes into run­ning an online store, like host­ing, domain name, main­te­nance, soft­ware updates, and more. 

This makes Shopi­fy a pop­u­lar choice among busi­ness owners. 

How­ev­er, it doesn’t offer the same flex­i­bil­i­ty and free­doms that many oth­er top eCom­merce plat­forms offer. It is also more expen­sive than many alter­na­tives on the mar­ket with their basic plan start­ing from $29/month.

That being said, let’s take a look at some of the best Shopi­fy alter­na­tives with the pros and cons of each option. 

1. WooCommerce

WooCom­merce is the most pop­u­lar eCom­merce plat­form in the world, and it is also our top pick for cre­at­ing any type of online store.

It is begin­ner-friend­ly and incred­i­bly easy to use. WooCom­merce comes with hun­dreds of pro­fes­sion­al­ly designed web­site tem­plates, and many of them are avail­able for free. 

You can also add any new fea­ture to your eCom­merce store using WooCom­merce exten­sions (many of them are free as well). 

There is also a ton of free online help and WooCom­merce tuto­ri­als which makes it eas­i­er for you to learn and grow your online eCom­merce business. 

There are also more pay­ment gate­ways exten­sions for WooCom­merce avail­able than any oth­er plat­form. WooCom­merce is used glob­al­ly, so you will be able to inte­grate pay­ment gate­ways sup­port­ed in your tar­get­ed regions. 

You will need to pay for web host­ing and a domain to run WooCom­merce. There are lots of options for WooCom­merce host­ing, but our top rec­om­men­da­tion is Blue­host.

They are offer­ing our read­ers a fan­tas­tic deal where you get a free domain name, free SSL cer­ti­fi­ca­tion, and host­ing for $2.75/month:

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Price:

WooCom­merce plu­g­in itself is free. 

How­ev­er, you will need to pay the usu­al costs of run­ning a Word­Press web­site. This includes web host­ing, your domain name, and any paid plu­g­ins you want to use for your online store. 

2. MemberPress

Mem­ber­Press is our top pick for cre­at­ing a mem­ber­ship site. It’s a great option if you want to offer dig­i­tal con­tent to cus­tomers. It lets you take sub­scrip­tion pay­ments, or just charge one-time fee for dig­i­tal downloads.

Mem­ber­Press is easy to set up, and you can use it to pro­tect pre­mi­um con­tent on your site in lots of dif­fer­ent ways. 

For instance, it’s easy to pro­tect all pages with a spe­cif­ic par­ent page, so only reg­is­tered users can see them. Mem­ber­Press also lets you ‘drip’ con­tent so that mem­bers don’t receive it all at once.

You can even set up dif­fer­ent pay­ment lev­els if you want to sell sev­er­al dif­fer­ent mem­ber­ships or online products.

Mem­ber­Press inte­grates with lots of oth­er tools such as pop­u­lar email mar­ket­ing ser­vices, live chat soft­ware, etc. It also has built-in sup­port for Pay­Pal and Stripe payments.

Price:

Mem­ber­Press costs from $129/year for the basic plan when you use our Mem­ber­Press coupon code.

3. BigCommerce

Big­Com­merce is a ful­ly host­ed all-in-one eCom­merce plat­form. The host­ing, SEO, pay­ment fea­tures, and more are all pro­vid­ed for you by Big­Com­merce. You don’t need to set any­thing up separately.

There’s also a Big­Com­merce Word­Press plu­g­in that lets you run a full Big­Com­merce store on your Word­Press web­site. You can login to Big­Com­merce to man­age your store and use Word­Press to add / edit web­site con­tent as normal.

There are hun­dreds of third-par­ty apps and inte­gra­tions that can be added onto Big­Com­merce. They have both free and paid apps avail­able in their app mar­ket­place. This gives you plen­ty of ways to add fea­tures like prod­uct pop­ups with Opt­in­Mon­ster, cart aban­don­ment, and more to your store as your busi­ness grows.

Big­Com­merce is a par­tic­u­lar­ly good option if you’re not very con­fi­dent with tech­nol­o­gy. The sup­port team is avail­able 24/7, and you can get phone, live chat, and email sup­port. Big­Com­merce will han­dle things like back­ups, updates, and secu­ri­ty for your store.

Price:

Big­Com­merce costs from $29.95/month. If you make more than $50,000 in sales per year, then you’ll need to upgrade to a more expen­sive plan. 

4. Easy Digital Downloads

Easy Dig­i­tal Down­loads lets you sell vir­tu­al (down­load­able) prod­ucts from your Word­Press site. It’s specif­i­cal­ly designed for sell­ing dig­i­tal prod­ucts, so it’s not a good alter­na­tive to Shopi­fy if you sell phys­i­cal goods. 

The Easy Dig­i­tal Down­loads plu­g­in auto­mat­i­cal­ly pro­tects your files. You can restrict how many times a cus­tomer can down­load a file. You can also let the down­load link expire after a set peri­od of time. These meth­ods pre­vent cus­tomers from shar­ing their pur­chased files with oth­er people.

