Weebly vs Shopify – Which Platform Delivers the Best Online Store Experience

Struggling to decide between Weebly and Shopify? Don’t worry; you have all the answers you seek in this post. 

Shopify is a popular platform focusing on helping businesses create an online store with less effort. Meanwhile, Weebly’s primary function is as a website builder; eCommerce is an afterthought. 

However, since Square acquired Weebly in 2018, more focus has been shifted to making Weebly suitable for selling online by adding more eCommerce capabilities and features.

Still, Shopify’s advanced eCommerce tools and Weebly’s afterthought eCommerce experience cater to different audience categories. 

Which one should you choose? 

Let’s find out in this user review of the Weebly vs Shopify comparison post. 

Weebly vs Shopify – Overview

Shopify and Weebly offer helpful eCommerce marketing tools that enable merchants to sell and collect payments seamlessly. 

You can access essential tools like inventory management, abandoned cart recovery, checkout pages, SEO tools, coupons, gift cards, and collect customer reviews. 

Also, POS and social media tools for selling on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok are available. You can sell in brick-and-mortar stores, in person, send transactional emails, track and fill order details, and many more. 

Setting up taxes, shipping rates, and prices and uploading products are all possible in Weebly and Shopify for eCommerce. They allow you to configure and add product details, like titles, meta descriptions, product variants, etc. 

However, one platform performs better, offering more advanced eCommerce functionalities, making it necessary to compare Weebly and Shopify for small businesses.

These and more are what we’re going to analyze in this review of Shopify and Weebly.

Let’s start with how easy it is to use both platforms to create a successful online store.

Ease of Use – Signup Process

Shopify’s signup process is more detailed and involves additional steps than Weebly’s. When you begin registration, you are asked questions to help set up your store.

Weebly, on the other hand, focuses on simplicity and is more beginner-friendly. The process takes only a few minutes, from filling out the signup form to accessing the drag-and-drop website editor and changing the default theme. 

On the signup page, Weebly asks whether you’re creating a standard website or one with eCommerce functionality. If you’re building an online store, select “I need a Website with an Online Store” and follow five simple steps, including adding your store address.

Shopify’s process is more thorough because of its advanced marketing features and broader functionality. During signup, you’ll be asked to choose the sales channels you plan to use, such as social media, in-person, or online marketplace. 

If you’re unsure, you can skip this step and decide later. Your choices may also depend on the Shopify plan, whether Basic Shopify or higher plans.

Despite the differences, both platforms offer straightforward signup processes.

Design and Customization

Shopify platform has an edge over Weebly in the theme design category; there are free and paid themes to build mobile responsive website design.

Though Weebly has more collections of free themes, Shopify’s theme gallery has more professional themes for building complex eCommerce stores. 

Considering most Shopify themes are created to suit eCommerce functionality, and Weebly has a mix of blogging and eCommerce themes, it comes down to preference. Blogging is an essential feature of a successful eCommerce store; having a website theme accommodating both needs can be beneficial. 

Weebly has 68 responsive themes (as of writing) created to suit most industries, like events, personal websites, blogs, and businesses. The good part is that Weebly’s numerous templates are accessible regardless of your plan—free or paid.

Plus, you can import custom themes from third-party developers to use on your Weebly website. So, I don’t think the issue of theme limitation has much to worry about in eCommerce templates between Shopify and Weebly.

On the other hand, Shopify has an option for free and premium themes. 

Shopify free themes are limited compared to Weebly (12 vs. 68 as of writing this line) but have 131 premium, customizable templates (as of writing). Most of them are designed for e-commerce stores. 

One of the things I like about the Shopify themes is that you get more information, access the theme demo page, preview mobile and desktop views, and get more details about a theme to inform your decision.

Additionally, the template pages are more organized, in better-sorting order, and categorized in a way that makes finding a suitable theme painless.  You can sort by catalog sizes, eCommerce functionalities, customization options, industry, free or paid, and even by most recent, popularity, and high or low price.

In a nutshell, Shopify’s theme demo page provides more information and feature access than Weebly. In Weebly’s themes page offers a basic demo view and nothing much to give you comprehensive knowledge.   

There are no options to preview mobile or desktop view on the themes page; you can only do that within the Weebly content editor. 

If you’re unsure of what you’re doing, this can lead to spending more time on design than required. Weebly can do better by providing more theme information on the demo page.  

When writing this article, Shopify premium theme prices range from $170 to $360. By the time you access the page, the price might change.  

Shopify won the ecommerce template sections by a wide margin.

Performance and Security

Both platforms provide unparalleled security and performance features protecting your site against known website security breaches like DDoS attacks, BruteForce, Malware, etc.  

Both Weebly and Shopify provide free SSL certificates, advanced login secured pages, and all sensitive information like payment details and personal identification information from site users with your website is Encrypted. 

As a hosted eCommerce platform, Weebly and Shopify guarantee 99.9% uptime, ensuring your website is always online, even during peak periods. You can investigate the Weebly network status for the past and current months. It shows Weebly web services performance data for the past 90 days.

