Running a successful e-commerce store is a lot of work, and these days technology doesn’t seem to make it much easier. Most people who have built websites before are familiar with WordPress and the flexibility that it offers to create a myriad of different types of websites, and how tricky it can be to get an e-commerce solution just the way you want it. Over the years our team has built many different e-commerce websites, having worked with WooCommerce (now Woo), Shopify, OpenCart, and even Magento (now Adobe Commerce). Our experience over the years is that while the basics like managing inventory and online checkouts work just fine, but when you have a good store manager experience, the web design tools usually suffer, and vice versa.
A great example of this would be a tool like Shopify, where the store manager and admin experience is fantastic, and there are power product organization tools available. Where it falls short, however, is within the website builder. You can accomplish basic designs and layouts, but when you want to go deeper into advanced designs and features, it simply does not make the cut.
While we were most familiar with WooCommerce, it also had its drawbacks. Clients often don’t enjoy managing inventory and e-commerce on WordPress due to its somewhat cluttered dashboard, preferring the much more optimized menu layout of Shopify. We wanted clients to get the best of both WordPress and Shopify. WordPress offers extensive customization, many page builders, and a vast online community with tons of plugins. Shopify, on the other hand, makes store management incredibly simple for staff.
So how do we have our cake, and eat it too?
The Solution: Connecting Shopify and WordPress
After searching for a plugin to accomplish this, and testing several, we settled on ShopWP for it’s robust features, and automated sync engine. ShopWP is a plugin for WordPress that allows you to log into your Shopify website from within the plugin, and set up an active synchronization of the inventory and collections within your Shopify store to the WordPress site to build an e-commerce experience for your visitors. In addition, ShopWP provides an add-on that allows you to integrate beautifully into Elementor or Beaver Builder, depending on your page builder preference within WordPress.
Integrating the two solutions is incredibly easy – simply purchase a plan, download the plugin file, and install it within WordPress. You can then go to the settings page for the plugin and one-click connect to your Shopify site. From there, you can adjust whether or not you want all of your products to synchronize, only certain collections, and what data from each of the products you want to sync, such as the product images and all associated metadata, or only certain fields like name and price.
After all of that is set up, the next steps are going to be adding the ShopWP widgets to the appropriate pages on your website, where your products will then populate. You can even automatically generate collection pages too, that filter pre-built collections you have in Shopify. Depending on how you have your settings configured, users can then add products to the cart, and will be redirected to Shopify to checkout and complete the sale. From there, they’ll be redirected back to your website where they can continue browsing if they so choose. The plugin also conveniently adds a floating menu to the screen, allowing visitors to quickly glance at or modify their cart without ever leaving the website.
Why Do It This Way?
As we mentioned before, Shopify has limited functionality within it’s website builder that we wanted to solve with pre-existing features within WordPress and Elementor. Many users are familiar with WordPress, and it runs over 47% of the internet these days, so selecting a solution that was familiar to the market made sense, as well as the perks that come with a mature platform, and a robust community. Additionally, WordPress gives you some powerful SEO capabilities, with the ability to install your preferred plugin, and integrate into a tool that can help you manage the SEO settings for your products much more easily.
Additionally, we’ve often seen a dramatic drop in cost for clients who have been able to downsize to the lowest Shopify plan because they do not need the extra features that Shopify offers, as they are covered by the WordPress website. In many cases too, WordPress hosting coupled with a lower cost Shopify plan is almost always a reduced cost, as you can scale your services independently, whether your website traffic increases and you need a more powerful hosting plan, or you gain more staff members and need an upgraded Shopify plan. It gives you the ability to choose.
