Weebly vs. Shopify vs. Zyro: Best Place for Your eCommerce Business

As a business owner, it is crucial to create a website. Luckily, website builders have made the process easier for people with no web design knowledge.

Because there are many website builder options to consider, let’s look at a few features to help you filter them out. Time efficiency, ease of use, and affordability are some of the main points to think about when choosing the best platform for you.

Weebly, Shopify, and Zyro are three excellent builders to start your eCommerce website. All of them offer attractive perks, but which one is better?

In this article, I will review these eCommerce platforms to help you make an informed decision.

Are you in a hurry? No worries, here’s a summary:

• Weebly — similar to Zyro but less flexible. Weebly can handle small eCommerce websites, but not very suitable for larger ones.
• Shopify — an eCommerce website builder trusted by many well-known brands. Shopify’s arsenal of features makes it suitable for medium to large-sized businesses.
• Zyro — a newer website builder with eCommerce features that are affordable, powerful, and easy to use. It’s best suited for budget-conscious entrepreneurs.

Keep reading to find out more, and see out comparison of these builders.

Weebly vs Shopify vs Zyro — a comparison of features and pricing

In this section, let’s take a look at an overview of the features of the top online store builder. This is the three-way battle of Weebly vs Shopify vs Zyro. I’ll review them in terms of user experience, support, and price.

Weebly eCommerce

Powering over 1,6 million websites, Weebly is one of the most popular web builders in the market. Weebly is user-friendly and boasts a vast selection of eCommerce apps to choose from.

Weebly App Center provides tons of free and premium extensions to enhance your online store’s capabilities. They range from boosting traffic and increasing sales, to marketing and management.

What’s more, Weebly has reliable built-in eCommerce features. Some notable ones are multiple shipping options, product filter search, custom products, descriptions, and product import — which works with Shopify and Etsy.

Weebly accepts Square, Stripe, and Paypal as its payment providers. Taxes are handled automatically, and the transaction fee is set at 2.9% plus 30 cents.

When it comes to bookkeeping, users can export reports to Quickbooks or other accounting software in CSV format. This feature is only available on the Business and Performance plan, however.

Beginner-friendliness and support

Weebly uses a different editor for online stores, so the features are slightly different than if you’re just building a site.

There’s a setup process that takes users from adding features and uploading a logo, to picking a style and connecting to a domain.

If you skip a step during the setup, you can revisit the checklist from the dashboard. There’s also a sidebar with several menus to access different features.

However, eCommerce for Weebly and its editor is not really flexible. Rather than drag-and-drop, it’s more similar to point-and-click. Elements are fixed to an area, and you can only edit them from the sidebar.

Weebly’s customer support can be contacted through live chats, phone calls, or support tickets. They’re only available at certain hours, however.

SEO and marketing features

Aside from the basic SEO necessities like responsive design, meta tags, and sitemap, users can adjust settings such as alt image captions, page descriptions, and more.

On top of that, Weebly’s SEO can further be improved with apps such as MarketGoo or Positionly.

Notable marketing tools include Weebly Promote for email campaigns and integration with apps such as Social Boost and Visitor Analytics.

Affordability

Besides the free plan, Weebly offers three premium options with various benefits. Here’s the breakdown of what you can expect from each tier when you choose to pay per month:

• Personal ($6/mo) — connect to a custom domain, shopping cart, and payments with Square and external providers.
• Professional ($12/mo) — unlocks previous perks, includes item badges, product options, shipping calculators, access to remove ads, and advanced website stats.
• Performance ($26/mo) — everything from the previous tiers plus email marketing, abandoned cart notification, and advanced eCommerce insights.

Pros and cons of using Weebly

Weebly stores stand out in several ways, here are the advantages and disadvantages:

Pros

• Export website — easily export your website if you decide to change your hosting provider.
• Loads of extensions — Weebly App Center offers a lot of add-ons to enhance an online store’s functionality.
• Offline editing — you can edit your site offline, whether on desktop or the app.
• Custom store emails — users can customize emails with ease using a drag-and-drop email builder, no coding required.

