E-commerce is a booming topic lately, and for those looking to start their own business, online store, or a full-blown sales machine online, there are options. Whether you run a small or medium sized business or a budding entrepreneur, there are ways to make money online. If you plan to incorporate a subscription-based model, Cratejoy is a platform you need to become familiar with. If you are looking to go with
a WordPress build and integrate a robust and highly customizable option, Woocommerce is something to explore as it has a lot of depth, and is open source allowing for a lot of customizations from web developers. There are a number of ways to go with these products, but there are some very important considerations to keep in mind, so that you don’t go flying blind into this venture, and waste a lot of time learning things you don’t need to learn, and ultimately spending time on the wrong solution for you.
Key Factor #1. What you are Selling
You need to sell and distribute a wide variety of products, as well as unlimited products on a subscription basis. It will be important to know your budget to get this rolling, as well as the level of customization you are seeking before you start. Each of the above-mentioned offerings offers robust solutions but in a very different way. Do you plan to take your sales operation to the enterprise level and scale massively, or do you plan to work with a modest selection and grow from there? Also, do you plan to sell subscription-based products boxes or individual products?
Key Factor #2. Shipping Options
If you need to integrate with shipping carriers and drop-shipping companies, this is a key factor. Drop-shipping is not something that either of these platforms specializes in, necessarily not like Shopify. CrateJoy works on a subscription basis and sends boxes of your preferred merchandise at a set frequency. WooCommerce has extensions that allow this also and will send items on a subscription basis, as well as a drop shipping basis, by connecting to your suppliers. There is a bit more work involved in getting to this point with WooCommerce, from a development and customization standpoint, but it is offered.
Key Factor #3. SEO – Search Engine Optimization
You need a solution that is easy to maintain and is SEO friendly right out of the box. You don’t need or want to spend a ton of time getting the site in front of a lot of eyes. One platform has a user base that is 30,000 users strong, and the database of listings is already optimized for SEO, which helps cut down on SEO maintenance costs. With WooCommerce this is an integration that works with WordPress but you still have to do your own traditional SEO legwork with this solution by hiring an SEO firm, or doing your own work, if you know how to.
Key Factor #4. Timeframe
You need a solution that is relatively easy to setup, and cost-effective/budget friendly. One solution fairly easily integrates into various WordPress themes but it does require someone that really knows the backend of WordPress as it has a lot of depth and requires someone that is above the novice skill level to master all of the integrations and extensions to make this a comprehensive solution. Another allows you to create a store from an existing site or use their platform. Do you not have time to re-create a new website for this purpose assuming you don’t already have one? If so, this is a key concern as WooCommerce needs to be integrated with a theme that you can get online or at the very least, with a Themeforest style theme. CrateJoy allows you to convert a site, that you would already have established to start building a store.
Key Factor #5. Flexibility & Security
You need a stable, secure solution. Creating your own website and store will not enable you to get going in a secure manner right away as there will be additional work required to get you to that point through the means of plugins and hosting security measures and both of these routes require a baseline setup in this regard. You have product customization options/needs, but don’t necessarily need the ability to highly customize your store or do anything beyond subscription-based sales options.
Each platform has flexible customization options, but these options do vary between platforms.
Now having the basic idea of how the things go, we can move on to discussing pros and cons of using WooCommerce or CrateJoy.
WooCommerce
WooCommerce is one of the most popular, robust and widely used Ecommerce offerings that exist today, and it has incredible depth when it comes to extensions, features, and even themes. WooCommerce is a very popular e-commerce platform used by many developers and even non-developers. It requires a bit more know how to really get it going, beyond the basic integration to WordPress to truly take advantage of all that it has to offer. It is widely considered one of the best and more powerful e-commerce platforms of all, but does requires some baseline knowledge to initiate and does not cater towards a novice user.
