Both Shopify and Wix were established in 2006 and have grown to millions of users building sites on the basis of their platforms. Shopify was designed for e-commerce businesses only, while Wix is a multi-purpose site builder that has introduced e-commerce plans along the way of its development.
Nevertheless, the competition between these two platforms is tight and they possess almost equal market shares in e-commerce site usage. For instance, Shopify accounts for 25% of stores in the US, and Wix accounts for 24%. In some regions, Shopify has a bigger edge (Australia, Canada, etc.), while in others, Wix takes the lead (European countries, Japan, Brazil, etc.). Overall, there are 4+ million stores around the world powered by each of these platforms.
According to the latest statistics,
The Shopify's GMV reached more than $197B in 2022
The basics offered by Shopify and Wix
Wix is a reliable solution for e-commerce businesses. With it, you can quickly set up a store with no development effort. It provides a secure, free hosting to every published site and has 200 global CDN nodes to ensure fast loading times regardless of location. Also, it can handle high-volume sales and processes up to 750 simultaneous transactions per second.
Shopify covers all the essentials as well: site hosting, security, and server load distribution. It uses the Cloudflare CDN that covers 200+ locations in over 90 countries. Regarding the maximum volumes of transactions, it can process up to 10,000 per second (under the Shopify Plus plan). Since it’s built specifically for e-commerce, Shopify is continuously improving its offering based on merchants’ experiences and requests.
Besides pricing, Shopify vs. Wix differences concern some of the platform’s additional features. Let’s explore which ones.
Wix vs. Shopify: store design
One of the biggest competitive advantages of Wix is design capabilities. It offers 500+ free templates that merchants can easily customize. On top of the basics offered in the templates, shops can add features with the help of apps: for example, sticky add-to-carts, stock notifications, product badges, etc.
Plus, there’s the Content Manager section that allows you to easily create dynamic content. It means that you can create datasets that can be pulled out from any page / element and connected to any other page / element.
The theme editor works in a similar way on both platforms, but compared to Shopify, Wix offers more site blocks to work with. It offers a menu of various elements—from ready-to-use sections like testimonials to particular design shapes you can fill out, and you can add hover effects or animations to each element.
The checkout page is where Shopify offers more flexibility than Wix. With the latter, you can slightly customize the checkout with brand details and store policies. By contrast, Shopify-powered shops have additional options to add custom images, fields, express checkout section, marketing sign-ups, and even more possibilities with checkout apps lacking on Wix.
Another aspect related to store design where Shopify works better than Wix is internal search. Apart from autocomplete and error tolerance, it can power smart product recommendations even without any historical purchase data.
On Shopify, most themes are paid. It does offer 11 free themes, which are essentially the same but have different layout configurations. Those themes are a decent choice that covers all the basic needs, especially for small stores; although, the majority of Shopify merchants go with paid templates (that cost a one-time payment of $200-300). There are 100+ on Shopify Theme Store, or, you can use third-party templates from services like ThemeForest.
External themes can be used in Wix as well. Similarly to Shopify, merchants go with third-party templates for the sake of added functionality (which can also be added with apps). Speaking of apps, Shopify App Store has a way more sophisticated collection of over 8,000 apps, while Wix only features 500, with most of them not being developed for e-commerce businesses. There are a lot of things you can accomplish with free Shopify apps, while paid apps can help you set up advanced upselling campaigns, automate order tracking, and much more.
Wix vs. Shopify: SEO
Another benefit of Wix is its extensive built-in SEO toolkit. The platform takes care of server-side rendering, image compression, and sitemap maintenance. It allows editing every page’s URL slug, title and description tags, robots meta tag directives, and structured data values. It also has a URL redirect manager and supports GSC integration. Moreover, Wix allows managing Google Business Profiles directly from its dashboard and offers stores personalized SEO checklists. SEO settings make Wix one of the best Shopify alternatives.
Shopify does a lot of SEO heavy lifting as well, but it provides you with less control over your SEO settings. It automatically optimizes images, as well as creates sitemap and robots.txt files. For each product, you’ll have the possibility to adjust its title and description but no advanced options (for instance, you’ll have to use a dedicated app or development effort for structured data markup).
Wix vs. Shopify: payments
As for payments, Wix supports over 80 providers, including buy-now-pay-later ones and many local solutions. Recurring payments for selling subscriptions are also available. Although, it doesn’t have some popular gateways like Google Pay or Shop Pay for express checkouts.
Shopify is more well-versed when it comes to payments. It supports 100+ credit card providers from all over the world. It has its own gateway, Shopify Payments, and its own solution for accelerated checkout, Shop Pay. Since recently, Shop Pay also offers the Shop Promise badge that can be displayed to guarantee fast delivery (if the guarantee is not met, customers receive delivery money back).
Regarding payment processing fees, Wix comes with slightly more expensive ones, and they depend on the merchant’s region. For example, the highest tier is 2.9% of the transaction amount + $0.30 in the US. In turn, Shopify bases its transaction fees on the merchant’s plan, with the highest fee reaching 2% (the higher the plan the lower the fee). Plus, there are no processing fees on Shopify Payments.
Finally, both platforms have their POS systems, but the one by Wix is only available to selected merchants in the US and Canada, while the one by Shopify is available worldwide.
