Shopify vs WooCommerce: which a first shop should pick
A shop that takes payments is step 04 on our ladder, EUR 3.500-7.500 excluding VAT, and that holds on Shopify and on WooCommerce alike. The platform barely moves our price. What moves it is how big the catalogue is, how odd your shipping and tax rules are, how many languages you sell in, and how much of the design is drawn rather than configured.
Our opinion on the real question: if this is your first shop, pick Shopify. Pick WooCommerce when you have a specific reason, and below we set out the reasons that count.
Hosted convenience against control
Shopify rents you a working shop. Checkout, card handling, fraud checks, tax rates, shipping labels and order emails are somebody else's responsibility. You pay monthly, and in return you accept the platform's opinions about how a shop behaves.
WooCommerce is a plugin on your own WordPress. You own the database, the code and the checkout, so the shop can be made to match how your business actually works. In exchange you own the hosting, the updates, the backups, the licences, and the consequences of skipping any of them.
Neither is the clever choice. They answer different questions: how fast can I start selling, and how far can this bend later.
When Shopify is the right pick
- It is your first shop and you are still finding out what sells. Time spent building is time not spent selling.
- A non-technical person runs it daily. Orders, refunds, stock and shipping live in one admin that was designed for them.
- You would rather rent payments, fraud checks, tax rates and PCI handling than own them.
- You want the shop to keep working through a quiet month when nobody logs in to maintain anything.
When WooCommerce is the right pick
- You already have a WordPress site with content that ranks and traffic that converts. Adding the shop to it beats moving everything to a new structure and hoping the rankings follow.
- Your pricing does not fit a product grid: per-customer rates, rental or booking periods, quotes that turn into orders, bundles priced by rule.
- The checkout itself has to do something unusual. On a hosted platform the checkout is the part you are least free to change.
- You want the database. Reporting, exports and joins against your own tables are yours to write, not a feature you wait for.
What it actually costs to run
We do not print other companies' plan prices here. They change, and quoting a number we do not control is how buyers get misled. What we can describe honestly is the shape of the bill.
On Shopify the bill is a monthly plan, card processing on every order, an added transaction fee if you bring an outside payment provider instead of theirs, and apps. Apps are the part people underestimate. Reviews, bundles, subscriptions, a better search, a feed for your ads: each is its own monthly line, and lines do not go away on their own.
On WooCommerce the bill is hosting that can survive a busy day, yearly licences for the plugins doing the real work, and somebody to apply updates and keep backups that have been restored once to prove they work. That last item is the one people quietly drop, and dropping it turns a cheap shop into an expensive weekend.
From us, either shop sits on Care at EUR 100-300 per month: updates, monitoring, backups and small fixes. Care is not a redesign and it is not new features. When you want either, we quote it.
| What changes | Shopify | WooCommerce |
|---|---|---|
| Getting the first order out | Quick. Checkout, payments and tax handling exist before you touch anything. | Slower. The same pieces are plugins, each chosen, configured and tested. |
| Running it day to day | Built for the owner. Stock, refunds and labels sit in one place. | Workable, but it is a WordPress admin with commerce attached, and more of the job is configuration. |
| What you own | Your data and your theme code. The platform underneath is rented, and its rules are its own. | The code, the repository and the database, outright. |
| What tends to break | Apps conflicting with each other, and a theme update undoing changes made in the wrong place. | Updates. A plugin or core release that nobody applied, or that was applied without a backup. |
| Where money leaks | Monthly apps that accumulate, and the added fee for an outside payment provider. | Hosting that turns out too small, licence renewals, and the emergency invoice when something falls over. |
| Leaving later | Products, customers and orders export cleanly. The storefront and the apps do not come with you. | You move hosting. The shop is already yours. |
What step 04 buys you
The work has the same shape on either platform: product data structured so it can be filtered and fed to ad channels, the storefront design, payments, tax and shipping rules, the emails a customer receives, and a real order pushed through end to end before launch. That is EUR 3.500-7.500 over 6-12 weeks. The range is wide because a short product list with finished photography is not the same job as a catalogue with variants, sizes and translations.
A shop never sits at step 03. Step 03 is EUR 1.500-3.500 for 4-7 pages with a CMS and a contact or booking flow, and money changing hands is the line between the two. The moment there is a checkout there are accounts, payment states, tax rules, refunds and failure cases to test.
Adding subscriptions later is EUR 600-1.500, and a customer dashboard EUR 1.500-4.000. An internal admin your staff work in all day is step 05, from EUR 7.500. The whole ladder is on packages.
When to spend less
If you do not yet know whether people will buy, do not commission a shop. Build step 01 at EUR 600-900 in 1-2 weeks, describe the product properly, take the first orders by invoice, and find out whether anyone wants it. That answer is worth more than a storefront.
You can also set a Shopify theme up yourself. It is designed for that, and there is no shame in hiring us once the shop earns enough to deserve a designer. We would rather build the second version of something that works.
If you already have a shop that sells but looks tired, that is a design job on what exists, not a replatform. And if nobody can find it, the platform is not the problem: SEO foundation is a one-off at EUR 450-750 and will tell you whether your product pages are indexed.
Questions buyers ask
Is WooCommerce cheaper because the plugin is free?
The licence is free. The shop is not. You pay for hosting that can take a busy day, for the plugins handling payments and shipping, and for somebody to keep all of it patched. That last cost is real whether you pay it in invoices or in your own evenings.
Do I own the shop you build?
You own the code, the repository and the database we build. On WooCommerce that is the entire shop. On Shopify it is your storefront code and your data, while the platform itself stays theirs, which is precisely what the monthly fee rents.
Can I move from one to the other later?
Yes, in both directions, and it is never free. Products, customers and orders move by export. Design, apps and custom logic do not move, they get rebuilt. Treat it as a project with its own quote, and do it when the shop has outgrown the platform rather than when you are annoyed with it.
Which one is better for SEO?
Neither wins by default, because both produce pages Google can read. What decides it is product page structure, descriptions written for your buyer rather than copied from the supplier, clean URLs and internal links that connect collections to products. WooCommerce inherits the WordPress content tooling, which helps if you publish alongside selling; Shopify needs more care with URL structure.
Can you host a WooCommerce shop for us?
We can host. It is agreed per customer rather than bundled in, and you are welcome to bring your own host.
Tell us what you sell and where the orders come in today. Send us that and you get a fixed quote after scoping instead of a range.
Building something?
JP Studio designs and builds websites, storefronts and product interfaces.