Shopify vs Wix: which is better to build your online store?

Choosing the right platform for your ecommerce store can be tricky. With slick marketing campaigns, long lists of features, and countless reviews to consider, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed before you even make your first sale.

That’s why we’ve done the hard work for you and compared 2 of the most popular ecommerce platforms: Shopify and Wix.

Shopify and Wix are both excellent choices to start selling online. So if you’re struggling to pick between them, read on. You’ll learn:

• The key differences between Shopify and Wix

• Which platform scores better across the most important criteria

• Whether Shopify or Wix is the best choice for your business

Wix vs Shopify: 12 key differences to consider

On a basic level, the main difference between these two popular ecommerce platforms is that Shopify was built specifically for building online stores, while Wix is a drag-and-drop website builder that launched an ecommerce solution in 2020. But there’s more to think about when starting your online store.

To help you decide which platform is the better choice for your business, we’ve split our analysis into 4 main categories to cover everything you need to know:

1. Ease of use: learn about setup and support

2. Features: learn about performance, customization, plug-ins, customer payment options, and security

3. Growth: learn about marketing and SEO

4. Cost: learn about pricing and free trials

Keep reading to dive deeper into each of these so you have all the information you need to decide which platform to choose.

Ease of use

There’s a lot to do when starting an online store, and a platform that’s easy to use can make the whole process less stressful. Luckily, Shopify and Wix are both suitable for beginners, and you don’t need any special skills like coding or web design to get going. Let’s take an in-depth look at how the 2 compare: 

1. Set up

The complexity of setting up your store on either platform depends on several factors, including the level of customization you need and how many products you’re selling. 

If you choose a basic template or theme, you can set up your store on Shopify within just a few hours. If you need something more complex, the same process could take a few days.

Thanks to its drag-and-drop feature, Wix has a slight edge when it comes to easy setup. Any change you make in the Wix Editor will look the same in your final store. This makes it simple to get things looking the way you want—even without technical know-how.

2. Support and learning resources

If you run into a problem with your online store (or you just want to learn how to do something new), having the right resources at your fingertips is a must.

Both Shopify and Wix offer a variety of help and support for ecommerce businesses, including:

• Knowledge bases

• Community forums

• Tutorials and guides

• Email and chat support

• Phone support

• App and plugin support

No matter the issue, help isn’t hard to find. 

For anything a little more complex, Shopify also has a Shopify Partner Directory, where you can hire freelancers or agencies to help with everything from technical issues to content marketing. Wix offers a comparable platform called Wix Marketplace, where you can hire services for every stage of your business. 

These platforms may add an extra cost, but Shopify and Wix vet each and every professional to ensure you’re getting quality work and content in return for your money.

Features

Of course, you can’t make a well-informed decision about which platform to choose without knowing what they can do. Let’s take a look at some of the most important ecommerce features Shopify and Wix boast, and what kinds of businesses they’re more suited to:

3. Performance

A slow, clunky website can wreak havoc on your ecommerce bounce rate, not to mention your conversions. 

Both Wix and Shopify are great in this area. But Shopify wins in this category as the more robust and powerful ecommerce platform—it’s specifically built for online sales, with more features, tools, and integrations for ecommerce.

If you’re planning to open an online store with a complex inventory or a large number of products, performance is particularly important to ensure your store doesn’t slow down your site and cause increased bounce rates or abandoned carts. Nevertheless, Wix remains a great performer for more basic online stores.

💡Pro tip: once you set up your website, use Contentsquare (that’s us👋), a digital experience insights platform, to see how customers interact with your store. With tools like Heatmaps and Session Replay, you can quickly identify any issues on your site and tackle them head-on.

For example, heatmaps let you see which product categories are getting the least clicks, or which CTAs (calls to action) aren’t attracting attention. By experimenting with copy and design, you can make data-backed improvements to boost your customer experience (CX) and your sales.

Contentsquare heatmaps show you where users click, move, and scroll on your site

4. Customization

Your ecommerce website design plays a huge role in how your customers feel about and interact with your online store. How much freedom does each platform give you to change the look of your site?

First, let’s compare the template options that come with Shopify and Wix.

Shopify gives you close to 900 themes to choose from. While 24 of them are free, the rest come with a price tag starting at $100.

Some examples of Shopify themes (Source: Shopify)

Wix has over 2,000 templates, with over 500 that are ecommerce-specific. Unlike Shopify, all of Wix’s templates are free.

A small selection of Wix’s ecommerce templates (Source: Wix)

However, Shopify is much more flexible than Wix if you want to customize your theme, as it gives you complete access to its CSS and HTML. This gives you the freedom to change anything you want.

While Wix allows you to add CSS and HTML blocks, you can’t edit the general code or style sheets of your theme.

If you want to change your theme later on, then Shopify is the better choice for you. With Shopify, you can easily switch themes with a few clicks. With Wix, if you want to change to a new template, you’ll need to rebuild your entire store.

5. Plugins and integrations

As your online store grows, you’ll need to integrate it with other apps and services.

The Shopify App Store offers integrations with an impressive 8,000+ apps, like Google Analytics (GA), Pinterest, and Kissmetrics, allowing you to do everything—from enabling customer reviews on your products to translating your store into different languages. For large ecommerce brands looking to scale up, Shopify is the better choice due to its range of plug-ins.

The Wix App Market has fewer integrations, but still offers hundreds of options, like GA, Mailchimp, and Instagram, to meet your business needs.

💡Pro tip: along with other essential tools for social media and email marketing, Shopify and Wix integrate with Contentsquare, helping you increase conversions on your ecommerce store.

For example, voice of customer (VoC) feedback collected via Contentsquare lets you gather customers’ opinions as they navigate your site. Does the design make sense? Is the product photography doing its job? By getting in-context feedback from your shoppers, you can pinpoint ways to improve the customer experience.

