Shopify or WooCommerce?

Shopify or WooCommerce? Choose Shopify if you want to sell fast, have no appetite for hosting and updates, and do not mind a monthly plan of 24 to 289 euros. Choose WooCommerce if you already run a WordPress site, want full control over your store and data, and have someone to handle upkeep. Over three years they end up close: for a small store Shopify is slightly cheaper once you outsource WooCommerce maintenance, for a growing store payment fees outweigh the platform.

All prices before VAT, for a store based in the eurozone.

Shopify: everything in one subscription

Shopify is a hosted store platform from a Canadian company. Everything comes in one package: hosting, security, payments through Shopify Payments and an admin for products and orders, available in 37 languages. You pick a theme, add products and you are live. For extra features you install apps, many with their own subscription. Products, customers and orders export as CSV; the store itself does not.

WooCommerce: a free plugin on WordPress

WooCommerce is a free, open-source plugin that turns a WordPress site into a store. You choose your hosting, theme, payment provider and extensions. Your store and data sit on your server. Upkeep comes with it: WordPress, WooCommerce, the theme and every extension must stay updated. In 2024 the WordPress ecosystem logged 7,966 new vulnerabilities, 96 percent of them in plugins. What that means: is WordPress safe.

Shopify and WooCommerce side by side

Worked example: three years, two stores

Same assumptions as in ecommerce website cost: average order 60 euros, 60 percent paid with a local fixed-fee method, 40 percent by card. Build, apps and upkeep are examples.

The small store, 50 orders a month:

The growing store, 500 orders a month:

If you do the WooCommerce upkeep yourself, WooCommerce is cheaper for the small store (8,058.64 euros), but you pay with your own hours and carry the risk. For the growing store, the biggest difference is not the platform but how your customers pay. In the UK or Germany the build and upkeep hours cost more, which favours Shopify's lower upkeep.

When does a pricier Shopify plan pay off?

On Shopify the card fee falls with a pricier plan while the plan fee rises. On a 60 euro card order you pay 1.45 euros on Basic and 1.33 euros on Grow: 0.12 euros less. Grow costs 45 euros a month more than Basic billed yearly. So you need 375 card orders a month before Grow pays for itself on card fees alone.

If most customers pay with a fixed-fee local method, nothing changes between plans. Then you choose a plan for its features, not its fees. On WooCommerce this trade-off does not exist: you pay your provider directly.

Selling across borders or to businesses

Selling internationally brings in languages, currencies and VAT. Shopify has built-in markets per country with their own prices and languages, but charges 2 percent when you sell in a currency other than your payout currency. WooCommerce does it with plugins for languages and tax that you choose and maintain. Above 10,000 euros a year of sales to consumers in other EU countries, you charge their VAT and file through the One-Stop-Shop.

Selling to businesses, with customer prices, ordering on invoice or large quantities? On Shopify the strong B2B features sit in the higher plans. On WooCommerce you buy them as plugins. With many customer-specific rules, a custom store is often simpler than a stack of extensions.

When Shopify fits better

• You want to sell within weeks and manage no server.
• You sell standard products with variants, shipping and a few payment methods.
• You also sell in a shop or at markets: Shopify POS comes with every plan, POS Pro costs 79 euros per location per month.
• You want a platform every freelancer and agency can work with.

The full Shopify bill is in how much does Shopify cost. Torn between Shopify and a website builder? See Wix vs Shopify.

When WooCommerce fits better

• You already run a WordPress site that works and ranks.
• You publish a lot: guides, recipes, comparisons next to your products.
• You want to choose where your store and customer data live.
• You have someone who handles updates, backups and security.

How WordPress compares to a custom site: custom website or WordPress.

When neither: a custom store

Both platforms are built for most stores. That is their strength, and their limit. Custom pays off when you:

• sell something that does not fit a standard cart, such as made-to-order products, subscriptions with their own rules or quotes;
• need the store connected to your own stock, planning or accounting;
• want a lot of traffic from Google with category pages, guides and comparisons in several languages;
• want no monthly fees that grow with every feature.

For many stores, Shopify or WooCommerce is simply the right choice. Looking for a platform closer to home? Read Shopify alternatives made in Europe. Combining a shop and a store? Read Shopify or Lightspeed.

Switching from one to the other

1. Export products, customers and orders as CSV. Shopify offers this by default; WooCommerce has export functions and plugins.
2. Rebuild the theme and integrations. Design and apps do not move.
3. Redirect every old product URL with a 301. Shopify uses fixed paths such as /products/ and /collections/, WooCommerce usually /product/ and /product-category/; without redirects you lose your rankings. See moving a website to a new host.
4. Test payments and emails with real orders before you switch the domain.
5. Plan the move outside your busiest season. The full runbook per source platform is in Shopify migration.

Mistakes per platform

• On Shopify: apps that add upTen apps at 15 euros are 1,800 euros a year.
• On Shopify Basic: another payment provider2 percent extra on every order.
• On WooCommerce: cheap shared hostingA store with many products and visitors gets slow; see how to improve website speed.
• On WooCommerce: no maintenance planA store that went months without updates puts your customers' data at risk.
• On both: forgetting accessibilitySince 28 June 2025 the European Accessibility Act applies to stores selling to EU consumers.

Decide in five steps

1. Write down your products and variants, and the orders a month you expect in a year.
2. Check how your customers pay, per country.
3. Decide who does the upkeep. Nobody? Then Shopify is the safe choice.
4. Work out both options over three years with the tables above.
5. Try both: Shopify has a trial, WooCommerce can be tested on a staging site.