Cons

• Less seamless interface — you can’t reposition elements or resize them. All editing can only be done in one area.
• No theme change option — once users pick a theme, they’re stuck with it unless the project is redone from scratch.
• No dropshipping — Weebly doesn’t have a dropshipping option.

Final result

Weebly is a user-friendly website builder that lets you create websites with eCommerce functionality. While the price is affordable, Weebly eCommerce features are not as powerful as the other items on this list.

Still, Weebly is a choice that small businesses may consider.

So, when it comes to Weebly vs Shopify, is there much to choose between them? Let’s see.

Shopify

As an eCommerce-oriented builder, Shopify offers plenty of useful features to build and grow a business.

Such capabilities on the Shopify platform include inventory management, multilingual stores, a fulfillment system, dropshipping, and comprehensive sales reports, to name a few.

What’s notable is the fact that Shopify offers support for up to 100 payment methods. The eCommerce platform even provides a built-in payment gateway called Shopify Payments that won’t charge a fee.

Should you have an existing website on another platform, Shopify has an easy solution to integrate its services. Users can either embed a Buy Button on their site or migrate it.

To do the latter, all you need is a Shopify account to import products and customer info in a CSV format. The platform will take care of the rest.

If you need more functions, Shopify has an eCommerce plugins store called Shopify App with thousands of extensions to choose from.

They are divided into several categories such as store design, sales and conversion, marketing, customer support, finances, and more.

Beginner-friendliness and support

Shopify’s admin panel allows easy navigation. Users can access store management features like new listings, purchases, and store analytics from the menu.

Similar to Weebly, you can only edit from the sidebar area. You can add, remove, and reorder sections as well as change the site’s whole appearance.

Any questions regarding the platform can be directed to Shopify’s live chat, phone support, help center, or their forums.

SEO and marketing features

Shopify’s SEO is specially tailored for online stores. It not only caters to page crawling, but also to product rankings.

It comes with built-in social media integration, allowing vendors to easily promote their products.

However, Shopify’s blogging SEO is not very advanced. For example, you won’t find blogging analytics or keyword suggestions. You may need to add extensions to work around this limitation.

There are many apps that can improve the SEO of a Shopify store. Some I recommend are SEO Meta Manager, SEO Booster, and Benchmark Hero for content auditing.

As for marketing, Shopify is equipped with tools like Shopify Email, Facebook Ads, and Google Smart Shopping.

Affordability

Shopify also offers three premium plans:

• Basic Shopify ($29/mo) — two staff accounts and essential online store capabilities for small businesses. The transaction fee is 2.0%.
• Shopify ($79/mo) — all the perks from the previous tier with some upgrades, such as five inventory locations, five staff accounts, reduced transaction fees to 1.0%, and professional reports.
• Advanced Shopify ($299/mo) — everything from the previous plans with fifteen staff accounts, eight inventory locations, an advanced report builder, higher shipping discounts, and reduced transaction fees to 0.5%

In addition, there’s Shopify Lite ($9/mo) that enables displaying products on an external website with a buy button. That way, visitors can purchase the items without leaving the site.

There’s no free plan, but you can try the two-week trial without inputting credit card information if you want to see what it has to offer first.

Pros and cons of using Shopify

Below are a few things about the Shopify eCommerce platform you may consider:

Pros

• Sell on multiple channels — Shopify’s Point of Sale enables vendors to sell products on physical stores, various online marketplaces, and social media.
• Easy drop shipping — drop shippers can easily connect their stores with suppliers such as Oberlo and Spocket.
• Theme selections — there are over 70 free and paid themes to choose from.
• Fulfillment Services — you can choose Shopify’s network or third-party services such as Fulfilment by Amazon to handle product storage and shipping.

Cons

• Limited interface — the editor is not very flexible. Similar to Weebly, it’s closer to point-and-click rather than drag-and-drop.
• Expensive — compared to the other platforms on this list, Shopify is much pricier if you use a lot of extensions or need a premium theme. Plus, there are additional fees if you don’t use Shopify Payments, which isn’t available in every region.

Final result

Shopify is an excellent choice for stores that need complex eCommerce features. I would recommend it for medium to large enterprises.

However, it’s not ideal for entrepreneurs on a budget, mainly because it doesn’t have a free plan and mostly relies on premium apps for advanced features.