Place a feedback button on your Shopify or Wix store to find out what your customers think

6. Product and inventory

As you might expect from a dedicated ecommerce platform, Shopify has robust inventory management that can handle a lot of stock. You can upload single or multiple products, use stock management tools, and get revenue reports.

Wix is better suited for small online businesses, offering more limited inventory management and requiring extra apps for additional functionality. However, it’s still suitable for up to 50,000 products—more than enough for most ecommerce businesses.

For example, say you want to start an online furniture store and have 10 suppliers whose designs you’ll sell on your site. Wix or Shopify would both be great platform options. But if you have dreams of becoming the next Wayfair or West Elm, then Shopify may be a better place to start.

7. Payment

Shopify and Wix offer numerous payment options to your customers, including PayPal, Stripe, and their in-house payment gateways, Shopify Payments and Wix Payments. They also offer businesses the ability to accept other forms of payment, such as bank transfers and cash on delivery, depending on the payment gateway you use.

However, Shopify offers over 100 different payment gateways, making it a bit more flexible than Wix. Wix offers over 80 payment gateways.

8. Security

Shopify and Wix both use SSL encryption to protect sensitive user information (such as credit card details), along with built-in security features like fraud analysis. They are both certified Level 1 PCI DSS compliant, which means that your store is automatically compliant, too—and you need to be PCI compliant to accept debit and credit card payments.

Both platforms take security very seriously and have all the necessary measures in place to help you sell safely online. Ultimately, the security of your website on Shopify or Wix will also depend on how you configure and maintain it.

Growth

Even if you’re starting small, it’s good to think about how you might grow your ecommerce business in the future. How do Shopify and Wix help you market and drive conversions on your online store?

9. Marketing

Shopify and Wix have several marketing integrations to help you reach more customers, including:

• Email marketing tools that let you send targeted email campaigns to your customers 

• Social media apps to help you build brand awareness on your customers’ favorite platforms

• Paid ad tools that enable you to share your products with a wider audience

• Affiliate programs, where you can pay commission to people who refer sales to your store, so you can encourage customer engagement and increase sales without having to spend a lot of money 

That said, Shopify relies heavily on third-party apps for marketing, whereas Wix offers its own tools to simplify marketing, such as intuitive blog functionality. Wix has also partnered with Vimeo to create its own video editor, so you can make your own social media assets right on the platform.

🧠 Keep in mind: Contentsquare helps ecommerce teams move beyond basic analytics by revealing how shoppers interact with every pixel on your site—from browsing to checkout. Use its AI-powered insights to uncover friction points, optimize user journeys, and boost conversion rates. If you run a Shopify or Wix store, integrating Contentsquare turns your data into a powerful, actionable roadmap for growth—no guesswork, just smarter decisions. 

10. SEO

You can optimize Shopify and Wix for SEO, but Shopify has the upper hand in ecommerce SEO. Here’s why:

• Shopify’s clean and organized codebase makes it easier for search engines to crawl and index your site

• Shopify has many features and tools designed to improve your store’s SEO, such as automatic sitemaps and the ability to customize page titles and meta tags

• Shopify sites are fully responsive, which can help you rank higher on Google, and AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) is available for product pages

• Shopify also has a large app store with several SEO-related apps

Wix has some built-in SEO features and lets you edit meta tags, alt text, and URL slugs, but it doesn't have as many specialized ecommerce SEO tools as Shopify.

Wix has a slight edge in its keyword support and blogging features, which can help customers find your store online more easily.

Cost

How much you’ll pay to keep your online store running has a big impact on your bottom line. What sort of costs are you looking at with Shopify and Wix?

11. Pricing

Shopify is more expensive than Wix—including start-up and running costs.

Shopify offers several pricing plans, including a basic plan that starts at $29 per month. However, if you want more advanced features such as shipping and tax calculation, you need to upgrade to one of the higher-priced plans, which can be as much as $299 per month.

On top of that, you’ll need to factor in Shopify’s transaction fees and the extra costs for adding more staff accounts to your store.

Shopify’s pricing plans (Source: Shopify)

Pricing for Wix’s ecommerce plans start at $17 per month. But even their most expensive plan will only set you back $159 per month. 

You’ll also make a saving on your domain name, which is included in a yearly subscription, with none of those pesky transaction fees.

Wix’s pricing plans (Source: Wix)

12. Free trials

Shopify and Wix offer users free trials for their ecommerce plans—so you can try before you buy.

Shopify offers a free 3-day trial with no need to enter your credit card details. After that, you pay just $1 a month for the first 3 months on selected plans.

You can use the free version of Wix to create an online store without time constraints before committing to a paid plan. 

The free trials for both platforms come with limitations—to access all features or remove the platforms’ branding, you’ll need to upgrade.

Choosing between Shopify and Wix: which is best for your business?

Shopify and Wix are great contenders for anyone starting an online store. The best platform for you depends on the type of store you want to open, your business needs, and how much ecommerce experience you have.

If you want to get started quickly, need the ease of an all-in-one site builder, and don’t imagine selling a huge number of products, then Wix is a solid and affordable choice.

But if you want to scale your business and have more freedom to customize your site, then Shopify could be the way to go. 

Since both platforms offer a free trial, consider testing each to see which one best suits your needs.

Whichever platform you decide on, you’ll benefit from collecting user insights to understand what makes your customers tick. Digital experience tools like Contentsquare Heatmaps, Session Replay, and Surveys show you exactly how customers engage with your ecommerce site, what they like about it, and where you can improve. 

By tuning into what your customers want, you can create a high-performing online store that drives conversions on autopilot.

FAQs about Shopify vs. Wix