If you’re thinking about building an online store and you’ve done any amount of googling, you’ve probably landed on two names more than any other – Shopify and WooCommerce. Both will get you selling online. Both have their fans. And both will have someone on the internet telling you the other one is terrible.
The truth is a bit more nuanced than that – and the right choice depends entirely on your business, not on which platform has the better marketing budget.
Here’s a plain-English breakdown of what you’re actually choosing between.
First – What Are They?
Shopify is a dedicated e-commerce platform. You sign up, pay a monthly subscription, and get a fully hosted online store out of the box. Everything – the hosting, the checkout, the payment processing infrastructure – lives within Shopify’s ecosystem.
WooCommerce is a plugin that turns a WordPress website into an online store. WordPress is the world’s most widely used website platform, and WooCommerce sits on top of it to add e-commerce functionality. Unlike Shopify, you own and manage the whole setup yourself – or you work with someone who does.
The Shopify Experience
Shopify is designed to get you selling as quickly as possible with as little technical knowledge as possible. The interface is clean, the setup process is guided, and most of the complicated infrastructure decisions are made for you behind the scenes.
That simplicity comes at a cost though – literally. Shopify’s monthly plans add up, and if you want to use a payment gateway other than Shopify Payments you’ll pay an additional transaction fee on every sale. As your store grows and you need more functionality, you’ll likely find yourself adding apps from the Shopify App Store – and those apps come with their own monthly costs too.
Shopify is also a closed ecosystem. You can customise within the boundaries it gives you, but there are things you simply can’t do – and if you ever want to move away from Shopify, migrating your store is not always straightforward.
The WooCommerce Experience
WooCommerce gives you significantly more control. Because it lives on WordPress, you have access to thousands of themes, plugins, and developers – and you own your store outright. There’s no platform that can change its pricing structure or terms of service and directly affect your business overnight.
The trade-off is that it requires a bit more setup and ongoing management. You need hosting, you need to keep WordPress and your plugins updated, and you need to make decisions about payment gateways, shipping plugins, and site security that Shopify handles automatically.
That said – with the right hosting and the right setup, a WooCommerce store can be just as straightforward to run day to day as a Shopify one. The complexity is largely front-loaded into the build rather than ongoing.
Cost – The Honest Version
Neither platform is free once you factor everything in.
Shopify’s entry-level plan starts at around $29 USD per month, before apps, before transaction fees, and before any premium theme costs. It scales up from there as your needs grow.
WooCommerce itself is free – but you’ll pay for hosting, potentially a premium theme, and any plugins you need. A well-built WooCommerce store on good managed hosting will typically cost less per month than an equivalent Shopify setup, but the upfront build cost may be higher if you’re paying someone to set it up properly.
The question isn’t really which one is cheaper – it’s where you’d rather spend the money and what you get for it.
Who Tends to Choose What
There’s no universal right answer, but broadly speaking:
Shopify tends to suit businesses that want to get up and running quickly, prefer a managed all-in-one solution, and don’t need a great deal of customisation beyond what the platform offers out of the box.
WooCommerce tends to suit businesses that already have or want a WordPress website, need more flexibility and control over how their store works, or want to avoid being locked into a single platform’s ecosystem long term.
What We Work With
At tiger&type we build on WordPress and WooCommerce – not because we think Shopify is bad, but because we genuinely believe WordPress gives our clients more flexibility, more ownership, and better long-term value for the kinds of businesses we work with.
That said if you’re already on Shopify and it’s working well for you, there’s no compelling reason to move. The best platform is always the one that serves your business – not the one that wins the internet debate.
If you’re trying to figure out which direction makes sense for your specific situation, get in touch and we’ll give you a straight answer.
