Starting an online business is both exciting and daunting, and there are a lot of decisions that need to be made before your site can launch. A big question you may find yourself asking is “Which is better, Weebly or Shopify?”
To help make your decision easier and eliminate any confusion, we’re going to break down all the key differences between Weebly and Shopify to help you decide which platform is best for your business.
What Is Weebly?
Launched in 2006, Weebly started as a site builder alternative to open-source platforms like WordPress. Its mission is to allow non-technical people, professionals, and businesses to establish an online presence — anyone should be able to build a site easy, quick, and cheap.
Over the years, Weebly introduced new services, extending its DIY capabilities and features to the eCommerce market, and is now focused on boosting its credentials by continuing to add new capabilities. Users count in the tens of millions, making it a worthy option for starting your online business.
What Is Shopify?
Launched in 2004, Shopify is an eCommerce platform that currently has over one million active online stores. To date, businesses built on Shopify have witnessed over $100 billion worth of sales.
Simplicity, customizability, and scalability are three pillars on which Shopify has built its reputation; and because it takes little technical know-how to run a successful Shopify business, the platform has maintained its position as the industry leader.
All it takes is a great idea, and Shopify’s themes, apps, and tools will make sure that you spend less time building your store and more time running your business.
Weebly vs. Shopify: Features and Functionalities
Weebly and Shopify make it possible to sell physical and digital products online, but essentially, Shopify was developed as a tool for online shopping while Weebly started out as a general site builder. Both can basically do the same thing, but because Shopify was built for eCommerce, its capabilities offer more options for customizing your store.
| Weebly | Shopify | |
|---|---|---|
| Summary | A drag-and-drop site builder that offers optional eCommerce functionality | An eCommerce-focused platform that gives you almost everything you need to start your online business |
| Difficulty | Intuitively designed for beginners, which makes site design extremely easy | With more capabilities comes slightly more difficult setup and site management |
| Domain & Hosting | Domain and hosting included | Hosting included |
| Themes | 15 eCommerce options | +70 eCommerce options |
| SEO | Basic optimizations are included with options to improve SEO through apps | Basic optimizations are included with options to improve SEO through apps |
| Social Media | Included | Apps required |
| Blog | Included | Included |
| Support | Limited support provided | Full support provided |
Difficulty
Winner: Weebly
Weebly is designed for absolute simplicity, which is one of the reasons it has millions of users. While a Shopify store can be set up in a matter of hours, Weebly can be set up in a matter of minutes.
Weebly’s intuitive drag-and-drop editor enables users to quickly customize the site’s theme and create impactful headers. Any frustrations you may have will likely be with the platform’s limitations in functions and tools, which come standard (or are available as apps) within Shopify.
However, for standard eCommerce sites, Weebly does provide a good selection of themes, backgrounds, images, and maps. These and other elements such as videos and text can be juggled around and put in place simply by dragging and dropping elements.
With Shopify, your only limitation is your imagination. The platform provides you with all the tools necessary to create a professional online store and promote your products across multiple sales channels. Every theme, tool, and function is designed for one purpose, to increase your sales in one way or another.
And when you’re confronted with a limitation, it’s possible to go a step further with Shopify, because the platform allows you to tweak the theme’s HTML and CSS through its Liquid coding language. This offers even more capabilities, but also may require changing the code yourself or hiring someone to do it for you.
When it comes to creating your site, you can’t get much simpler than Weebly; however, you will likely sacrifice some functionality as a result.
Domain and Hosting
Winner: Shopify
Weebly offers a free domain to all users of its Pro and Business plans, and free hosting for every plan. Weebly guarantees exceptional speed, optimal performance, and secure shopping.
While Shopify doesn’t provide a free domain, the platform makes it easy to buy one for a small additional fee. Alternatively, you can purchase a domain through another vendor, though we don’t recommend it. What all users get is free best-in-class hosting from Shopify. The platform boasts 99.7% uptime, level 1 PCI DSS security compliance, and a content delivery network (CDN) that gives your site faster loading speed to customers wherever they’re located in the world.
While a free domain is a nice bonus, Shopify’s superior hosting service provides much more value over the long term.
Themes
Winner: Shopify
Weebly themes are well designed, but they aren’t as crisp and professional as those offered by Shopify. Again, Weebly aims to keep things simple and eCommerce is considered an option rather than the primary purpose of the platform, so you’re limited to choosing between 15 theme designs.
Shopify is a clear standout in this category in terms of offerings, options, and professional aesthetics. Users can pick from over 70 mobile-responsive eCommerce themes segmented by industry. Furthermore, each element, feature, and function is carefully planned, designed, and positioned to promote more sales.
Weebly’s variety of themes and overall look will probably meet your business needs, but when it comes to themes, Shopify is easily a notch better.
Search Engine Optimization
Winner: Shopify
Both Shopify and Weebly provide themes that are optimized for search engines. Each also offers apps that allow you to optimize your store beyond basic SEO best practices. (It’s important to note that with any platform, integrating too many apps will increase your site’s load speed, which can negatively affect SEO.)
Comparing the SEO features of both platforms, they are almost equal but Shopify slightly gains an upper hand over Weebly.