Per Shopify’s uptime services performance information, check this page for the status of all service networks. On this page, you can view Shopify API, third-party services, mobile, POS, admin backend, checkout pages, and more network status. 

Regarding website performance, both platforms are optimized to deliver optimum user experience out of the box.

In the next section, I will compare Weebly vs. Shopify app stores. 

Apps Store & Extensions

This is where Shopify knocks out Weebly with a devastating blow (knockout). It’s hard to compare over 8,000 Shopify apps and extensions to the Weebly app center, less than 500 (as of writing).

Shopify’s app store offers various marketing tools and integrations, particularly for robust inventory management, analytics, and ecommerce enhancements.

Case in point: I searched both Weebly and Shopify app stores for apps related to SEO tools. Shopify returned 613 (as of writing) apps related to search engine optimization. 

Meanwhile, the Weebly app center returned 43 extensions in the same category (as of writing).

It gets worse when you consider that less than a hundred Weebly apps are free to use, with the majority being premium apps or offering limited free access. Shopify has over 3,000 free apps you can download and activate on your store.

Both platforms use filtering features to search; you can sort or search apps by category, store functions, marketing features, keywords, etc. Still, Shopify has better sorting functionality, making finding the right apps less time-consuming. 

If your storefront heavily depends on integrating app functions, go through both platforms to ensure you have what you need before committing to a paid plan. In this aspect, the gap between the Shopify and Weebly apps is far too broad to ignore. 

You must evaluate the app store database size when considering your option. 

Blog Functions and Editors Interface

Weebly and Shopify allow creating blog pages on their platform to support your store, reach more audiences, enhance SEO visibility, and consistently produce content.

Let’s start by creating content and adding elements to the Weebly page.

Weebly uses a simple drag-and-drop editor interface, making adding elements less stressful. But, if you’re unfamiliar with this approach to creating content, it requires some degree of learning and trial and error. 

Even as a WordPress user, I find it challenging to create content quickly. It takes several attempts to make it look exactly how I want it. 

Writing text isn’t challenging; dragging desired elements onto the sections or points you want in the main problem. Here is a text site I created with the free plan. 

As you can see in the image, the left bar contains elements you can drag to the page, and the top includes links to other essential marketing features like apps and theme stores, a setting page, and a help center. 

Leveraging my experience with WordPress, I created this test page on Weebly. You can do more; remember, I’m only doing this for fun and testing while on the Weebly free plan. This isn’t a project I wanted other than to get more information to help me understand how Weebly works.  

One feature I noticed missing is the preview button. I could not find any function to preview content before hitting the publish button. This could be better, especially in today’s digital marketing world. 

Weebly content editors require a steeper learning curve for beginners.

Adding blog pages or content to your Shopify store is much easier. Shopify’s user-friendly interface editor makes creating content and media files more manageable.

Unlike Weebly drag and drop functionality, Shopify stands out with classic editors, making it easier for beginners to compose content, format it, and add images. 

Write your text and add images and other media files using the file upload features. Down the editor’s page, there are meta tags settings you can edit to improve content SEO.  

You can write or customize the content excerpt on this page, enter a different page title, modify the URL, preview the SERP listing, enter tags, author name, etc.

Writing and publishing content for your blog on Shopify is much easier than on Weebly. 

While you can manually write page titles, add content categories, and write meta descriptions in Weebly, Shopify provides more on-page SEO tools and makes it easier to access than Weebly. 

Another win for Shopify is that it has a feature that lets you send draft content preview links to anyone for feedback. This is a helpful feature for collaboration and letting others contribute to your success even as they are not part of your Shopify store team. 

Supports Comparison

Another area in which Shopify has done well, as well as the best option between Weebly and Shopify, is support. 

Weebly help center for free users, and the personal account plan is limited to community forums, email, and chat support. If phone support is more convenient, upgrade to the Professional plan and higher. 

However, I don’t see how this can be a big issue, considering you can resolve your queries quickly with live chats or even more helpful assistance from other Weebly users. 

Shopify thrives by providing 24/7 support for all users. You can access the community forum and Shopify live chats on the free plan or premium.

Shopify does not offer phone support, but as a merchant, you can request a call back via phone, and an agent will schedule a call when available. Below is the step-by-step guide to accessing the Shopify request callback feature. (Notes: The image was taken from the Shopify community forum.)

So, there is a tie between the customer support comparison for Weebly and Shopify – Neither platform offers direct phone support.

Payment Gateways Integrations

When it comes to payment gateways, Shopify is the clear winner.

Shopify supports global payments, allowing you to sell in more countries and accept a broader range of currencies than Weebly. With Shopify Payments, eligible merchants avoid transaction fees entirely. 

Additionally, Shopify offers integrations with hundreds of third-party payment providers, supporting methods like credit cards (Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover, etc.), Apple Pay, and UnionPay.

