Most comparisons of Shopify and WooCommerce list the same features in two columns and leave you exactly where you started. The feature lists barely matter. Both will take an order, both will look good, and both will still be here in five years.
What actually decides this is money over time and who controls the shop. Here’s the version I’d give a client on a call.
The Short Answer
Choose Shopify if you want to be selling in a fortnight, your products are straightforward, and you’d rather pay a monthly fee than think about hosting. You’re renting a very good shop.
Choose WooCommerce if you’re planning to be selling for years, your margins are tight enough that a percentage of every order matters, or you need the store to do something slightly unusual. You’re building a shop you own.
Most of the small UK businesses I work with end up on WooCommerce, but not all of them, and the ones who don’t are usually right not to.
The Real Difference: Renting vs Owning
Everything else follows from this one distinction.
Shopify is a fully hosted platform. You pay monthly, and in exchange Shopify handles servers, security patches, uptime, PCI compliance and the checkout. You never think about any of it. The cost of that is that you live inside their system, on their terms, at their prices, and those terms can change.
WooCommerce is a free, open-source plugin that turns a WordPress site into a shop. Nobody charges you for the software or takes a cut of your sales. In exchange you’re responsible for hosting, updates, backups and security — either doing that yourself or paying someone to.
Neither is the “professional” choice. They’re different trades.
What Each One Actually Costs
This is the part that gets glossed over, because the sticker prices look similar and the three-year totals often aren’t.
Shopify
- Subscription: plans start at around £25/month and rise steeply through the tiers
- Apps: the real budget line. Most genuinely useful ones charge their own monthly fee, and they stack. £50–£200/month in app subscriptions is normal for an established store
- Payment processing: competitive if you use Shopify Payments
- Transaction fee: an additional percentage of every order if you use any other payment processor. Small per order, and it compounds with volume
- Theme: a paid theme is a one-off few hundred pounds; genuinely custom design means hiring a Liquid developer
WooCommerce
- Software: free, and no cut of your sales ever
- Hosting: £20–£60/month for hosting that can actually handle a shop. Budget shared hosting will let you down here, and it’s a false economy
- Extensions: mostly annual licences rather than monthly subscriptions, which usually works out cheaper over time
- Payment processing: whatever your chosen provider charges, and nothing on top
- Maintenance: either your time, or £50–£200/month for someone to handle updates, backups and security
The crossover. At low volume Shopify is usually cheaper, because hosting and maintenance are real costs and a handful of orders doesn’t generate much in fees. As order volume climbs, the picture inverts: app subscriptions grow, and a percentage of every sale becomes a meaningful number while WooCommerce’s costs stay roughly flat.
Work out where your own crossover sits before you commit. Take your realistic monthly order count and average order value, and price both properly. It’s an afternoon’s work and it’s the single most useful thing you can do before choosing.
A note on figures: platform pricing changes, and app costs vary enormously by store. Treat everything above as the shape of the cost rather than a quote, and check current prices before committing.
Where Shopify Genuinely Wins
Speed to launch. A competent Shopify store can be live in days. A WooCommerce build is a project.
The checkout. Shopify’s checkout is tested at a scale no small business could replicate, and it converts. This is a real advantage and it’s underrated.
You cannot break it. No updates to apply, no plugin conflict at 11pm, no hosting to outgrow. If the thought of maintaining a website fills you with dread, that’s a legitimate reason to pay someone else to worry about it.
Traffic spikes. Black Friday, a viral post, a feature in the press — Shopify’s infrastructure problem, not yours.
If you’re launching fast, testing whether an idea sells, or running a simple catalogue of physical products, Shopify is often the right answer. There’s more on that in Is Shopify Worth It in 2026?.
Where WooCommerce Genuinely Wins
No cut of your sales. Over several years at decent volume, this is usually the largest single difference between the two.
No ceiling on design. The store can look like anything. Shopify themes are polished, but a lot of Shopify stores in the same niche look related, because they are.
It does unusual things well. Quote-on-request products, trade pricing tiers, bookings attached to products, deep integration with a stock or accounting system you already run. When a requirement falls outside what apps cleanly handle, WooCommerce’s flexibility stops being abstract.
Content and shop in one place. The shop lives inside a full WordPress site, so blog, service pages and products all sit together. For businesses where content drives the traffic that drives the sales, that matters.
You own it. The database is yours, the files are yours, and you can move hosts on a Tuesday afternoon if you want to.
The Part Nobody Mentions: Getting Out Again
Both platforms are easy to join. Only one is easy to leave.
Moving off Shopify means extracting products, customers and order history from a system that was never designed to hand them over neatly. It’s doable, and it’s a proper project with a proper cost. Discount codes, subscriptions, reviews and anything living inside an app are the parts that hurt.
Moving a WooCommerce store between hosts is routine, because you have the database and the files.
This isn’t a reason to avoid Shopify. It’s a reason to treat the choice as a five-year decision rather than a launch-week one.
How to Decide
Answer these honestly:
- What will your monthly order volume realistically be in year two? Low, and Shopify’s simplicity probably wins. Higher, and run the fee maths properly.
- Who maintains the site? If the answer is nobody, Shopify. A WooCommerce store with nobody minding it is a security incident waiting to happen.
- Is there anything unusual about how you sell? Trade accounts, made-to-order items, bookings, complex shipping. The more unusual, the more WooCommerce’s flexibility earns its keep.
- How much does the store need to look like you? If the brand is the product, the design ceiling matters.
- Do you already have a WordPress site? If content and SEO are already working for you there, adding WooCommerce keeps it all together.
What We Build On, and Why
Most ecommerce builds here are WooCommerce. The reason is narrow and practical: no transaction fees, no platform that can change its pricing model once you depend on it, and no ceiling when a client asks for something the off-the-shelf apps don’t cover.
But it isn’t a rule. When someone needs to be trading next month with a simple catalogue and no appetite for maintenance, Shopify is the honest recommendation and that’s what they get told. Picking the platform that suits the studio rather than the shop is how businesses end up on the wrong one.
If you’re weighing this up, get in touch with your rough order volume and what you’re selling, and you’ll get a straight answer about which way the numbers actually point — including if that answer is the one that means less work for me.
