A woman who makes hand-poured candles in Bristol has outgrown selling through social media messages. She wants a shop with a basket, card payments and shipping options. Two friends give opposite advice: one swears by Shopify, the other says WooCommerce is cheaper and more flexible. Both are right about their own shop, which is exactly the problem.
Instead of ranking the two, this comparison follows the money and the maintenance. Seeing who does what, and who invoices you for it, usually settles the question faster than a feature table.
What you are actually choosing between
Shopify is a subscription service. You pay a monthly plan fee, and the platform provides the shop software and its hosting. Its plans are called Basic, Grow and Advanced, and Shopify Plus is quoted individually.
WooCommerce is a free, open-source plugin that turns a WordPress website into an online shop. The plugin costs nothing, but a WordPress site needs a domain, hosting and someone to keep it updated. You own the store’s content and data and can export them to another platform.
Cost: where the money actually goes
Prices change, so rather than quoting figures that will date, here is how to build your own yearly total for each option.
Shopify cost lines
- The monthly plan fee, which varies by plan and is lower per month if you pay annually.
- Card rates, if you use Shopify Payments. These vary by plan, by market and between online and in-person sales.
- Third-party transaction fees, charged by Shopify when you use an outside payment provider. The rate depends on your plan, and it comes on top of the provider’s own card fees. Shopify Payments, Shop Pay and manual methods such as cash on delivery or bank transfer are exempt.
- App subscriptions, which are billed on their own cycle, plus any paid theme or domain.
WooCommerce cost lines
- Hosting that meets WooCommerce’s requirements, plus a domain.
- Extensions for things like subscriptions or bookings. Many are free, and some are paid.
- The fees of whichever payment gateway you choose. WooCommerce supports more than a hundred of them, including Stripe, PayPal and Square, and WooPayments is available in selected countries.
- Setup and maintenance time, whether that is yours or an agency’s.
Two things stand out. Shopify’s costs are more predictable but grow with sales if you use an outside payment provider. WooCommerce has no platform fee, though the hosting and upkeep are yours to fund. For the wider budget picture, our guide to website design cost breaks down the one-off and running costs of a site.
Control: what you can change and what you cannot
WooCommerce gives you the most room. Because it runs inside your own WordPress site, you choose the hosting, the theme, the extensions and the payment gateways, and you can move the whole shop elsewhere. The price of that freedom is responsibility for the pieces.
Shopify trades some freedom for a more complete package. Payments are the clearest example: Shopify Payments is the route that avoids third-party transaction fees, but Shopify’s own help pages say that availability depends on the country, so check that your market is supported before you plan around it. If it is not, you will be using an outside provider and paying the plan-based fee on top.
Think about the content side too. A shop that depends on articles, guides or a lot of custom page layouts may feel natural in WordPress. A shop that is mostly a product catalogue with a basket may not need that.
Maintenance: who keeps it running
With a hosted subscription, the platform operates the shop software for you, so your regular tasks are products, orders and any apps you add. With WooCommerce, you or your developer take care of WordPress, the plugin, extensions and the server.
WooCommerce’s published server requirements ask for current versions of PHP and MySQL or MariaDB, a host that supports HTTPS, and a minimum amount of memory. Older versions still run in places but are end of life and carry security risk, so ask a host to confirm the figures on the requirements page before you commit. Backups and updates are part of the routine, ideally tested on a copy of the site before they go live.
A simple way to decide
- Write down what you sell, how many products and where you ship.
- Check that your payment method is supported in your country on each platform, and note which fees apply.
- Decide who will update the site after launch: you, a developer or an agency.
- Add up a year of costs using the lines above, with a quiet month and a busy one.
- Choose the option where the total and the amount of upkeep both feel comfortable.
Neither platform is the wrong answer in itself. The wrong choice is the one whose running costs or upkeep surprise you three months after launch.