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When looking at Weebly vs. Shopify, we recommend comparing the Performance and Basic plans, respectively. Price-wise, these stack up the best with one another while offering a solid core of features. Here’s how the two compare.
Credit Card Fees
Both Weebly and Shopify charge a standard 2.9% plus 30 cents to process credit card transactions through your store. That means on a $75 sale, you’d pay $2.48 in fees for the transaction to go through.
Keep in mind, these fees are just if you use one of these sites’ payment gateways. If you go rogue and set up your own payment gateway with a third party, your fees may vary.
Available Payment Gateways
Weebly offers you the choice of three payment gateways: Stripe, Square or PayPal Express. All offer the same transaction fee. Stripe and Square will be integrated into your site’s checkout, while the PayPal Express option redirects to PayPal to finish the purchase. If you choose Square, your customers can also pay with Apple Pay or Google Pay.
Shopify, on the other hand, partners with over 100 payment gateways. This is important because it can help you reach customers across the globe. It includes many of our top picks for the best payment gateways, including Stripe, PayPal and Authorize.net.
The default payment gateway is Shopify Payments. If you choose to use an alternative payment gateway, you’ll be on the hook for transaction fees as well as the standard processing fees. For the Basic plan, that’s an extra 2%, but it goes down to 0.5% on the highest-tier plan.
Products
With Weebly and Shopify, you’ll get to upload unlimited products on the plans we recommend. That’s a lot to manage, but luckily, both services offer product search features to help your customers (and you) keep track of things.
On Weebly, you can add the search function simply by dropping and dragging it into your site’s template. Users can filter by attributes such as color, price and more. The tool searches through page names, descriptions, keywords and photo captions to find what you’re looking for. It’s also customizable, so you can alter the font, colors and other settings.
Shopify can search for 50 products at a time. If you’re searching in the backend, you’ll see that they’re listed alphabetically by product name. However, you can sort them by date created, date updated, inventory level and more. It’s even possible to use search syntax to narrow down the exact products you want to find.
Storage
With unlimited storage from both providers, the options are endless. Feel free to upload dozens of full-resolution images per product, video tutorials, user guide PDFs and other size-heavy files without restraint.
There are a few small caveats. On Shopify, files are limited to a maximum size of 20MB. They can also have a max resolution of 20MP. And on Weebly, you’re limited to 250MB per audio file, 1GB per video file and 250MB for all other file types.
Integrations
Integrations are a way for you to connect your site to other applications, such as an Instagram store, SEO tool or accounting service. Weebly’s current selection of over 370 apps includes a mix of e-commerce, communication, marketing, social and site tools.
Some standouts include Google Ads (which makes it easy to sync up your marketing efforts), Facebook Live Chat (so you can instantly answer customers’ questions) and TrustedSite (so you can display your certifications to improve customer trust). These apps are a mix of paid and free options.
Shopify’s 8,000-plus apps are more focused on finding and selling products, orders and shipping, marketing and conversion and store design and management. For example, you can connect to TikTok to showcase your products, sync up with QuickBooks to manage your sales and even link to DSers so you can place hundreds of AliExpress dropshipping orders at once.
Shipping Discounts
Getting shipping discounts can save you hundreds or even thousands over the course of a year. And luckily, both of these companies make things pretty easy for you. Weebly integrates with Shippo, allowing you to charge real-time shipping rates to your customers. The only downside is that you can only score your 40% discounts at USPS and DHL. It’s still possible to ship with other providers if you link your account, but you won’t get a discount.
Shopify’s higher discount rate of 88% (77% on the Basic plan) is valid with USPS, UPS and DHL, giving you more flexibility. As with Weebly, you can also buy and print shipping labels right from your dashboard, helping you save time. And in some plans, you get free shipping insurance up to $200—a nice perk that gives you and the customer peace of mind.
Automated Marketing Emails
If you don’t want to invest in separate email marketing software, we have good news: both Weebly’s and Shopify’s integrated email systems are top-notch. Again, Weebly wins out in the design side of things, as it lets you drag and drop every element of an email to create a truly unique format.
Not feeling creative? You can also choose from pre-designed templates for newsletters, promotions, product announcements and events. Automated abandoned cart emails are only available on the most expensive plan—but they come with the Basic plan on Shopify.
Shopify also offers plenty of email templates as well as the ability to upload your own photos or add an express checkout button. We also like the Shopify Magic feature, which generates subject lines for you. You can send up to 10,000 emails for free each month, and after that, it’s $1 per 1,000 emails.
Customer Support
Weebly offers phone support with a real human being—something many other website builders don’t offer. It says you can reach a specialist during “standard business hours,” but it doesn’t note what those might be. Otherwise, you can utilize 24/7 support through email and chat. Weebly also has a thriving community forum where users can answer each other’s questions, as well as articles in a knowledge base.
Shopify’s support resources are extensive, with dozens of guides on every aspect of running your online store. You can get help with managing your site, selling, marketing and anything else through video tutorials, an online forum, webinars and even courses. If you do need to talk to someone, you’ll have to do it through 24/7 email or chat.
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