Shopify vs. Wix: analytics
Wix equips online stores with easily extractable insights via Wix Analytics. It includes a live view of visits, a breakdown of traffic, sales reports, referrals, and insights on top customers. It’s possible to create custom reports on your data. Plus, the analytics dashboard gives merchants simple suggestions on boosting traffic and sales based on current performance. All of that can be controlled via the Wix Owner app on the go.
Shopify’s analytics dashboard provides merchants with more granular reports. All plans include a live site view, as well as reports on finances, products, inventory, marketing, etc. The higher-tier plans also offer sales, profit, and customer reports. On top of that, Advanced and Shopify Plus stores are able to create custom reports. Compared to Wix, Shopify’s reports embrace more e-commerce aspects (for instance, there are no acquisition analytics or tax monitoring on Wix). Regarding taxes, Shopify even introduced a solution for US merchants to easily calculate taxes based on each state’s regulations.
Shopify vs. Wix: social media integrations
There’s no denying that modern-day stores should engage with their audience on social media. Between these two, Shopify does a better job of recognizing the power of social selling. It allows adding Facebook / Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok as sales channels; plus, it has a native app that helps find influencers. On Wix, you can set up a Facebook Shop and connect your Instagram account. The platform also allows you to connect products to TikTok, but you won’t be able to add TikTok and YouTube as sales channels. Wix social features are limited in other details: for example, you can’t set up Facebook Pay for accelerated checkout (which you can do on Shopify).
Shopify vs. Wix: pricing
There are 3 Wix e-commerce subscription plans: Business Basic ($17 / month), Business Unlimited ($25 / month), and Business VIP ($35 / month). The Basic plan doesn’t support selling subscriptions and selling on marketplaces. It’s also not suitable for multi-currency stores and doesn’t offer automated sales tax. You’ll have all that in Unlimited and VIP plus free access to some apps (Modalyst for dropshipping and KudoBuzz for product reviews). On top of that, VIP exclusively includes custom reports and Smile.io integration for loyalty programs. Overall, the pricing of Wix E-Commerce is much more affordable than Shopify’s plans, but it can be explained by a smaller range of available features.
Shopify pricing starts at $32 for the Basic plan, while Shopify and Advanced plans cost $92 and $399. When paid annually, any of them is 25% off. All the plans included unlimited pages and products, basic reports, and up to 1,000 inventory locations. Shopify and Advanced plans offer more detailed reports, more staff accounts (5 and 15, respectively), and lower transaction fees (on external payment providers).
Besides these options, Shopify offers the Starter plan ($5 per month) for social selling with no website, Shopify Components—custom pricing based on the components a store needs, and Shopify Plus—custom pricing for large-volume stores (starting from $2,000 per month). The latter includes exclusive customization capabilities (like a drag-and-stop checkout editor) and development options (event webhooks, Shopify’s query language for analyzing datasets, etc.). Overall, Shopify is more flexible in pricing than Wix, but it’s also generally more expensive. Lastly, Shopify offers a range of discounts (of up to 88%) on shipping rates from chosen carriers (for example, USPS), while there are no such discounts with Wix.
Comparison table
basic overview
Starting price (per month)
$32 (varies depending on the region; costs 25% less if paid for a year ahead)
$17
Free trial
Duration varies
14 days
Transaction fee
0.5-2% depending on the plan (no fees on Shopify Payments)
1.9-2.9% depending on the region
Unlimited products
Embedded payment gateway
24/7 free support
Number of apps
8,000+
500+ (not all designed for e-commerce)
Migration from other platforms
Can be done manually or with the help of apps (both free and paid)
With the paid app Cart2Cart
Mobile app to manage stores
features
Blog
Built-in SEO
Global CDN
Hosting
SSL certificate
Subscription sales
(with the help of apps)
(available in Unlimited and VIP plans)
Digital products
Social selling
Number of staff accounts
2-15 depending on the plan
Unlimited
POS
(only for selected US and Canada-based stores)
Inventory locations
1,000
No inventory tracking by location
Manual orders
Automatically calculated shipping rates
Automated sales tax
Only for the US
Only for the US (Avalara integration)
Own fulfillment network
design
Drag-and-drop editor
Theme customizations
Number of themes
100+ (11 free themes)
500+
Unlimited pages
Possibility to add custom code
Smart search with autocomplete and error tolerance
With paid apps
Site backup
global reach
Multi-language stores
Multi-currency stores
Multiple inventory locations
Automated translations
Local payments
Automated domain redirection based on geolocation
Market-specific product selection
Analytics & reporting
Live view
Marketing reports
Finances reports
Inventory reports
Product analytics
Visitor behavior
Google Analytics integration
Payments
Number of supported gateways
100+
80+
PCI DSS compliance
Credit cards
Google Pay
Apple Pay
Amazon Pay
PayPal
Crypto
Installment payments
Klarna
Afterpay
iDEAL
Wire transfer
Cash on delivery
Accelerated checkout
(including its own solution Shop Pay)
(only PayPal and Apple Pay)
Summary
Features
100%
80%
Design
90%
100%
Global reach
100%
50%
Analytics & reporting
100%
80%
Payments
100%
70%
