We've built on both. Migrated between both. Here's the unfiltered version.
Every few weeks someone asks us which platform they should build on. Shopify or WooCommerce. It's the right question to ask before you spend money on development, the wrong answer costs you more to fix later than it cost to build in the first place.
So here's the actual conversation, not the blog post version.
Most platform comparisons treat Shopify and WooCommerce as competing products trying to do the same thing. They're not. They were built with completely different assumptions about who's using them and what they need.
Shopify's assumption: you want to sell products, you don't want to manage servers, and you'll trade some control for a lot of convenience. That's a reasonable trade for a lot of businesses.
WooCommerce's assumption: you're running WordPress already, or you want everything under one roof, or you have requirements that a hosted platform can't accommodate. You're willing to manage more complexity in exchange for owning the outcome.
We push clients toward Shopify when speed and simplicity matter more than control. Specifically:
Shopify is the better out-of-the-box experience. The admin is clean, the checkout converts well, and it handles scale without you having to think about it. For a product business that just wants to sell things, it's genuinely excellent.
One thing people miss: Shopify's real cost isn't the plan price. It's the apps. Most real stores need $200–500/month in third-party apps before they've spent anything on development or marketing. Build that into your math before you commit.
Content is the biggest one. If blogging, SEO, and editorial work are central to how you acquire customers, and they should be, WooCommerce running on WordPress is the only serious option. Shopify added a blog the same way a hardware store sells cleaning products. It's there, it works, but it's not what the store was built for.
Beyond content, we recommend WooCommerce when:
On data ownership: When you're on Shopify, your customer records live in Shopify's infrastructure. That's fine until Shopify changes its terms, adjusts pricing, or makes a policy decision that affects your business. It's happened before. On WooCommerce, your data is in your database on your server. That's yours.
Two years in, businesses on the wrong platform start looking at the other one. That migration is painful every time. Product data, customer records, order history, SEO URLs, all of it has to move cleanly or you're starting over in search rankings you spent two years building.
We've done these migrations. They're manageable, but they're not cheap and they're not fast. The cost of getting the platform decision right upfront is a few hours of honest conversation. The cost of getting it wrong is a migration project that runs five figures.
If someone tells you platform migrations are easy or that you can "just switch later," ask them how many they've done. The answer will tell you a lot.
| Factor | Shopify | WooCommerce |
|---|---|---|
| Launch speed | Days | Weeks with a proper build |
| Technical overhead | Minimal, Shopify handles it | Higher, you manage hosting |
| Customisation ceiling | Medium, you'll hit walls | None, open source |
| Content and SEO | Basic blog, limited | Full WordPress, best in class |
| Transaction fees | Yes (unless Shopify Payments) | None at platform level |
| Monthly cost | $39–$399 + apps ($200–500 typical) | Hosting only (~$30–80) |
| Data ownership | Shopify's infrastructure | Yours entirely |
| Multi-channel | Native, TikTok, IG, Amazon | Good via plugins |
| Long-term flexibility | Limited by platform direction | Unlimited |
If you're a product-focused business, your team isn't technical, and you want to be selling by next month, start with Shopify. It will serve you well and you can always evaluate it again when you've outgrown it.
If content is part of how you compete, you have requirements a hosted platform can't handle, or you're building something you want to control completely for the next decade, build on WooCommerce. Done properly it will outlast any Shopify alternative.
If you're genuinely not sure, that usually means the answer is WooCommerce, because the businesses that are clearly a good fit for Shopify usually know it immediately. The ones with complex requirements, content strategies, or long-term growth plans tend to need the conversation first.
There is no universally correct answer. There's the right answer for your business, your team, and where you're going. We spend real time on this decision with every client before touching design or code, because it's the decision everything else is built on.
If you're working through this decision right now, get in touch. We'll tell you which one we'd recommend for your specific situation and exactly why, no pitch, just a straight answer.
And if you want to understand how we approach the build after the platform decision is made, here's how Presence works.
