Gearbubble Pro (a.k.a. GB Pro) is an eCommerce platform that focuses on maximizing sales. My team has been using it since it first launched in 2017. We’ve found that it’s a good alternative to Shopify.
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This eCommerce platform was developed by my friend, Don Wilson, the founder of Gearbubble. He’s an internet entrepreneur, so he knew what he wanted when building GB Pro.
He knows the essentials of selling products, what product pages should look like, what features should be added to the system to boost conversion rates, the backend selling, etc. This is what differentiates Gearbubble Pro from other Shopify alternatives on the market.
I have used Shopify for some of my stores, too. I see pros and cons in each of these two platforms (Shopify and Gearbubble Pro). In this post, I’m going to compare the two platforms.
The Setup Process
Let begin with the setup process.
With Gearbubble Pro, the setup process is very simple, because almost everything has already been done in GB Pro.
All you have to do is connect your domain name to the system, wait 24-48 hours for the system to generate a SSL certificate for your domain name (a.k.a. HTTPS), and you’re ready to add new product to your store and start getting sales.
That’s it. Simple, right? No need to install a theme or any apps, because they’re already in the system. You just have to enable them when you want to use any of their functions.
The setup process is similar to what we do in Shopify, but there we need to install a theme and some apps.
The Shopify Theme VS the Gearbubble Pro Theme
For Gearbubble Pro, your store comes with a high-conversion theme already. You don’t need to set up the look and feel, countdown timer, related products plugin, etc. All of the necessary elements have already been installed in your store.
If you get some customer reviews, they will be shown up at the bottom of the product’s page. You don’t need to install any apps.
And it’s free.
As I said, this platform was developed by an internet marketer who knows about these things.
I like this simplicity. In Shopify, I need to select and install the theme by myself. But most of the good themes are not free. They normally charge around $100++ for one theme. And I rarely find a theme that’s as clean and fast loading as what I get with GB Pro.
If you want to have other elements like a countdown timer, related products, customer reviews on the landing page, you need to install other apps, and most of them charge extra monthly fees.
Also, you need to test where to place those elements on the landing page, set the style, etc. which you don’t need to do in GB Pro.
Over 2,850,000++ products have been sold on Gearbubble, so you can be sure that the product page has been optimized.
Judging from the stats from my own store, the conversion rate of the GB Pro landing page is much better than what I got in Shopify.
Dropified VS Oberlo
If you want to sell dropship products from a website like AliExpress, you have to install the Oberlo app in Shopify.
In Gearbubble Pro, you can use Dropified, which is an Oberlo competitor.
In my opinion, these two apps are pretty similar. You can import products from AliExpress to your store in a few clicks. When there is an order, you can do it in a few clicks as well.
In term of pricing, Dropified charges $47 per month to list 15,000 products, while Oberlo charges $29.90 per month to list 10,000 products.
I think they’re pretty much the same. There are a few other differences. Both services have listed comparisons on their websites.
But you know that people always say good things about themselves, right? So I’ll give you links to the comprehensive comparisons of written by both of them.
Dropified – Click here
Oberlo – Click here
I think these two aren’t really much different. You can choose either of them.
Selling Print-On-Demand Products
If you want to sell print-on-demand products such as coffee mugs, t-shirts, shot glasses, pillowcases, etc., you can create these kinds of products easily in Gearbubble Pro.
In Shopify, you need to install external apps such as Gearbubble (LOL), Printful, Teelaunch, or Printify to sell print-on-demand products.
If you want to sell customized products (for instance, by letting people entering their name on the coffee mug), you can do it easily with Gearbubble Pro. They provide a customized box where people can easily insert the text they want.
Customized products are easy to sell, because people can put their name, a family members’ name, or a friend’s name to make the product unique. (Check out the top-selling products in Etsy. Most of them are personalized products.)
I’m not sure you can do this in Shopify, because I have never done this before. We might be able to let people enter a name in the notes box on the checkout page, and we have to pass this to our supplier. But I don’t think that’s convenient.
In Gearbubble Pro, people can enter their name on the product page and create an order. Gearbubble will produce the customized product with their name. We don’t have to do anything ourselves.
