Is Shopify better than Wix for building an online store?

Understanding the Core Difference

The answer depends on your business goals and scale. Wix is a versatile website builder that includes ecommerce capabilities, making it ideal for small businesses, creatives, and service providers. Shopify is purpose-built as an ecommerce platform, designed specifically for online selling and scaling retail operations.

Where Wix Excels

Wix shines with its intuitive drag-and-drop interface that gives you exceptional design flexibility. You can create visually stunning websites without any coding knowledge. The platform is perfect for businesses that need a professional website with ecommerce functionality as a secondary feature.

For small stores with simple product catalogs (under 500 products), Wix provides solid ecommerce basics at competitive pricing. The customizable checkout experience is available on all plans, and you get up to 50,000 product capacity—more than sufficient for most small businesses. The platform also includes helpful tools like an SEO wizard and supports around 800+ app integrations.

Where Shopify Takes the Lead

Shopify dominates when it comes to pure ecommerce power and scalability. The platform offers unlimited products across all plans, compared to Wix's 50,000 maximum. This makes a significant difference as your business grows.

The real advantages become apparent in advanced features: Shopify provides robust multi-channel selling, sophisticated inventory management, detailed sales analytics, and abandoned cart recovery tools. With over 8,000 ecommerce-specific integrations, Shopify's app ecosystem is 10 times larger than Wix's, giving you access to specialized tools for marketing, fulfillment, and customer management.

Shopify also excels in international expansion with automatic tax calculations for multiple regions and support for over 130 currencies. The platform offers shipping discounts up to 88% through carrier partnerships, and seamlessly integrates online and offline sales through its point-of-sale system.

Making Your Decision

Choose Wix if you're building your first online presence, prioritize design flexibility, have a small product catalog, or need a content-focused website that also sells products. It's user-friendly, affordable, and perfect for service-based businesses or creators who want an attractive online presence.

Choose Shopify if you're serious about scaling an ecommerce business, manage complex inventory, need advanced reporting and analytics, plan to sell across multiple channels, or require extensive third-party integrations for specialized functionality.

Neither platform is inherently "better"—they serve different purposes. Wix is the better choice for small stores and businesses where ecommerce is secondary to content and design. Shopify is superior for dedicated online retailers focused on growth and sales optimization.

For those committed to the Wix platform, the ecommerce features continue to improve and remain highly competitive for small to medium-sized stores. The key is matching the platform to your business model and growth trajectory.