Weebly and Shopify are two names among eCommerce platforms that are designed to help merchants build their online stores easily and quickly. So, how does Shopify differ from Weebly? In this article, BSS Commerce Shopify will give you a full comparison of Shopify vs Weebly. Check it out below!
Contents
Shopify vs Weebly: At a Glance
Shopify Overview
Back in 2004, Shopify was first introduced under the name “Snowdevilb” by three young guys – one of them, Tobias Lütke is a programmer. At that time, they did not intend to build an eCommerce platform as you can use now. They simply felt dissatisfied with the existing website builders. Even Lütke might have not thought about how their business could grow up from a team of three to a 5000+ company to serve online merchants worldwide.
More excitingly, between 2014 and 2020, Shopify has increased its market share from 0.1 % to 1.9%. This is the fastest-growing rate when it comes to an eCommerce platform.
For those who might not know, Shopify is a fully hosted and cloud-based platform that comes with almost all you need to set up and run your business on multiple channels like online stores, mobile, social media, physical stores, and pop-up stores. All you need is to pay a monthly subscription fee for Shopify to provide all hosting, server, and web-builder tools for you.
Weebly Overview
Similar to Shopify, Weebly was built as a DIY web-builder to make selling online less hassle, cheap, and code-free. Great to start in 2007. Over 10 years, this platform has improved significantly to be more intuitive and easy to use, meanwhile, Weebly strives to have more and more capabilities on the ecommerce side.
We like that the platform allows adding content elements, from images to maps, with a drag-and-drop approach. At the same time, you can still use HTML and CSS to further customize the website. With this in mind, Weebly seems to be more user-friendly than the old WYSIWYG of Shopify.
However, eCommerce features are limited given the fact that Weebly is trying to develop its platform to be more business-friendly. As a result, beautiful pages created by Weebly are more suitable to be used as personal blog pages or for educational purposes rather than selling things.
Comparison of Shopify vs Weebly
| Criteria | Shopify | Weebly |
| Years of experience | Over 17 years | Over 16 years |
| Main users | For individual, small, medium, and large businesses | |
| Solution packages | 3 main packages:
3 alternatives packages:
|
4 main packages:
|
| Pricing | $25/month to $2000/month | $0/month to $26/month |
| Hosting and cloud-based system | Fully-hosted | Fully-hosted |
| Theme library | 12 unique Free themes and nearly 100+ paid themes | A range of FREE themes that are frequently updated. |
| Web builder | Easy interface, but with old-styled WYSIWYG | Interesting drag-and-drop editor. |
| Product management | Different product types with 3 options per product | Possibly limited in the FREE plan. |
| SEO optimization | Basic SEO features | Basic SEO features |
| Loading speed | Very good | Good |
| Mobile friendly | Very good | Very good |
| Sales channels | More sales channels integrated | Online store only |
| Shipping & Payment | Very good, especially for dropshipping | Limited to Credit Card and Paypal |
| Customer Support | Very good | Additional fees required |
Shopify vs Weebly: Pricing & Solutions
Shopify offers 3 plans with fixed prices with many features.
- Basic: $25/month
- Shopify: $65/month: for small business
- Advanced: $399/month: for medium to large businesses
✨✨✨ DISCOVER: Shopify Pricing Plan
Besides, Shopify offers 3 more alternative solution plans for business:
- Starter: $1/month: for casual sellers
- Retail: $89/month: for retail businesses
- Shopify Plus: starts at $2000/month: for large enterprise
Accordingly, you can simply start selling products at events and through social media and messaging apps with the Starter plan of Shopify ($1/month). It means you do not need to buy another website from the ground up.
Otherwise, pay a little more – $25/month for the Basic Shopify plan and you can build a complete website to sell more and flexibly.
The next plan, Shopify, is more expensive. In return, there are more analysis tools to help you understand and optimize your business better. Advanced Shopify, as its name suggests, comes with more advanced features – especially when it comes to shipping and payment methods. Nonetheless, it is not the feature-richest plan. The Shopify Plus is. The plan is recommended for a scalable store thanks to the unlimited customization ability.
Besides, the Shopify retail plan is for retail businesses. It supports selling in-store with features to manage staff, inventory, and customers, and tools for a simple online presence.
Overall, Shopify plans themselves are not costly. However, take note that there are extra charges on payments via Shopify credit card which adds some to the business expense. The more sales you earn, the more you have to pay for Shopify! See detailed Shopify fees now.
Meanwhile, Weebly comes with a FREE plan and 3 premium plans:
- Free: $0/month: with basic use
- Personal: $10/month: help connect to a custom domain
- Professional: $12/month: help to connect your domain and add more customization
- Performance: $26/month: add features that drive growth and manage operations
Those who have a very tight budget might find Weebly ideal to start with because it costs nothing. Subscribe to Weebly for FREE and you build a website under 500MB – enough to launch a temporary business. Hosting and drag-and-drop builders are available to use.
Paid plans offer extra flexibility to custom domains as you wish. However, the features are very limited when comparing pound to pound with Shopify. For example with Pro and Business plans, you only get some eCommerce features such as password-protected pages, site search, product options, Facebook ads, and tax calculators.
The plus side is those transaction fees are zero. Nonetheless, you have to pay the whole fee annually.
Weebly eCommerce vs Shopify: Key Features
Hosting and security
Hosting is one of the major costs when building our website. Luckily, both Shopify and Weebly offer it at no extra cost. More importantly, they will take care of all storage space, maintenance, security, and any technical problems. You can start your business today even when you have no command of codes.
Shopify hosts online stores on Debian Linus Servers protected by extra-secure OpenBSD firewalls and high-speed MySQL databases. Meanwhile, Weebly has an entire infrastructure of multiple data centers and a battle-tested cloud that is also secure and speedy.