Wheelio VS GB Exit Popup
The Exit Popup is another famous marketing strategy. If you don’t know what this is, check out the screenshot below.
This is the “Spin to Win”, which appears when people are about to move to another tab or close the page. The people can enter their email address and spin the wheel to get a coupon discount.
It encourages people to stop closing the page and try to win the discount coupon. If they get a high-discount coupon (we normally set a high percentage to make it happen), they will usually use the coupon to get the discount.
This feature will turn people who are about to close the page into a customer. You can also get their email address to do marketing in the future. Cool, right?
When I used Shopify, I installed an app called “Wheelio” to do this. It worked great. Many people used the coupon code they got from the spinning wheel.
In Gearbubble Pro, you can do this too, but without installing an app or paying an extra fee.
It works pretty much the same as the Wheelio app.
Email Abandoned Cart
Sending abandoned cart emails is another thing that every store needs to do.
Because most people won’t place an order on their first visit, we need to send them a reminder to bring them back to our website.
Gearbubble Pro will do this automatically for you. You don’t have to do anything at all. No email responder needed. No need to write a message in the abandoned cart email. No need to set a delivery time. In GB Pro, all this is done automatically.
When people leave the checkout page, the system will send them an abandoned cart email automatically. Not once, but few more times over the next few days (if they still don’t buy the product).
In Shopify, we need to install an abandoned-cart app like Klaviyo, Conversio, Abandoned Cart Recovery Email, etc. They cost a lot more, but they come with more features (such as follow-up messages, newsletters, etc.).
In my opinion, this feature is very useful and good for beginners or people who have no idea how to set up an abandoned cart email marketing flow and or write good copy. You can bring people back to your website and turn some of them into customers automatically.
I’m not an email marketing expert, and this automated system helps me handle this kind of thing.
Recart VS GB Messenger Cart
You don’t just have to send an abandoned cart message on email. Nowadays, we can do this on Facebook Messenger as well.
Recart is a great app that helps you create a campaign to make more sales using FB Messenger.
You can send an abandoned cart message, shipping and delivery messages, welcome messages, product review messages, etc. using this app.
In Gearbubble Pro, they provide only the abandoned cart message. When people leave the checkout page, the system will send the notification message to their inbox to bring them back to the website.
I expect they will develop something else that will take advantage of Messenger in the future.
Automated Customer Reviews
Apart from sending abandoned cart emails, Gearbubble Pro also sends an email to ask for reviews from customers. A few days after you fulfill the product, the system will automatically send the email to ask for a customer review.
The 5-star reviews will be displayed automatically on the product’s page. You don’t have to do anything. This will help boost the conversion rate, because people love social proof.
In Shopify, you have to install another app like Loox, Yotpo, or Judge.me to do this. These apps provide more settings you can use in your emails. You can edit the email message, do segmentation, set delivery times, etc. But I think these are unnecessary, especially if you’re new to all this.
Discount Code
Another reason I really like Gearbubble pro is that they provide an easy way to offer discounts to people.
Normally, in Shopify, we need to create a discount code and give it to our people. If they want to use the coupon, they need to copy the code and copy it into the checkout page.
That requires them to take a few few more steps.
In Gearbubble Pro, we just need to add “?did=[CODE]” to the end of our URL, and use this URL in the ads. People just need to click this link, and they’ll get the discount for the product automatically.
They don’t need to remember a discount code and place it in the checkout page. This is much easier than the Shopify process.
Shopify Checkout page VS GB Checkout Page
This is the feature I like the most in GB Pro. It’s a one-page checkout.
People normally need to fill forms of 1 or 2 pages in the Shopify checkout. But in Gearbubble Pro, people can complete the checkout process on one page. If you want to customize a one-page checkout in Shopify, you need to install a third-party app.
But it’s the default setting in Gearbubble Pro.
GB Pro also has the Google Autocomplete feature, which helps people enter their address quickly.
When people complete the checkout process, the system will also send their receipt, along with an ad for a related product to encourage them to make another purchase.
1-Click Upsell
1-Click Upsell can be done easily in Gearbubble Pro. You just need to go to the settings page of the main product and select another product as the upsell. No need to set up any complicated code or anything.
