Shopify is scalability redefined. It can handle small, tiny shops, moms and pops, and anyone can get them up and selling. It can handle your little boutique shop where you've got one brick and mortar, it can handle big, it can handle wholesalers, it can handle multinationals, it can handle Kylie Cosmetics. It can handle small, big or colossal truly.

We're going to talk about intellectual property, WordPress, and the WooCommerce community. And talk about flexibility and customization of WooCommerce. The cost effectiveness of WooCommerce, the marketing potential, leveraging SEO for WooCommerce. And hopefully, we're also going to debunk some myths along the way. So intellectual property, ownership of your e-commerce site versus use of a platform. So to understand WooCommerce, you've got to take a bit of a step back and you first got to understand what WordPress is. So simply put, WordPress is a website builder. But on a slightly more technical level, WordPress is an open source content management system, which is licensed under the GPL version two. And what this means is that anyone can use or modify the WordPress software for free. So this is also quite an important distinction to note against wordpress.org. And wordpress.com wordpress.org is the software that we're talking about. And wordpress.com is a software as a service that almost rents out WordPress, as a package, like a self managed platform. And that's kind of what Shopify is as well. It's a self managed platform.

So WooCommerce is a customizable and open source e-commerce platform built on top of WordPress. So essentially WooCommerce is the e-commerce extension of WordPress. So when you're building, Woo, you're actually building WordPress. But it's a technical distinction. And what's great about WooCommerce because it's WordPress means you can modify it freely. And you truly own your website, because it's yours. So you created it. But with great power comes great responsibility because you are more in control. That also means that you have greater responsibility with maintaining and managing your site. So how does this compare to Shopify? Well, Shopify is a managed platform for software as a service. And what that means is that it's got easier user experience for basic tasks, it's easy to get onto Shopify. However, you don't own your site.

You have access, and you have access to your files and your code. But you actually don't control your data, all of that sits on Shopify servers, on servers, Shopify servers, and you're also limited by what Shopify wants to give you control over. So they can change what they want to give you access to at any time. And it also means that when you want to change anything that isn't included out of the box, it can become a lot harder to do.