Shopify takes responsibility for payments, tax rates, card compliance and its own updates, provided you can live inside its rules. That is a real offer and for a lot of shops it is the right one. You are renting a machine that works, and the rent is a monthly fee plus a percentage of everything you sell.
WooCommerce bends to how the business already works. A trade price, a lead time, a minimum order quantity, a deposit, a product that is not three options and a variant list. Nothing is rented and nothing takes a percentage of turnover, but everything that breaks is yours to fix or to pay somebody to fix.
I have written code that runs on both. Cartback is an abandoned cart recovery app on the Shopify App Store, so I have built against Shopify’s admin API, its webhooks and its billing API, and been through app review with a submission that came back needing changes. It is one of the four things I own outright. WooCommerce builds are something I sell, from £4,500.
That is narrower than it sounds and I would rather say so. Building an app teaches you exactly where a platform’s edges are, and nothing at all about running a shop through a Christmas rush. Everyone writing this comparison has a commercial interest in one answer. So do I, and mine points at WooCommerce, which is why the sum below is arranged so you can check it rather than trust it.
One shop, three years, both platforms. A total you cannot take apart is a marketing claim, so here are the parts.
Entry plan, using Shopify Payments, the configuration the platform is priced around and the one that shows it at its best.
The same shop, built by me, taking cards through Stripe. Same turnover, same orders, same three years.
Look at where the gap is not. WooCommerce comes out £3,150cheaper on card fees, because Stripe’s published UK rate is lower than the one Shopify quotes on its entry plan. On the line most people assume settles this, WooCommerce wins. The £620 Shopify wins by is very nearly my invoice: the build and the care plan. Drop to the £65 care tier and it falls to £-2,260 across three years on £540,000 of takings, which is not a reason to pick either one.
Five situations. The first costs people real money and it is the one nobody puts in the comparison table.
Take money through anything else and Shopify adds its own fee on top of your provider's. On the entry plan that has been 2% of order value for as long as I have watched it, less on higher plans. 2% of £540,000 is £10,800. Put that in and the Shopify column goes from £20,200 to £27,850, making WooCommerce £7,030 cheaper instead of dearer. Check the current percentage on Shopify's own pricing page, because it has moved.
That is the shape Shopify models a product in, and most shops fit it comfortably. The old limits were three options per product and a hundred variants; the variant ceiling has been raised a long way since, and the option count is what has caught out more of the shops I have seen. Verify both figures rather than trusting mine.
Trade accounts on their own list, quantity breaks, a deposit now and the balance on despatch, price on application, a discount agreed on the phone in 2019 and still honoured. Each is an app or a workaround on Shopify and a few hours of code on WooCommerce, and workarounds compound.
Shopify's checkout is not editable the way a WooCommerce one is. It is more extensible than it used to be, and the old template approach has been retired in favour of app blocks and functions, but it remains a set of extension points rather than a blank page, and the deepest hooks sit on the top plan.
Two hundred pages of guides and a mailing list with a shop attached, rather than a shop with an about page. WordPress is a publishing platform that grew a shop, which is the right way round here. Content on WordPress and the shop on Shopify is a third option, and sometimes the best one.
The plugin is free. The shop is not. On the sum above, extension licences alone come to £1,200 over three years before anybody touches the code, and hosting and the update work sit on top of that whether you pay somebody or do it yourself. Free means no licence fee for the core and nothing else. Quoting WooCommerce as the cheap option sets a plan fee against zero, which is not a comparison.
Everyone sets £25 a month against £30 of hosting. On this sum the plan is £900 and the card fees are £13,050, so the plan is under a tenth of the running cost. The percentage decides this, and it depends on a gateway decision most people make while thinking about something else.
A fair share of the shop enquiries I get should be Shopify stores, and saying so is the difference between a £4,500 build and an afternoon of my time. I will still say it. Eighty simple products, one warehouse, UK delivery, no unusual pricing: a decent theme configured well does that job, and the build money is better spent on photography.
So I will set one up and hand it over, or introduce you to somebody who builds Shopify themes full time and take nothing for it. If you want the brand and the writing to be properly yours with the shop as a smaller part, that is a bespoke build at £3,900 with Shopify handling the money behind it. What I will not do is talk you into WooCommerce because WooCommerce is what I invoice for.
What a WooCommerce build involves is on the WordPress and WooCommerce page. Both platforms get slow the same way, by accumulating third-party scripts, which is most of what I find in a speed audit. Every figure I charge is on pricing, and the claims I refuse to make are on facts and caveats.
On the sum on this page, at £15,000 a month through the checkout, Shopify comes out about £3,320 ahead over three years. Most of that gap is my build fee and my care plan rather than anything about the platforms themselves, and WooCommerce is actually £1,530 cheaper on card fees. If you cannot use Shopify Payments the answer reverses by roughly £6,000. Cheaper depends on inputs you can change, which is why every one of them is listed.
The plugin is. The shop is not. A working UK shop needs hosting that can serve a cart nobody can cache, several extensions that renew every year, and somebody doing the updates. On the assumptions used here that is £2,280 over three years before anyone touches the code, plus whatever maintenance costs. Free means no licence fee for the core and nothing else, and quoting WooCommerce as the cheap option sets a plan fee against zero.
It is a fee Shopify charges on top of whatever your payment provider charges, and it applies whenever you take money through anything other than Shopify Payments. On the entry plan it has been 2% of the order value, less on the higher plans. If you can use Shopify Payments you never see it. If your trade is one Shopify declines, or you are tied to an acquirer, it becomes the largest line in your running costs. Check the current percentage on Shopify's own pricing page, because it has moved.
Product count is the wrong test and I use it only as shorthand. What matters is whether a product can be described as options and variants. Eighty T-shirts in three sizes and four colours is a Shopify shop. Four hundred lines where each one carries a lead time, a trade price, a minimum order quantity and a datasheet is not, whatever the count says. Send me the product list rather than the number.
I will set one up on a good theme, migrate your products and hand it over, and I have shipped code inside Shopify so I know where the edges are. What I do not do is compete with the studios building custom Shopify themes full time. If that is what you need I will introduce you and take nothing for it. My own shop work is WooCommerce, from £4,500.
Yes, and it is a project rather than an export. Products, customers and orders move reasonably well. What does not move is the theme, the app configuration, the discount logic and anything living inside an app's own database. Budget for rebuilding the front end and redoing the integrations, and keep the URLs and redirects on the plan, because the search history is the part most migrations quietly lose.
Neither, materially. Both can produce a fast, well-structured, indexable shop, and both can produce a slow mess. Shopify constrains your URL structure in a couple of places; WordPress gives you more rope to hang yourself with. In practice the deciding factors are the theme, how many third-party scripts you have let in, and whether anybody writes anything. Platform choice is a long way down the list.
Yes, and it is the strongest argument for Shopify on this page. Multiple currencies, EU VAT and customs paperwork are things Shopify largely handles with configuration, and WooCommerce handles with extensions plus somebody who understands the rules. If a meaningful share of your orders leave the UK, weight the decision towards Shopify harder than the cost sum on its own suggests.
Real numbers from your device and connection, not a screenshot of a score I chose. Nothing is sent anywhere. The measurement happens in your browser and stays there. If one of these ever reads amber on my own site, you will see it, which is rather the point. I audit these for £650.