Which site or cms to choose in dropshipping to create your shop?

Many sites like shopify , dropizi, prestashop or woocommerce with wordpress exist to create a website and an online dropshipping store . What should be your choice to create your online sales site? Whether for dropshipping or classic e-commerce , here is the comparison and my opinion without any moderation.

Create a lifelong business that lasts

The goal of your e-commerce site, of course, in dropshipping is often to do a good job of making money. But nothing like a business that will last for months and months. For that, you need a solid solution. An all in one that allows you not to fight with 1000 external services and which are optimized for the platform.

I’ll give you an example, you have to search for products and then import them to your dropshipping supplier . You must follow the stock , the turnover while continuing to create a site, send follow-up emails, modify your payment form… Then you change business, you keep the same site but change supplier, import another list of products, set up a strategy… Frankly, there is no better than having a site coded from A to Z by a performance level team, but that would take forever. So, that’s why solutions like Shopify, Dropizi (my opinion for the latter is salty…) or other exist. Thanks to CMS, you will clearly save time.

Your job is not to look for 50 years of plugins and understand them, it’s to have a site that is efficient with all the tools you need and to have control of the site, to be able to modify it step by step, no matter you have products which are from aliexpress , big buy or other suppliers. (By the way, don’t build your site with bigbuy, it’s canned crap). Now that’s done, let’s compare the different sites to create an online store.

The list of sites for dropshipping and the advantages

I will not talk about Selz or Wix here , which, strangely even if they are not optimized for large volumes, can be interesting for small businesses. I run a few things on Selz myself , it’s quick to set up and does the job well. Here is the ranking:

Shopify, the most accessible and ultra efficient

Yes, although it has a certain cost, you have everything at your fingertips. Do you need an extension? One click and it’s done. It’s fluid, no hassle with the code, it’s pro if you use good themes for ecommerce. Besides, it doesn’t “blink”. You don’t need to worry about the technicalities. If suddenly you’re on TV and you have the right offer, your site will hold up against the load of users. This is a considerable time saver.

The biggest advantage is therefore its ease of use and its many applications. The biggest flaws are the fact that you can’t change everything in a few clicks (I’m thinking of the payment form in particular) and the monthly cost which can be heavy at the start if you have little income. The interface is clearly more motivating than any.

It’s easy with Shopify to offer a beautiful catalog of products, whether it’s a general or niche store. The merchandise is well highlighted and well presented. It’s super easy to apply your graphic charter so that your store looks like your brand image, without involving a developer. The user experience is at the heart of the subject, allowing to maximize the understanding of the site in order to generate a sale. It is very difficult to create an ugly website or online store with Shopify that leaves you in control of the main elements.

Thus, launching a store with Shopify is super simple. The payment system is integrated, you do not need to create one. Likewise, your site is hosted at Shopify with its domain name, so no need to link your site with other services or hosting. Managing the store and orders, informing of delivery times is done in a few clicks, the interface could be easily understood by a child. Below is the Shopify dashboard which allows you to follow the evolution of the turnover. Of course, there is no limit to the number of products, you can manage inventory even without technical skills, that’s the art of Shopify: being able to sell with an e-commerce store quickly created , without the fuss.

WordPress with Woocommerce, my great (but complicated) love

I use wordpress extensively. You must be wondering why am I teaching it less? Because… managing a wordpress generally requires a lot of headaches. The interface is not as sexy and pretty as shopify and you have to tweak the code from time to time to make everything work. But it’s ultra-cheap, there are apps for everything and it’s customizable from A to Z. The big drawback is therefore the loss of time getting the tool in hand and a few headaches (but a once you’re used to it, it sends wood), the ugly side of the admin interface (and again, it’s detail) and the fact that if you have a large peak of visitors, it is better to have prepared your servers, CDNs, etc. So analyze your market well to find out how many customers you are going to land and prepare your stock of your flagship items! vat , include google analytics, synchronize with Twitter, mailchimp, export everything in CSV to your distributor. It is he who has the most flexibility (especially with Elementor to create beautiful product sheets ).

