We see tons of new business owners and creators ask all over social media about a preference between hosted WordPress and Shopify for your ecommerce website. While we may be biased on the subject, we wanted to share with you a breakdown of why we chose WordPress for ourselves and recommend it to our customers, whether they are new businesses or growing businesses.
Essentially, Shopify has the advantage of looking like a simple all-in-one solution to get your business online; however, WordPress can seem like a mystery and a learning process to someone who hasn’t used either service. Our founder, Savannah, knows what that is like – and she tried Shopify before ever exploring hosted WordPress. Because of that experience, we have some insights to share.
First and foremost, many bigger businesses take advantage of entrepreneurs and small businesses by tapping into their needs at a price. Here at Accord, we’ve come a long way in discovering that a new business can succeed without spending as much as the big businesses AND without cutting corners. Shopify, in our opinion, is one of those big businesses that take advantage of the little guy. Take a look at the pricing table below pulled from Shopify’s website.
To build an ecommerce website at all on Shopify, your cost per month starts at $39. That’s not going to include your domain name that you’ll need to get people to your website. It also doesn’t include a professional email address at your domain name. Services that provide custom email address are often pricey as well. You’ll also notice that they limit how many staff accounts you can have for your business on each Shopify plan. Meaning that if there are more staff members, your staff will share logins. What Shopify’s website builder does cover is customer card processing, analytics, inventory locations, and shipping – all of which is easily mastered with your choice of providers in WordPress, along with a great deal of better options and resource that you control.
Out of the box, WordPress appears to be a blank slate – maybe too blank. To make life easier for creators and entrepreneurs, Accord hosts WordPress pre-loaded with a customizable theme and tons of plugins that you choose to enable for your website’s needs. For all of this, we charge only $3.99 per month. How is this possible? WordPress is an open-source platform that developers have been perfecting and updating for decades. It has changed with technology, and it will scale with your business without price gauging you.
DIY Website – Hosted by Accord
Build your website on a trusted unlimited network with the tools you need included!
As your website host, Accord keeps the WordPress system, themes, and plugins updated for you so that you don’t have to worry about keeping up with that. You’ll be able to choose what card processing service you connect to your store – we really like Square! Some processing services have options for in-person payments, and those sales can reflect in your online inventory. Integrations are also available for linking your website store to other marketplaces online. You can also link your WordPress store to a number of shipping service providers, like Shippo or PirateShip. Our favorite part, though, is the analytics! Your site comes with analytics through WordPress as well as Google Analytics. So you get to see what traffic you have, what parts of your site views looked at, and where they found your website link online. We also have all of our websites pre-loaded with the best WordPress Search Engine Optimization tools at no extra cost to you. With Accord hosted sites, you can have as many staff accounts as you need and as many customer accounts as you need. Your hosting comes with a customized email address at your domain (whether your domain name is registered with us or with another service). For that matter, with the money you save by choosing Accord WordPress hosting over Shopify, you’ll be able to pay for your domain name’s first year – and we’ll work with it whether you register your domain name through us or through another service.
Building your website is simpler than it sounds, and if you can run a business you can build on Accord’s WordPress. When you start, the base website is already there, you just have to edit it to be right for your business. You’ll be able to create webpages, blog posts, products, and more. And the integration options with services you already use are endless! We like to personally make sure you are comfortable with customizing your website, so we are happy to do a screen-share tutorial with any hosting customer. We are also available for any troubleshooting needed.
Check out these websites that are proud to be built on WordPress by Accord!
Evergreen History is a woodturning craft maker.
Show Me Productions is an event production company.
Jax the Pitbull is a dog blog supporting non-profits. Jax’s mom authored a Kindle eBook!
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