Zyro eCommerce

Despite being a website builder (unlike Weebly and Shopify which are dedicated to eCommerce), Zyro can also easily accommodate online stores, whether they be for a desktop or a mobile device.

You can add features from the platform’s app market, such as real-time inventory management, gift cards, discounts, and much more.

It accepts popular payment methods like Stripe, Paypal, and credit cards, making transactions super convenient.

Additionally, its multilingual and worldwide shipping feature can help merchants target international audiences with ease.

You don’t need to worry about paperwork because the system will automatically calculate delivery fees and taxes.

Other notable features include a Heatmap and an AI writer. The former predicts which parts of the website get the most attention. That way, you can create the most compelling call-to-action.

Meanwhile, the AI writer enables users to craft content quickly. You can input sample sentences or choose from the available categories, then kick back while the writer generates content.

Beginner-friendliness and support

Starting an online store on Zyro is as easy as picking a template. The clean interface enables smooth editing, as users can simply drag and drop elements wherever they need.

The grid system is especially helpful since users can place and re-position elements in no time, creating a pixel-perfect look effortlessly.

When you need to tweak parts like colors, illustrations, sizes, and so on, simply hover on an element and choose the appropriate settings.

The setup wizard for building an online store will walk users through every step from adding products to adjusting payment methods. It’s quick and intuitive to follow.

If there are any questions, you can consult the platform’s knowledge base or reach the customer representatives via email or live chat.

SEO and marketing features

SEO can help build a brand. Luckily, websites built on Zyro are optimized for search engines.

First of all, the templates are responsive, web-safe, and most importantly, load fast. This is crucial considering how influential website speed is to site rankings.

You can crawl your website even higher by tinkering with the site’s meta tags, description, and more. That, combined with Zyro’s marketing tools such as Google Tag Manager and Analytics, can improve brand visibility.

Affordability

This online store builder is an excellent choice for budget-conscious entrepreneurs because it offers powerful features at a price anyone can afford.

To access Zyro’s eCommerce functions, you need to purchase either one of these packages:

• eCommerce ($8.99/mo) — comes with essential features to build a website and an online shop. Namely, unlimited bandwidth and storage, ad removal, unique domain name, 100 product slots, inventory and tax management, etc.
• eCommerce + ($13.99/mo) — sell unlimited products, enables website location, abandoned cart recovery function, and more.

Pros and cons of using Zyro

To summarize, here are the advantages and disadvantages of using Zyro:

Pros

• Value for money — users can gain full access to essential eCommerce features starting from $8.99 per month.
• No hidden fees — you get what you pay for as the eCommerce platform doesn’t take a commission from your sales.
• Intuitive user-interface — it’s minimalistic and user-friendly. The grid system helps align elements quickly and proportionally.
• AI-powered tools — the AI writer and heatmap function helps create content and optimizes its placement faster.

Cons

• Limited features — There’s not a lot of template variety, and some functions are still missing. For instance, there’s no integration with CRM software like HubSpot or Salesforce yet.

Final result

If you’re looking for an affordable yet powerful website builder with eCommerce functions, consider Zyro.

The interface is fluid and minimalistic, with a drag-and-drop feature that makes building online shops easy.

With the latest blogging feature rolling out, I’m positive the eCommerce platform is going to get even better from here.

If you’re looking for a more extensive eCommerce experience with more customization, you’re probably going to be deciding between Weebly vs Shopify.

Weebly vs. Shopify vs. Zyro — Which is better?

Zyro is an all-rounder website builder with eCommerce and blogging functions. It comes with budget-friendly plans that are easy to use and offer great value.

I strongly recommend it for entrepreneurs who are just starting out, especially if they have no web design experience.

Meanwhile, Weebly offers basic eCommerce features that are most suitable for low-volume stores.

While the tiers are affordable, they’re not as powerful in handling medium to large-sized businesses.

Shopify, on the other hand, focuses on eCommerce. It offers a wide range of features for building complex online stores, but it is much more expensive.

Also, Shopify’s blogging SEO feature is not very advanced. If that’s a huge part of your marketing strategy, I wouldn’t recommend it.

Now, it’s up to you to weigh the pros and cons, and choose the platform that’s right for you.

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