The ecommerce platform market is very big, and growing fast! Two key competing ecommerce platforms that you can use entirely for free are Big Cartel and Ecwid. WooCommerce is also a key competing product, with a huge userbase – but this is a WordPress plugin (rather than a standalone store building tool). Additionally, it gives you access to a website building tool and an online course selling tool, meaning that it can be viewed as a direct alternative to Shopify. Prinitfy may seem like an odd choice to include in a Shopify alternatives roundup – it’s traditionally viewed as a print-on-demand service that you typically integrate with Shopify. You can learn more about Webflow in our Webflow review or see how it compares to Shopify in our Webflow versus Shopify comparison. You can learn more about ClickFunnels and how it stacks up against Shopify in our ClickFunnels vs Shopify comparison; alternatively, check out our ClickFunnels review. The main advantage of selling on Etsy’s marketplace rather than via a standalone Shopify store is – as is the case with Amazon and eBay – the access to an existing audience of consumers.
It brings with it a similar advantage over Shopify, namely access to a huge existing audience of shoppers. The other key advantage of using eBay over Shopify is that if you want to run auctions, it’s a much better tool; additionally, so long as you’re listing less than 250 items on your eBay store, there are no monthly fees to worry about (but that said, commission will be applied on any sales). The other advantage of using Amazon over Shopify is that you don’t have to worry that much about web design tasks – domain registration, graphic design, navigation design, UX, copywriting and so on. Now it has to be said that by comparison to Shopify, Printify’s Pop-Up Store feature is a very simple store builder – the customization options are minimal and you won’t be able to map the store you build with it to a custom domain. The main disadvantages of Shopify are that it only comes with a few bundled themes; gaining key features often requires purchasing an app; product options are limited; and transaction fees apply if you use a third-party payment processor. This is not always a financial transaction.
It applies fairly ungenerous limits to the number of items you can sell; doesn’t let you use many payment gateways; and it is not as user-friendly as Shopify (generally speaking, to get the most out of it, some coding knowledge is required). So far in this post I’ve discussed a range of Shopify alternatives that let you build an online store. The downsides of using Amazon over Shopify are that you have far less control over your brand and less opportunities for content marketing, and it’s also not remotely as good for dropshipping. You can learn more about the differences between Shopify and انجمن; full report, Amazon (and how to use both together) in our Shopify vs Amazon comparison. You can learn more about the feature (and Printify in general) in our full Printify review or our YouTube video review of the platform. It’s certainly one of the best – it’s easy to use, feature packed and highly scalable, and is considered by many to be the ‘industry standard’ solution for building a store (particularly a dropshipping store). This is because in addition to handling the print on demand side of things for you, Printify comes with a standalone store builder – its ‘Pop-Up Store’ feature.
Take advantage of the valuable resources around you, namely humans! But you can still use it to sell products on, and the main advantage of doing this rather than building a Shopify store is that you are gaining access to a ready-made (and enormous) audience of Amazon shoppers. But since Shopify and Amazon can be made to work well together (via an official ‘Buy with Prime for Shopify’ app and also a selection of third party apps that are available from Shopify’s app store), it’s usually in merchants’ interests to sell on both platforms. Unlike Amazon and eBay’s audience however, Etsy’s is a ‘niche’ one – one that is primarily interested in handcrafted, personalized or vintage goods. As for Etsy’s ‘Pattern’ store builder, this is a much less scalable and sophisticated ecommerce solution than Shopify – but it is significantly cheaper (it costs $15 per month, $24 cheaper than Shopify’s ‘Basic’ plan for building an ecommerce store) and it integrates very neatly with Etsy.
