Ecommerce Uncovered - Shopify Vs Woocommerce

Music Now recently we were having a conversation with some friends who are also in e-commerce and were discussing the idea of perhaps Tess and I doing a course one day and they raised the question would we move to a platform like Shopify The obvious reason being that if you're going to try to make money from teaching people about e-commerce, Shopify have an incredible affiliate program. If you're not sure what an affiliate program is, it means that if we promote Shopify as being the platform of choice and we have a link and you click on that link and then you go and register with Shopify, we make money of you basically registering Shopify.

And Shopify's affiliate program is actually really good. You actually make money every single month that you're part of Shopify. So if we recommended it to hundreds of people, we can make thousands of dollars a month just from that link alone. Now, I don't necessarily have an inherent problem with affiliate programs like this.

I can understand why people do it. But it It has caused a bit of an issue in that if someone's doing a review of different platforms, for example we use WooCommerce which is free, a plugin for WordPress. Now, if someone's doing a Shopify versus WooCommerce review, because WooCommerce is free there's no kickbacks there, but if you say that Shopify is a better platform and somebody clicks on on your Shopify link well you make money out of it So that really comes down to an individual I guess integrity about promoting which might be the better platform based on its actual merits as opposed to the affiliate program but it does make it difficult makes it difficult to know who to trust and who to listen to most ecommerce courses I know of at the moment online really to promote Shopify quite heavily and I can't say whether or not they're doing that for the money look Shopify I can't I've never actually Shopify and there are reasons for that I it seems by all accounts it sounds like it's a good platform but there's some very big reasons why we can't recommend it to anybody that's following our particular model.

When you start an e-commerce store in a niche or a niche, you don't have a guaranteed way of knowing that that particular e-commerce store is going to be an amazing success. There's just no way of knowing. We've got a lot of different ways to figure out whether or not we might be able to rank the site in Google by looking at various competition metrics we can look at the potential profitability of the product there are a lot of ways you can massively increase your chances for success but you can never ever guarantee it if you start in a particular nation has all the right metrics there could be three other people starting in that particular niche on the same day that you do and you won't know for six to twelve months that they're in there and they're going hard and that might make it very difficult for you to do well.

So there's just no guaranteed way. So one of the things that we always do when we help other people and we do mentor quite a few other people is tell them to start in at least five niches that might if you new to this that might seem like a huge task you know it might seem like a herculean task just as that one but in actual fact it's not that difficult particularly when you can just sort of clone you you build one site you can clone it and then change the products and change the banners etc so the reason we say start five because if it takes you a year or two to really get an e-commerce site going, which I can do, and you've chosen a niche that just for whatever reason doesn't work out and you have to start again, well two things might happen.

One, you might say this e-commerce thing doesn't work. When in actual fact, you might be doing everything right, it's just that you've just chosen a bad niche. Or number two, it will work and you'll go, man, I wish I had started more. That is something that have seen we have seen some of our people that we've mentored where they have had actually really good success with their first one but man they wish they'd started more so based on that if you're going to start five sites the difference between starting five sites with something like Shopify where you're paying you know $29 a month even for a basic e-commerce store plus a percentage of sales unless I think if you use their their credit card pressing processing facilities all of a sudden you're paying a hundred more than $150 a month for these five stores some of which may not work out whereas with blue commas because it's free you can actually put them all on them the same hosting for like ten bucks a month until you figure out which ones are really gonna work for you and And gosh after a year or 12 to 18 months of pushing these stores the amount of money that you save by going with the WooCommerce platform over something like Shopify is crazy You know we talking thousands of dollars So that our reason we couldn in all good conscience say definitely start with Shopify because, again, nothing inherently against Shopify other than the actual cost of getting started.

so we're commerce I would say definitely you know it has its drawbacks as well as you've got a lot to learn a lot more about how to set the site up where Shopify you have more help and with a commerce sometimes when you upgrade one plug-in it'll something else will stop working so there's other things you need to be aware of so again we commerce is not without drawbacks but for for us teaching somebody else how to do what we've done we would have to go with something like with commerce just because we believe that the risk of only starting in one niche is too high it's just too high whereas if you start in a few you'll either you will first of all you have more chance of success more chance of finding at least one really good one and and hopefully you'll find more than one.

And when you get a couple of years of interest, then you'll be able to quit your job or even be able to do more than that. So that's it. That's why we would say WooCommerce over Shopify. Might be a little bit of a different angle than other people talk about.

We'll talk about the different features, but for us it's very much about the business model as a whole. I hope that helps. Thank you.