- Heading tags are limited to H1 and H2 in Weebly.
- Shopify allows for easy syncing between your store and Google Shopping, opening up another way to get your products in front of customers through Google’s search engine.
Again, Weebly has all of the basics for a reliable site, but Shopify offers slightly more in terms of SEO.
Social Media
Winner: Shopify
Social media is an essential part of today’s eCommerce business. It’s the meeting place of your customers and a major traffic source for online stores. Weebly and Shopify take different approaches to integrating social media into their platforms.
With Weebly, users have the ability to add social media icons on product pages by dragging and dropping the preferred buttons anywhere within the page. You can also use an app to share your products on social media with a click of the button or automatically schedule your blog articles to post on your preferred channels when they go live.
Not only can Shopify bring customers to your site with functions similar to Weebly’s, the platform has revolutionized social media integration by allowing users to sync their online store with their Facebook store, which in essence let’s you take your store to where your customers hang out.
As competition continues to grow, it’s important to get your products in front of potential customers before your competitors do. If your target audience heavily uses social media, then Shopify is the better choice.
Blog
Winner: Weebly
Blogging is another opportunity to build an audience, increase organic and paid traffic to the store, generate leads, and boost sales.
Weebly makes it quite easy to add a blog to your site. The platform provides a variety of blogging tools that are far more comprehensive than Shopify; and with its drag-and-drop editor, you can start a blog in minutes. Some of its features include scheduling, advanced sharing, comments management, and social media sharing. The only big downside is that you can’t add more than one author.
Shopify provides the ability to create a blog, but the features and final look are lacking. You can have multiple authors, as well as scheduling, comments management, and social media sharing, but that’s not enough to redeem its weaker features.
- Frustrating blog editor
- Poor flexibility with layouts
- No category pages
- No related posts
If blogging is a big part of your marketing strategy, then you should really consider using Weebly instead.
Support
Winner: Shopify
Weebly lags behind quite a bit in customer support as its in-person phone support is limited to 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. on weekdays and 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekends. You can argue that due to the platforms ultra simple setup and maintenance, it’s not necessary to have 24-hour customer support. Although that’s partially true, it can be a scary thing for you to run into a major issue during off-business hours when the store is your primary source of revenue.
Shopify promises 24/7 help to all its users, regardless of the plan. Users can get in touch with a dedicated and highly knowledgeable support staff member through phone, email, Twitter, and LiveChat as well as many other ways. Developing an online store with Shopify is like working with a team. You focus on taking care of the business side of your store, and when you need support, a Shopify specialist is ready to help you troubleshoot any issue that might arise.
While Weebly makes it possible to get solutions to your issues, Shopify has invested a lot of time and money into guaranteeing top-quality customer support that is always with you.
Pricing
Before going into each platform’s pricing, it’s important to understand that you will likely need additional apps to make your store function the way you want it to. Both services offer free and paid apps, so this will make a difference in how much you finally end up spending on developing the store.
Weebly
Weebly offers several levels of service, but for eCommerce, you will need to go with the Pro, Business, or Business Plus plans. It’s possible to also start with the Free plan and upgrade to an eCommerce plan later. The following is what you should expect to pay:
- Pro: $12 per month
- Business: $25 per month
- Business Plus: $38 per month
The differences in service between Weebly’s plans are pretty straight forward, but if the primary purpose of your site is eCommerce, it’s best to go with either the Business or Business Plus plans as they provide several essential functions that the Pro plan doesn’t include.
- Item badges
- Item options
- Inventory management
- Tax calculator
- Coupon codes
- Item reviews
- Shipping calculator
- Abandoned cart emails (Business Plus only)
- And much more…
With all Weebly eCommerce plans you also get a free domain and a $100 credit toward Google Ads.
Shopify
While Shopify doesn’t offer any free plans, it does offer a free 14-day trial so you can get a feel for whether or not the platform is the right option for your business, and honestly, 14 days is plenty of time to learn the ropes. Shopify offers five pricing plans:
- Lite: $9 per month (this lets you add Shopify to pre-existing platforms like WordPress)
- Basic: $29 per month
- Shopify: $79 per month
- Advanced: $299 per month
- Plus: Starts at $2,000 per month but is negotiable
Compared to Weebly, Shopify is expensive but for a reason. That’s because Shopify offers a comprehensive set of tools and functionalities that Weebly has difficulty competing with.
Weebly vs. Shopify: Which Is Best?
When comparing Weebly vs Shopify, you can clearly see that there isn’t a lot of overlap between their target users.
Weebly’s strongest features are its low pricing and extremely simple setup and design. If you have little-to-no experience with eCommerce, or technology for that matter, Weebly makes it easy to build and manage an online store. Where you will likely run into problems is when you’re ready to grow your business and become limited by the tools and options that Weebly provides.
In contrast, Shopify is definitely more costly from initial setup to monthly management. But as long as you have steady sales, the platform’s comprehensive packages with advanced features and apps will be well worth the price. Furthermore, the tiered plans are designed to help you effortlessly scale up your business when you’re ready.
Selecting the best eCommerce platform rests solely on your business needs. So, make a list of your requirements and match them to the points made above.
