Choose Shopify if you want a hosted store with no server responsibility and your catalogue is reasonably straightforward. Choose WooCommerce if you need wholesale or B2B pricing, want full control over checkout, or your transaction volume makes Shopify's per-sale fees expensive. Both handle serious stores — the decision is about operational burden versus cost and control, not capability.
Head-to-head
| WooCommerce | Shopify | |
|---|---|---|
| Platform cost | Free (open source) | Monthly subscription |
| Per-transaction fee | None from the platform | Yes, unless using Shopify Payments |
| Hosting | Yours to arrange and pay for | Included |
| Maintenance | Yours — core, plugins, backups, security | Handled by Shopify |
| Checkout control | Complete | Constrained below Shopify Plus |
| B2B / wholesale pricing | Strong — role-based pricing | Limited without Plus or apps |
| Customisation ceiling | None — it is your code | Moderate, bounded by the platform |
| Ownership | You own everything outright | You rent the platform |
| Setup speed | Slower | Faster |
| Technical resource needed | Yes, ongoing | Minimal |
The cost question, honestly
The headline comparison is misleading in both directions. WooCommerce is described as free, which it is as software and is not as a running store. Shopify is described as all-inclusive, which is true until you add apps and count transaction fees.
What WooCommerce actually costs to run
- Hosting: $150–$1,200 per year, and cheap shared hosting is a false economy for a store
- Premium plugins: commonly $200–$600 per year for things like advanced shipping or wholesale pricing
- Maintenance: your time, or a retainer, for updates, backups, and security
- Payment processing: charged by your gateway, typically around 2.9% + 30¢
What Shopify actually costs to run
- Subscription: a fixed monthly fee that scales with plan tier
- Per-transaction fee: charged on every sale unless you use Shopify Payments, and this is the line that matters
- Apps: subscriptions that stack quickly — $50–$300 per month is common for an established store
- Payment processing: charged separately, similar rates to any gateway
The structural difference is that WooCommerce's costs are broadly fixed while Shopify's scale with revenue. At low volume Shopify is cheaper in total cost of ownership because the fixed costs of running WooCommerce properly are not amortised over many orders. At high volume the relationship inverts, sometimes dramatically. The crossover point depends on your margins and average order value, and it is worth actually calculating rather than assuming.
Where WooCommerce genuinely wins
B2B and wholesale pricing
This is the clearest win. WooCommerce supports role-based pricing so wholesale accounts see trade rates and retail customers see retail, from one catalogue and one stock pool, with gated trade-only product lines and an application-and-approval flow for new wholesale accounts. Fire & Ash Hair runs exactly this — salon wholesale and direct retail from a single store. Achieving the equivalent on Shopify means either Shopify Plus or a stack of apps that fight each other.
Checkout control
On WooCommerce the checkout is yours to modify — field count, flow, upsells, compliance messaging placed inline rather than as an interrupting modal. On Shopify, below the Plus tier, checkout is substantially locked. If conversion optimisation at checkout is central to your business, that constraint is a real cost.
Ownership
You own the code, the database, the customer list, and the order history. There is no platform that can change its terms, its pricing, or its policies in a way that affects your store. For some businesses this is an abstract benefit; for those in categories that platforms periodically decide to restrict, it is the entire decision.
Where Shopify genuinely wins
You do not have to think about infrastructure
No hosting decisions, no security patches, no PCI compliance work, no plugin conflicts after an update, no 2am outage that is yours to fix. For a business without technical resource and without the appetite to acquire it, this is worth more than the fees — and pretending otherwise has produced a lot of abandoned WooCommerce stores.
Speed to launch
A straightforward Shopify store can be trading in days. The equivalent WooCommerce build takes longer because more decisions are yours to make — hosting, theme architecture, which plugins, how the catalogue is structured.
Predictable behaviour
Shopify's constraints are also its strength: there are fewer ways to build something that breaks. WooCommerce's flexibility means it can be built badly, and a large share of the WooCommerce stores that perform poorly are suffering from implementation rather than from the platform.
Does either one struggle at scale?
Not inherently. Both run stores with large catalogues and high order volumes. Where WooCommerce gets a reputation for struggling, the cause is almost always shared hosting, poorly structured product attributes, or unindexed database queries rather than the platform. Where Shopify gets a reputation for being slow, the cause is almost always app scripts — every installed app injects JavaScript on every page load, and a store running a dozen apps carries a dozen extra scripts.
So the scaling question is really: which failure mode would you rather own? On WooCommerce you own the infrastructure and can fix it. On Shopify you own the app stack and can prune it, but the platform's limits are not yours to change.
Which should you choose?
| Your situation | Recommendation |
|---|---|
| No technical resource, straightforward catalogue | Shopify |
| Wholesale or B2B pricing is core to the business | WooCommerce |
| High transaction volume, margin-sensitive | WooCommerce — run the fee maths |
| Want to launch in days | Shopify |
| Checkout conversion work is a priority | WooCommerce |
| Already running a WordPress content site | WooCommerce — one system, one team to train |
| Operating in a category platforms restrict | WooCommerce — ownership matters here |
| Genuinely unsure and just want to start selling | Shopify, and migrate later if volume justifies it |
Can you migrate between them?
Yes, in both directions, and it is routine work. Products, variants, customers, and order history all migrate. The real planning effort is mapping functionality: Shopify apps and WooCommerce plugins rarely correspond one-to-one, so part of any migration is deciding how each piece of existing functionality will be reproduced. URL structure should be preserved with 301 redirects so rankings and inbound links survive.
Because migration is a solved problem, starting on Shopify and moving to WooCommerce once volume justifies it is a legitimate strategy rather than a mistake. Paying platform fees for two years while you find out whether the business works is often cheaper than building the flexible version of a store you may not need.
Akif Wani builds on both platforms and will tell you during scoping when the one you asked for is the wrong fit — including when that means recommending against the larger project.