All in all, Shopify hosting and Weebly hosting are almost 1 by 1.
Mobile-friendly themes
Weebly offers three theme options at your fingertips – built-in templates, customizable templates, and premium themes integrated with third-party providers. We appreciate that all themes are optimized for a horde of mobile responsiveness and are customizable with CSS and HTML.
All are good except for the fact that there are a limited number of Weebly theme providers and you had better look for ones offered by Weebly. Shopify themes, on the other hand, are both beautiful and widely available in both FREE and premium ranges. All are mobile-friendly and customizable.
To say, we both like Shopify and Weebly themes but have a bit of preference for Weebly because they are simply easy to edit without coding skills.
User-friendly web builder
So far, Shopify is well-known for its ease of use. Its interface is clean and intuitive in a contemporary content management approach – a menu on the left to access all content and features and the customization options on the right. With a pre-built theme, you can then add or remove any blocks. Just a small disappointment with the old-fashioned WYSIWYG editor.
The Weebly builder is more interesting, we admit it. This platform uses the modern drag-and-drop editor. You take no time to master the editor and you can arrange all blocks the way you want. The only drawback is that Weebly lacks a customization department compared to the theme.liquid of Shopify.
Unlimited product management
Shopify provides a more flexible tool to create and manage products – which makes it more eCommerce-friendly than Weebly.
First off, you can add any number of products to Shopify websites. Meanwhile, with the Weebly FREE plan, products’ content is limited to 500MB capacity. It means being inconvenient when your products have lots of images, videos, and other media.
Secondly, Shopify offers more product types compared to the simple physical and virtual products of Weebly. Particularly, you can create Shopify gift card products. Moreover, there are more configurations on product edit pages and collection edit pages so that you can manage products more flexibly. For instance, Shopify supports useful product tags.
Thirdly, Shopify has the unique Oberlo app that is favorable for you to find and sell dropshipping products. Truth be told, it is dropshipping features that bring fame to Shopify and help the platform become popular within a very short time.
SEO optimization
Both Shopify and Weebly come with essential SEO features like page titles, headings, metadata, alt text, etc. However, neither of the platforms offers advanced SEO like sitemap, robot.txt, URL rewrites, etc. The blogging function is also limited.
Thankfully, Shopify has a big contributive community of app providers who come up with apps to improve default features. In relation to SEO optimization, there are many built-in Shopify apps for SEO available. We also like that Shopify recently has speed reports to help you get an overview of loading issues and improve your store to be faster. Please remember that speed is important for user experience and search engine optimization.
Sales channels and point of sale (POS)
An online store is not the whole eCommerce business. Now that customers are ready to buy almost any time they are present on the Internet, the more business channels available the more chances of sales. For that reason, Shopify, which supposedly has various sales channels (Online store, Buy Button, Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, Amazon, POS, etc.) is more preferred than Weebly.
Shipping & payment methods
Again, Shopify is more business-friendly than Weebly because the platform supports a wide range of shipping and payment methods.
Take the shipping, for example. Shopify offers a built-in solution called Shopify Shipping for orders shipped from the U.S. or Canada. This solution is integrated with the most common carriers to update with real-time and favorable shipping rates and to offer customers a great order fulfillment experience.
About payment methods, Shopify allows you to connect your website to 80 gateways with a small transaction fee. Meanwhile, Weebly does not require additional fees for transactions, there are only Credit Card and PayPal options available to use on the highest plan.
Shopify vs Weebly: Customer Support
Shopify provides dedicated support no matter which pricing plan you are about to use. Even more, phone support is provided using a callback system and Shopify helps connect you with the apps’ providers if needed.
Weebly’s support is also good. However, you must pay a little more each month to get priority support. It will add the expense to the overall web development cost and Weebly turns out to be not as cheap as you might expect in the first place.
Shopify vs Weebly: Which Is More Popular?
As you can see, in terms of popularity between Weebly eCommerce vs Shopify, more people are searching for Shopify than those searching for Weebly, this makes sense when we think about how Shopify has grown its popularity over the past years.
According to Shopify’s report in the first quarter of 2020, more merchants use Shopify during the COVID crisis and the revenue of Shopify increased by 47%. This makes sense because Shopify is easy to use by small and newbie sellers who want to take advantage of their off-time at home. Not to mention, Shopify offers promotions and dedicated support to help their subscribers get through a hard time.
The number of Weebly’s users is increasing from time to time, but not as fast as Shopify. Accordingly, frequent users go around 30 million compared to 218 million (in 2019) of Shopify. Interestingly enough, there are quite many people searching for Weebly for the last 12 months, and the traffic to Weebly’s website is quite impressive. Thus, Weebly is very promising to get more popular in the future.
Shopify vs Weebly: Wrapping Up
Consider all Shopify vs Weebly comparisons as above, each platform has its own pros and cons. Based on what you need for your business, you can decide the most suitable platform for your online store. Shopify has a secured hosting and server system, an easy-to-use approach, and business-oriented features by nature. Whereas Weebly is a straightforward and affordable solution to try on. However, its feature list is not suitable when your business is growing fast!
If you favor Shopify over Weebly and wonder where to start building a Shopify store from scratch, feel free to contact BSS Commerce Shopify – a 10-year-experience eCommerce provider and Shopify expert in particular, to get a FREE consultation. We’d love to hear your idea and bring it to real life!
If you also wonder about Shopify and other eCommerce platforms, check the list below:
- Etsy vs Shopify
- Shopify vs. Magento
- Shopify vs. BigCommerce
- Wix vs Shopify
- Shopify vs eBay
- Shopify vs Volusion
