DEV Community

Cover image for Shopify vs WooCommerce - The Best Choice for Dropshipping 2025
Muhammad Furqan Ul Haq
Muhammad Furqan Ul Haq

Posted on • Edited on

4 2

Shopify vs WooCommerce - The Best Choice for Dropshipping 2025

Traditionally, starting an online eCommerce store requires some investment. The major portion of this money is used to purchase the inventory. Meaning that you need to have some products in stock before selling them.

But, dropshipping has completely changed the way we do business online. It introduces the concept of selling someone else products in our store.

To get started, we have two popular options. Whether set up a Shopify store or go with WordPress plugin WooCommerce.

Overview of Shopify and WooCommerce

Shopify is an online service that enables you to launch an eCommerce business with ease. Basically, they manage the technical stuff for you like hosting, security, updates, etc.

Whereas, WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin through which you can create and customize an eCommerce store according to your needs. It gives you much more flexibility than Shopify as you’re in complete control.

How Dropshipping Works?

In dropshipping, you need to source products from online Suppliers and Vendors. Basically, when someone places an order on your website/app then the supplier is automatically informed about it. They receive the order details as well as where to ship them.

Once the order is ready, the supplier ships it to the buyer. Our job is just to bring more customers and the supplier will handle their orders.

Here, we earn money through margins. Meaning that if a supplier is selling a product for $100 and we add that product on our website at $125, then we will earn $25 for each sale.

Dropshipping with Shopify

Shopify is a software to set up an online shop. It has tons of features that make it stand out from other eCommerce platforms.

For example, it has features like:

  • Readymade themes that are specifically designed for online stores.
  • Integration with 100 payment gateways.
  • Launch your shop in 50+ languages.
  • Out of the box support for Dropshipping.
  • Quickly integrate with social media platforms. For example, you can sell on Facebook from Shopify.
  • Intuitive inventory management functionality.
  • Support for Video & 3D assets.
  • Subscriptions.
  • Fast speed web hosting including SSL certificate.
  • Product reports and analytics.
  • Support for Augmented reality (AR)

It is a paid service that works on a subscription model. They have three packages to fulfill the needs of small, medium, and large eCommerce businesses.

  • Basic Shopify – Starting at $29 per month
  • Shopify – Starting at $79 per month
  • Advanced Shopify – Starting at $299 per month

Dropshipping with WooCommerce

On the other hand, WooCommerce is an open-source WordPress plugin that allows you to host an online shop yourself.

There are many hosting companies out there, but using the best one is very important for the overall success of the eCommerce business. Here’s a comparison between the best WordPress hosting to help you make an informed decision.

The major reason for using WooCommerce is that Shopify is very costly. They even charge a fee per sale. But, while using WooCommerce we don’t have to give any subscription fee.

As we have the complete source code of WooCommerce so we can easily customize it for any special use case.

Image of Timescale

🚀 pgai Vectorizer: SQLAlchemy and LiteLLM Make Vector Search Simple

We built pgai Vectorizer to simplify embedding management for AI applications—without needing a separate database or complex infrastructure. Since launch, developers have created over 3,000 vectorizers on Timescale Cloud, with many more self-hosted.

Read more

Top comments (1)

Collapse
 
ket_bento_e503b9a6ce4b872 profile image
Ket Bento • Edited

Recently, I've also started working on dropshipping and building my career in this direction. Specifically, I’m focused on wallpaper dropshipping .

As for Shopify vs WooCommerce, both platforms are great, but it really depends on your specific needs. Shopify offers more ease of use and excellent built-in tools for dropshipping, while WooCommerce gives you more customization options if you're looking for a more flexible setup with lower ongoing costs. If you're just starting out and prefer a more hands-off experience, Shopify might be the way to go. However, if you're already comfortable with WordPress and want to scale your store with more control over the details, WooCommerce is a strong contender.

Billboard image

The Next Generation Developer Platform

Coherence is the first Platform-as-a-Service you can control. Unlike "black-box" platforms that are opinionated about the infra you can deploy, Coherence is powered by CNC, the open-source IaC framework, which offers limitless customization.

Learn more