When the customer completes the checkout for the main product, they will see the upsell product page. If they want the product, they just click a button to buy it.
This will help you increase your average order value (AOV) easily by just adding the related products with a discount on the upsell page.
In Shopify, it’s difficult to set up things like this, because Shopify doesn’t allow us to edit anything after the checkout page. We need to use an app like Carthook or Zipify to do it.
But in GB Pro, upselling can be done easily. You just click the settings button for the main product, select the upsell product you want to show after the checkout page, and enter the discount percentage (optional). That’s it. A very simple setup process. You don’t need to install anything.
The Fee Summary
Okay, that’s all the important features you’ll get with Gearbubble Pro. Actually, they also have other useful features I haven’t mentioned here.
Next, let’s compare the Shopify and Gearbubble Pro fees.
GB Pro charges start from $97 per month to listing 100 products and 5,000 visitors, and you get all the features I mentioned above. If your store gets bigger, they offer an unlimited plan for $297 per month.
Shopify charges start at $27 a month, and if you want advanced reporting and lower transaction fees, you need to upgrade the plan to $79 or $299 a month.
Let me compare the app fees. I’ll select the cheapest apps and plans available to get the lowest fee per month:
| Shopify | GB Pro | |
| Monthly Fee | $27-299 | $97 |
| Dropshipping Software | $29.9 | $47 |
| Ultimate Sales Boost | $9.99 | Free |
| Wheelio | $14.92 | Free |
| Abandoned Cart Email | $20 | Free |
| Recart | $29 | Free |
| Product Reviews | $9.99 | Free |
| 1-Click Upsell | $67 | Free |
| $207.8-506.8 | $144 |
This comparison doesn’t include the fees which Shopify collects from every transaction. It charges between 0.5% and 2%, depending on the plan you subscribe to.
For example:
If you make $1,000 a month and subscribe to the Basic plan ($29 a month and a 2% transaction fee), you’ll pay a $20 transaction fee.
If you make $10,000 a month and subscribe to the Shopify plan ($79 a month and 1% transaction fee), you’ll pay a $100 transaction fee.
There is an Advanced plan with a 0.5% transaction fee, but it costs $299 a month.
There are no transaction fees in Gearbubble Pro. This is a huge advantage you’ll get from this Shopify alternative.
Why you should use Gearbubble Pro
Well, as you can see, the monthly cost of Gearbubble Pro is a lot less than Shopify, and it comes with all the functionality you need.
The user interface might not be as friendly as Shopify’s, but you get used to it after you’ve used it a few times.
If you’re a beginner, I highly recommend you try to sell something with Gearbubble Pro first. It’s very easy to get started.
On that note, when you’re just getting started, the most important thing is to find winning products.
Why you should use Shopify
Although I’m a big fan of Gearbubble Pro, I have some stores in Shopify, too.
Shopify is definitely a good eCommerce platform. You can use it if you want to use other apps with advanced functions.
For example, I have run an Automated eCom System selling print-on-demand products, mainly using SEO traffic.
The on-page SEO is quite important, and I need to edit the description, tags, etc. for every one of my products. I also need to submit my products to social media websites to build backlinks.
I can’t do that automatically with GB Pro. Before I tried using this business model, I found a few apps in the Shopify App Store that can do this for me.
Also, other apps in Shopify – such as the Recart, Klaviyo, Product Reviews, etc. – can do offer advanced functions that Gearbubble doesn’t provide. You have to check whether you need them or not.
If you need to use advanced functions, it’s better to build your store with Shopify.
Conclusion
Looking for Shopify alternatives?
Gearbubble Pro is a good choice. With this eCommerce platform, you don’t need to worry about landing page optimization, installing apps to boost the conversion rate, email marketing, etc.
All the necessary functions are provided in Gearbubble Pro.
This lets you focus on the essentials, like product research and finding winning products.
Even you’re not a beginner, I recommend that you try this platform. In my experience, you can save a lot of monthly fees and avoid the headache of setting up a bunch of different apps.
My team has many stores in Gearbubble Pro, and we’ve been doing very well on this platform.
Interested in building your own store?
—Bank K.