Easy Dig­i­tal Down­loads works well even if you have mul­ti­ple dig­i­tal prod­ucts to sell. There’s a built-in shop­ping cart sys­tem where cus­tomers can buy sev­er­al prod­ucts at once. It’s also easy to make a cus­tomer account page, so that peo­ple can eas­i­ly view all the prod­ucts they’ve bought.

As with any Word­Press plu­g­in, you’ll need a domain name and Word­Press host­ing in order to use Easy Dig­i­tal Down­loads. It’s not a stand­alone solution.

There’s lots of help avail­able through the sup­port forums, videos, and tuto­ri­als. If you pay for the pre­mi­um ver­sion, you’ll get pri­or­i­ty sup­port through email.

Price:

Easy Dig­i­tal Down­loads itself is free. There are a num­ber of exten­sions avail­able, some also free and some paid. Pric­ing plans start from $99/year, and these give access to email sup­port and cer­tain extensions.

5. Constant Contact Website Builder

Con­stant Con­tact is best known as an email mar­ket­ing ser­vice, but the com­pa­ny also has a begin­ner-friend­ly web­site builder. You can use this to quick­ly and eas­i­ly cre­ate an online store.

The built-in eCom­merce func­tion­al­i­ty in the Con­stant Con­tact web­site builder lets you eas­i­ly choose a lay­out, add prod­ucts, and set up pay­ments. There are also fea­tures that let you cre­ate a logo and ana­lyze your web­site traffic.

You can try out Con­stant Contact’s web­site builder com­plete­ly free of charge. Once it’s time to launch your site, you’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan.

The drag and drop inter­face makes this web­site builder real­ly easy to use. There are over 550,000 free pro­fes­sion­al qual­i­ty images to pick from for your site too. 

Con­stant Con­tact also includes 24/7 sup­port through phone and live chat, so it’s easy to get help if you need it.

Price:

Con­stant Contact’s web­site builder costs just $10/month. There’s a 30-day mon­ey-back guar­an­tee, too.

6. Magento

Magen­to is an open source eCom­merce plat­form, just like Word­Press is an open source web­site builder platform. 

You can use the com­mu­ni­ty edi­tion of Magen­to with any web host that sup­ports it. We rec­om­mend SiteGround’s Magen­to host­ing for this.

There’s also Magen­to Com­merce, which is a paid plat­form. This includes lots of fea­tures and sup­port, but you need to ask for an enter­prise quote to get pricing.

Magen­to has a healthy exten­sions ecosys­tem that lets you add new func­tion­al­i­ty. Many of these are free, but a lot of them are pre­mi­um extensions.

Magen­to is a pow­er­ful plat­form with lots of flex­i­bil­i­ty, but it can be tricky to get start­ed with if you’re a begin­ner. It’s a good fit if you’re run­ning a busi­ness and have devel­op­ers on hand, or if you want to hire a devel­op­er to set things up.

Price:

The open source ver­sion of Magen­to is free. How­ev­er, you’ll need to pay for web host­ing that’s pow­er­ful enough to run a ful­ly fea­tured online store.

7. Weebly

Wee­bly is an all-in-one web­site builder and eCom­merce plat­form, so you don’t need to buy host­ing sep­a­rate­ly. It comes with dozens of web­site designs that you can edit using drag and drop tools. 

Wee­bly lets you eas­i­ly cre­ate an online store. Their plat­form gives you the abil­i­ty to sell dig­i­tal items as well as phys­i­cal ones. There are also options for sell­ing ser­vices and tak­ing donations.

With Wee­bly, you also get extra fea­tures like a mobile app to man­age your store, auto­mat­ed aban­doned cart emails, and more.

There are over 300 Wee­bly apps that you can add to your site to give it new fea­tures. Many of these are free, but some cost extra.

How­ev­er, Wee­bly doesn’t have the full range of cus­tomiza­tion options that oth­er eCom­merce plat­forms like WooCom­merce can offer.

Price:

Weebly’s busi­ness plan is $25/month. This removes the 3% trans­ac­tion fee that Wee­bly would oth­er­wise charge on all your sales.

There’s also a free ver­sion of Wee­bly, but this doesn’t include eCom­merce tools.

Which is the Best Shopify Alternative for Your Online Store?

For most peo­ple, WooCom­merce is the best Shopi­fy alter­na­tive. It’s easy to use, and fair­ly quick to get start­ed with. Best of all, it has lots of flex­i­bil­i­ty since WooCom­merce offers the largest exten­sion ecosys­tem and pre-made tem­plate library.

Mem­ber­Press is a great option if you want to offer dig­i­tal prod­ucts or online cours­es that peo­ple sub­scribe to. It’s easy to use and again offers lots of pow­er and flexibility.

Big­Com­merce is anoth­er good alter­na­tive that offers the sim­i­lar fea­ture set as Shopi­fy with­out the restric­tion of spe­cif­ic pay­ment gate­ways or extra fees.

We hope this arti­cle helped you learn about the best Shopi­fy alter­na­tives to cre­ate an online store. You might also like our list of proven and easy to start online busi­ness ideas.

If you liked this arti­cle, then please sub­scribe to our YouTube Chan­nel for Word­Press video tuto­ri­als. You can also find us on Twit­ter and Face­book.

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