Let’s start with the conclusion, Showit is a beautiful commerce site but if you’re looking for a strong ecommerce platform, there are many factors not widely discussed and I would recommend you watch my review on Youtube to not make the same mistakes I did.
Now to the beginning of the story when I fell in love with Tonic websites. I saved up the money to buy. Then I learnt that it could only be run with a Showit subscription. So I purchased. My website now looked incredible but with no ability to shop on it, it was pretty useless. So I added Shopify Lite. Then Shopify regulars as they recommend.
But it’s not the answer. Because if you want a true e-commerce platform with the ability to automatically send shop items to places like Google shopping, Google search, Pinterest, Facebook shop, instagram shop of Tiktok shop, you are going to need a feed of purchasable items. Yes you can achieve that with Shopify regular. But then then the customer experience is messy as you need two separate websites. One website for the showit site and one website for Shopify. So do I send people to sharonschurderart.com or shop.sharonschurderart.com? What does the customer journey look like? How do customers feel moving between two different websites with two different looks?
Conclusion
Ultimately, several years into my journey, my conclusion is that if you are selling on your website, I would recommend either a stand alone Shopify website (with no Showit involved), Wix or SquareSpace.
I have stuck with Showit because I invested in the system infrastructure and the interface is very similar to Adobe. Creating beautiful website pages on Showit is extremely easy! I cater to the luxury art market and so my website needs to look perfect but I want to keep creative control. I love updating my website on Showit. I love the problem solving.
Also, I hated my standalone Shopify website – it was extremely ugly. Yes it was a million times easier to sell on. But the interface was just all blocks and screamed e-commerce.
I have stuck with Showit and I am glad. But the $500+ Showit cost per year matches Shopify at this point. There was little financial benefit, only aesthetic.
I can detail how to set up Shopify Lite or Shopify Regular another time, or comment below if you are interested.
Let’s Dive into setting up Showit and Woocommerce
Ok so two basic things you need to know about Showit and Woocommerce.
There are two Showit page templates that WordPress will rely on when creating the Woocommerce element, 1) single-product and 2) page. These are separate and different to the Showit templates that are used for the Blog element of the Showit website.
To create these two pages, you first need to create the page in Showit:
Create a content text box and use the right hand box to choose xx > Post Content so that Woocommerce can auto-populate all of the product information inside this box. Unfortunately at present, Showit and Woocommerce can only pull in the ‘Post Content’ and xx fields so there isn’t any option to add in extra tags or categories or anything else clever!
The next important thing is Google Listing and Ads – you won’t be able to set that up normally. Dexter from Woocommerce Support came to my rescue. He found the website’s front page is designed on the Showit tool. The front or home page of the website isn’t coming from WordPress.
Due to that reason, the Google site verification meta tag isn’t included on the front page of the website. Although he found that meta is included on the shop page which isn’t coming from the Showit tool:
Full Size: https://d.pr/i/AnaRis
Google will need to verify site ownership, and this verification is done by using a meta tag. As right now Google can’t find that meta tag on the website, the WordPress plugin throws the following error:
Unable To Insert Site Verification
So you need to go into Showit front page Advanced Settings > Custom Head HTML and pop in a Google site verification meta tag, I list mine below but I reckon each website and Google Merchant Centre account will have it’s own code so I recommend you check in with WordPress support to confirm.
<meta name="google-site-verification" content="3ud4aIx_smu8DABMW3eoal5uH8Nr4pgFYk5z7M6pRzI" />
what does this mean!!!
If you’re creating a manual shop page (all created in Showit) then you might want to consider a more “featured” main shop page and then have the category pages populate automatically so that they’re all easy for the customer to see what you have and you don’t have to worry about creating another manual custom page.
Davey and Krista gave a fabulous breakdown between Elementor and Showit and I agreed with every word, link is https://daveyandkrista.com/showit-vs-elementor-wordpress/
Other options:
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