Shopify’s approved payment providers include 2Checkout, BitPay, PayPal, Stripe, Coinbase, Payoneer, and PayStack.

You can integrate with almost any payment processing company to handle orders through your store.

For in-person sales, Shopify provides a POS system. The basic POS Lite version comes with all plans, but upgrading to POS Pro unlocks more marketing features.

Weebly, on the other hand, supports fewer payment processors. It allows connections to Square, Stripe, and PayPal Express. While these options are reliable, they’re limited compared to Shopify’s offerings.

Shopify’s credit card rates vary depending on your plan:

• Starter: 5% + $0.30
• Basic: 2.9% + $0.30
• Shopify: 2.6% + $0.30
• Advanced: 2.4% + $0.30

In-person payments with Shopify’s POS system don’t incur transaction fees, but online credit card fees still apply, though they decrease with higher-tier plans.

Weebly has a flat rate of 2.9% for online credit card transactions, plus a $0.30 processing fee. These rates apply across all payment gateways and plans.

Both platforms support POS systems for in-person sales, but Shopify’s POS operates globally (provided your store location is in a supported country). Check out this page for a list of supported providers.

Weebly relies on the Square POS system, which integrates well for tracking inventory and sales orders. 

However, Square only accepts payments from the US, Canada, Japan, the UK, and Australia. This can be a drawback if you have physical stores in other regions.

Weebly vs Shopify Subscription Plan

Shopify focuses on growing businesses aiming to launch and scale their online stores. In contrast, Weebly is ideal for beginners with small budgets and basic website needs.

Here’s a table comparing their subscription plan

Weebly Pricing table

Assuming you purchase a month-to-month plan, the price is slightly higher. The personal plan is $13, the Professional is $16, the Performer cost is $29, and the Premium is $79 for all month-to-month billing.

Note: Custom domains are not allowed on the Weebly free plan, but they include SSL Certificates and basic online store features, like Square gift cards, automatic tax calculator, in-store pickup, shopping cart, and inventory management.

Shopify’s Pricing in Table.

You save 25% on all Shopify annual subscriptions.

While it seems Weebly is cheaper than Shopify, the math doesn’t work out as straight as that. You must compare the features you need before the price.

For example, the Weebly cheapest plan offers essential features to starting an eCommerce store; the Shopify Basic plan provides all the features with two staff accounts and shipping discounts from DHL Express, UPS, and UPSP. 

It is hard to compare Shopify or Weebly pricing vs. features as business requirements differ, and no two eCommerce stores are identical. 

Shopify may be cheaper than Weebly, considering all the advanced e-commerce features and discounts you get. Going for Shopify could also make more sense when considering time vs. cost.

Shopify will save you more time managing your business, which you can use elsewhere. Still, you could spend more time managing the Weebly store due to its lack of advanced automation features.

Shopify pricing is not cheap compared to Weebly, one of the most affordable eCommerce plans. But remember, you always get what you pay for. 

Weebly or Shopify? Which one Should You Choose?

Shopify is the winner in many aspects, but is it the right eCommerce platform for everyone? 

It depends.

You should consider Weebly if you have less than a handful of products to sell (less than 20). You need blogging features, are on a tight budget, and are familiar with drag-and-drop editors. 

Weebly is one of the best alternatives to Shopify if you’re looking for a simple online store to start selling with all the necessary marketing tools and eCommerce features. 

For nonprofit organizations, artisans, novices, students, or small businesses with less demand for advanced eCommerce functionalities but needing essential inventory management, free SSL certificates, and SEO capabilities, custom domains, Weebly is a good choice.

On the other hand, Shopify is great if you have the budget and want to start an online store to make a full-time income, grow your existing business, sell in more countries, and access more advanced features. 

Especially if you do drop shipping, you should consider Shopify’s powerful e-commerce platform as your ideal store builder. Hundreds of dropshipping apps and suppliers are readily available to make your life easier and help you make money.

Pros and Cons of Weebly and Shopify

Even though Shopify and Weebly offer fantastic features and services in their respective stronghold, they have advantages and disadvantages.

Let’s discuss some of the pros and cons of Shopify and Weebly in this section.

Weebly Pros and Cons

Shopify Pros and Cons

Conclusion

It comes down to choice, budget, experience level, and eCommerce needs. 

If you have a sufficient marketing budget, want to grow your store into a full-time income, and expand into more locations, Shopify is the perfect eCommerce platform you should try.

It is the platform offering more advanced features and can handle resource demand business, with solutions targeted at different website needs. 

Shopify grows with you as your business expands and requires more resources; you can upgrade to higher plans without losing data or features.  

Weebly makes sense for small businesses or beginners looking to learn how e-commerce works and need a place to build their business without the high cost. It is sufficient for blogging on the side, making some money, and running a mini eCommerce business. 

Whether you choose Weebly or Shopify, both platforms offer unlimited storage and bandwidth to add unlimited product catalogs.

You may also be interested in reading our guide on WooCommerce SEO vs Shopify SEO; which platform helps with search engine optimizations?