Compare · Ecommerce platforms

WooCommerce vs
Shopify.

I've built and recovered stores on both. The honest answer isn't which platform is better — it's which failure mode you can afford to live with. Here's how I decide.

Attribute
WooCommerce
Shopify
Platform fees on sales
None — you pay hosting only
0% on Shopify Payments, 0.5–2% on external
Monthly platform cost
$0 platform + hosting ($25–200)
$29–$399+ per month
Store ownership & data portability
Full — your database, your files
Hosted — export possible but painful
Extensibility
60,000+ plugins, full PHP access
Curated app store, Liquid templating
Time to first sale (no dev)
Days — setup is on you
Hours — hosted, opinionated
Reliability under Black Friday load
Depends entirely on your host
Excellent — Shopify absorbs it
PCI compliance burden
Yours (or your gateway's)
Handled by Shopify
Recovery cost when things break
Cheap — any WordPress dev can help
Locked to Shopify Experts
SEO control
Total — every URL, canonical, schema
Constrained — forced /products/ path
Checkout customisation
Total access to the code
Locked until Shopify Plus ($2k+/mo)

Pick WooCommerce if

You want to own the store, control the checkout, keep SEO tight, and have (or hire) someone who can maintain WordPress. The cost curve wins at every scale — but only if the ops discipline is real.

Pick Shopify if

You want to sell today, not build first. You'd rather pay platform fees than hire a WordPress engineer. And you accept the trade — someone else's rules on your checkout, your URLs, and eventually your ability to leave.

The honest fleet-scale truth

Every serious WooCommerce store that scales past $500k/yr saves five figures annually vs. Shopify — but only if it's on the right host, updated on a schedule, and has verified backups. A neglected WooCommerce store costs more than Shopify. The platform decision is really an ops-capacity decision.

Own the checkout, safely.

WooCommerce recovery, hardening, and speed. Stripe/PayPal webhook repair. Whether you're recovering a broken checkout or scaling one that works.

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