What sort of users are Shopify and WordPress aimed at?
It’s probably fair to say that Shopify’s target audience is users without web development skills — this might be people who have a good idea for a product, and simply want to sell it online, or owners of retail stores in physical locations who want to extend their business to selling online.
Those types of users often turn to Shopify precisely because it aims to allow anyone to use the platform to make their own online store — quickly, and without needing to code at all.
WordPress by contrast caters for two groups of users — web design novices AND developers.
Like Shopify, WordPress is suitable for users who are relatively new to web design, and not particularly tech-savvy; it is certainly possible to create and maintain a WordPress site without needing any coding skills, particularly if you’re happy to use a ‘visual editor’ interface for WordPress like Divi. Users who don’t want to go near any HTML or CSS can definitely avoid doing so with WordPress.
WordPress is needed before you can publish a website; and that depending on what you want to do, setting up a WordPress site can involve a steeper learning curve than Shopify.
The second audience that WordPress caters for is users who have loads of web development experience. These users can work with the platform to pretty much build any sort of website, and host it anywhere they like.
Although it is possible to modify Shopify in a lot of ways (through coding or the addition of apps), there are more limits to what you can do, and you are always going to have to host your site on Shopify’s servers.
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