For example in WordPress which is an e-commerce platform with Woocommerce, it is not uncommon to have to tamper with the CSS code and the html a little so that the site is perfectly responsive despite the templates. There are few turnkey solutions that match despite the multitude of themes. The admin interface is not really ergonomic for creating your site. But it is certain that you can do extraordinary things with it. Only for the payment methods and the payment form that you can modify, while this is not possible with Shopify. So don’t be afraid to mess around with the source code, you’ll get used to it soon enough! Start with a free template like Ocean Wp which is excellent for online multi-channel commerce, the configuration will be done quickly. As for web hosting, I recommend the formulas at 1&1 ionos with a super fast and simple installation of a merchant site under wordpress. Having your own store at a much lower price than Shopify while being more professional is of course possible! One of the only things that still bothers me is the difficulty of tracking the conversion rate of your visitors into customers, which can be solved with a few apps and extensions.

Prestashop, Magento and Drupal, those who have muscle but don’t show it

Certainly the solutions that I have tested the least. Frankly, it’s pretty. The redoubt site is mounted on prestashop and it’s professional, clean. These are open source CMS solutions. You think at the beginning that it costs you nothing but… To have a beautiful site that runs well, you will have to align the tickets (theme, functionality, etc.). As much as the base of the site costs nothing, the bill will go up very quickly. Now it’s up to you to do the comparison because in reality, these are Shopify’s sexiest competitors.

The advantage is its open source side, its community, its manageability. I will not mention Drupal which is excellent but clearly corresponds to teams with dev. Disadvantage ? In reality, if we combine everything, the bill goes up very quickly. Rather risky to set up an ephemeral dropshipping site. In reality, if you have the budget and if these solutions were much more competitive, Shopify could clearly be worried. So you have to buy a particular prestashop module to do this or that element. Creating a business on the internet is much more complicated if only to follow the tracking number here against Shopify. Regardless of the cms you use, you can also do BtoC and BtoB.

Dropizi, the one who pretends to be Shopify but isn’t

I received an incredible number of emails on this subject “is it true that dropizi is better than shopify? Intel or intel talked about it on their site”. Yes, I also do affiliation, but each time I offer products and services that hold up, that bring something. Those who sell Dropizi just want to earn commission, but frankly there is currently nothing to defend this service against Shopify. So I never agreed to join it. Why ? Because Dropizi is currently in my eyes an amputated Shopify that does not hold up, intended to create an e-commerce store with a rather wobbly webmarketing.

I’m not saying it’s ugly. We can make pretty sites and I clearly respect the team behind it. I’m more of the type to always support francophone initiatives. But here, there are clearly years behind Shopify. We can make a beautiful site, we can certainly make sales, but something is always missing. So it annoys me to see students try a dropizi shot and come back disappointed. You want to couple the page edit with a raise this or that and then this or that, and it quickly becomes hell. Moreover, it seems that everything is empty, an almost complete desert in terms of applications. So I wanted to finally give my opinion on this subject, given the number of questions I receive on this subject.

Sorry the team behind it, I have absolutely no desire to break your momentum and desire to undertake. Surely there are good things in your project, but currently I haven’t seen them. Dropizi may later be a French-speaking CMS that will challenge the others, but for now Shopify is ahead and hands down. Ha yes, on the pricing, I have the impression of being steered directly to take the pro offer in order to have something that holds up slightly.

This does not make you want to manage a store that will seem lame, regardless of whether you have a good dropshipping supplier and a quality product, we are clearly slowed down by the possibilities offered by Dropizi which are poorly optimized despite the new features. All the thought of the service and the administrator interface of this commerce platform deserves a good overhaul, as well as its very restrictive economic model.

And builderall in all this? I talked about it some time ago. There were big updates, I had bet on their progress and the objective of this tool. It is unfortunately still not efficient enough for ecommerce or dropshipping and simply allows you to make beautiful showcase sites for small boxes. A little disappointed with the progress, we can nevertheless give them another good year, maybe they will be more interesting one day on this subject.

The management of a site, whether in French or English should not be a problem, you must be able to understand both languages ​​(or your native language and English). A business is built step by step and the CMS is the very foundation of your success. Site creation must be fast because in reality, you are a trader. You are not there to redo the facade non-stop but to grow what is inside. Don’t forget that you can also sell very well on a marketplace like ebay or amazon .

In addition, wordpress has a head start for its flexibility on natural referencing , which for me is a key element in niche markets. Choose the platform you like, test them all and then focus on your products and suppliers, to appear on search engines, to acquire traffic, to do marketing. A good tool for creating a dropshipping site is none other than one that allows you to do all this professionally while saving the most time.