Pros of WooCommerce:
✓ WooCommerce has hundreds of extensions, features, and options to really get any customizable aspect in play, for your online store, that you seek
✓ You can connect with shipping companies, drop-shippers, manage inventory, and track sales. The possibilities are really quite endless with the hundreds of extensions you can use
✓ WooCommerce has a theme library for WordPress Sites, and it also integrates with various Themeforest style themes, which makes it fairly adaptable to any site look that you plan to go with
✓ It is Open-Source, meaning it is friendly towards the development community that wishes to further customize the offering to their unique needs which is great for those with large budgets to go even deeper to meet their needs beyond what is offered in the extension library
✓ Some of the largest companies in the world use this and this demonstrates and solidifies the trust in the platform
✓ They offer amazing support, money back guarantees, and secure shopping portals
✓ The extension library in itself allows you to custom craft your store with almost endless possibilities. There are over 300 extensions in the library to help you customize things appropriately
✓ There are no transaction fees through WooCommerce just the yearly fee. These fees are charged by the payment gateway provider such as Authorize.net or others that you choose to connect to WooCommerce
Cons of WooCommerce:
✓ If you are on a budget and seeking a simple solution, this may not be it WooCommerce’s greatest strengths are also their largest weakness towards the novice WordPress user and those with lower budgets as it requires quite a lot of extra work to get a full scope solution out of it
✓ You likely need to hire/work with a web developer to really capitalize on all that this tool offers to get things customized to your needs and without this, you will likely spend many hours trying to learn, and could possibly end up frustrated attempting to learn on your own
✓ You will have added transaction fees on top of their subscription fees and these vary based on who your payment gateway provider is
In summary – Reasons to choose WooCommerce:
✓ You need to sell a wide variety of products, unlimited products, even on a subscription basis and require a high level of customization for your store
✓ You need integration with shipping carriers and drop shipping companies
✓ You had physical products that people purchase at all times, in varying frequencies
✓ You need an exceptionally robust offering with a high degree of customization capability
✓ You need a trusted solution that is used by many big name companies
✓ You have the budget to work with web developers to fine-tune a solution to your liking
Vs.
CrateJoy
CrateJoy is a bit different from WooCommerce, in that it runs a subscription-based e-commerce business for various lifestyles, desires, and needs. This is it’s core purpose and objective, and it is made exclusively to do this, without the need for enhancement plugins to achieve this purpose. It is designed to deliver products quickly through a subscription box service to the people that order them and count on them.
Pros of CrateJoy:
✓ CrateJoy will let you convert an existing website into an online store, relatively easily and without too much frustration
✓ It offers complete solutions for your subscription business and online store needs. It’s main focus, however, is subscription sales with built-in modification options
✓ CrateJoy offers an easy to maintain solution that is SEO friendly with over 30,000 users strong and growing daily
✓ Each listing is SEO optimized from the moment it is published online
Cons of CrateJoy:
✓ Some limitations with CrateJoy are that it is more challenging to handle multiple products at once, from a categorical standpoint
✓ There are limitations for adding product details, and the ability to add more details to any given product so, if this is a concern for you, it could be a large one
✓ There are no options to pre-order products.
✓ Your customer can only view subscription purchases in order history
✓ There are no blog integrations with this tool which can be considered unfortunate to some
✓ You can not ask your customer to upload their picture in case you need that in your subscription flow e.g personalized product
✓ Subscriptions cannot be categorized within CrateJoy at this time
There are still a number of positives and factors/reasons to choose CrateJoy, however, if you can see through the various limitations that are common with the offering.
In Summary – Reasons to choose Cratejoy:
✓ Your customers tend to purchase these items in a set frequency and count on steady delivery out of a desire for convenience
✓ You need to convert an existing site, rather than start fresh (for your e-commerce needs) to save both time and money and development costs
✓ Your customers count on quick delivery and ordering processes and are less likely to shop a wide variety of products they are convenience-focused
✓ You need an easy to maintain, SEO friendly solution right out of the gate
Overall – Which do you Choose between the two?
When choosing between these two if you need a robust multi-purpose store to sell multiple offerings, with very robust development and customization possibilities, WooCommerce is simply the way to go, especially if you have the budget to support it. If you need to be able to ship products quickly and regularly with a subscription model for orders that are frequently repeated on a set frequency for example, goods that are replenished, weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, etc, then CrateJoy is a great choice for you. WooCommerce does allow subscription-based purchases through the use and integration of one of its extensions but CrateJoy is naturally more suited for this, based on this being its core purpose as you don’t need to work with extra plugins/extensions and web developers to achieve this purpose. CrateJoy is SEO friendly, and optimizes their listings, and gets them in front of their 30,000 strong user base, which is a great perk to cut down on SEO costs. WooCommerce is something that houses itself in the backend of WordPress, so in this case, you would still need to do your own standard SEO work that you would on any other website. If budget is a factor, CrateJoy may be your best solution, if you are solely on the subscription-based model. If you need to sell more products, WooCommerce may be the way to go but be prepared for some added development costs.
It will be very important to have your business model established before venturing towards one choice or the other. If you need development solutions, HTML Pro offers a full service offering around both of these platforms to help get you off the ground. For general CrateJoy web design services, visit here. For a custom design to CrateJoy Offering for a subscription box business, visit here.
For custom WooCommerce development services, visit here and general WooCommerce website design solutions, visit here.
Thanks for Reading! Hopefully, you learned some new tips!
P.S: Comparison has been made neutrally and based on the research & facts collected from industry’s best development teams and businesses. HTML Pro is also an Affiliate Partner with Cratejoy.
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