Shopify vs WooCommerce: how to choose for your store
Updated
by Firas Muhammed, Sales
If you’re setting up an online store, Shopify and WooCommerce are probably the two names you keep seeing. They take opposite approaches to the same job, and the right one depends on who’s going to run the store and what it has to connect to.
Shopify: a store you rent
Shopify is a hosted platform. You pay a monthly subscription and Shopify looks after the servers, the security updates and the checkout. You pick a theme, add your products and you can be taking orders the same week.
Its app store covers most of what a store needs, from reviews to subscriptions to shipping rates. Each app tends to be its own monthly fee, so a store that starts on the base plan can end up paying for eight or ten apps on top of it. Shopify also charges a transaction fee on each order unless you use its own payment service, which isn’t available in every country, so check what applies where you sell before you decide.
The trade-off is control. You work within Shopify’s rules for themes, checkout and data, and if you outgrow them your options are an app, a workaround or a different platform.
WooCommerce: a store you own
WooCommerce is a free, open-source plugin that turns a WordPress site into a store. Because you host it, you control the design, the features and the data. There’s no platform fee and no platform rules, and a developer can change anything.
In exchange, you’re responsible for the things Shopify does for you: hosting, backups, updates to WordPress, the plugin and the theme, and security. None of this is hard, but it’s ongoing, and a store nobody maintains eventually breaks or gets compromised. Plugins cost money too, and their quality varies more than apps on Shopify’s store, so choosing them takes some judgement.
Side by side
| Shopify | WooCommerce | |
|---|---|---|
| How you pay | Monthly subscription, plus apps and transaction fees | Free plugin; you pay for hosting, plugins and maintenance |
| Hosting and security | Shopify handles it | You or your developer handle it |
| Time to first sale | Days | Days to weeks, depending on the setup |
| Design control | Within the theme and checkout rules | Complete |
| Custom features | Apps, or Shopify’s APIs | Anything a developer can build |
| Your data | Exportable, but lives on Shopify | On your own server |
| Running it day to day | A non-technical team can | Easier with someone technical on hand |
| Suits | Brands that want to focus on selling and keep running costs predictable | Businesses with unusual needs, an existing WordPress site or a reason to own the platform |
How to decide
If you want to launch quickly, keep running costs predictable and never think about servers, Shopify is usually the better choice. It suits most brands selling physical products who would rather spend their time on marketing than maintenance.
If you already run a WordPress site, need something unusual at checkout or in fulfilment, or want to own the platform outright, WooCommerce gives you more room. It also suits businesses that already have a developer, in-house or on call, because the freedom is only useful if someone can use it.
A few questions settle most cases.
- Is there someone technical who will look after the store? If not, lean towards Shopify.
- Does the store need to do something no app does? If so, lean towards WooCommerce, or plan for custom development either way.
- Is the store the whole business, or one channel among several? A store that is the whole business is worth owning.
- What does the total cost look like over three years, including apps, plugins, hosting and the people who maintain it? Subscriptions look cheap in month one and expensive in month thirty.
Top tip
Before choosing, list what your store must do on day one, such as payments, shipping, taxes and integrations, and check how each platform handles them.
When a store needs custom engineering
Both platforms cover the standard store. The work gets harder when a store has to connect to the rest of a business: stock held in an inventory system or an ERP, orders that need approval before they ship, prices that depend on who’s buying, a subscription with rules no app supports, or a catalogue that lives somewhere else and has to stay in sync.
At that point you need an engineer who can connect the platform to everything else, whichever platform you picked. System integration is one of the things we do: connecting a product to the APIs, payment providers, databases and existing systems it depends on, so it works with the rest of the business. If that’s where your store is heading, tell us what you’re building and we’ll tell you which platform fits and what would need building around it. There’s more on how that conversation goes in how we take a project from problem to production.