Shopify vs WooCommerce

Shopify and WooCommerce solve the same problem in opposite ways. Shopify is a single subscription that bundles hosting, checkout and point-of-sale into one flat plan. WooCommerce is a free plugin that turns a WordPress site you build yourself into a store. That difference in shape, not just price, decides which one actually fits a given business. Every plan, extension price and billing rule below comes from Shopify’s and WooCommerce’s own pricing pages.

Is WooCommerce actually free, or does the bill just move somewhere else?

WooCommerce itself really is $0: no plan tiers, no cut of sales. But a live store needs somewhere to run, and that cost is real. The bill above uses Pressable, a host WooCommerce recommends, at $25 a month for a solo store’s traffic. WooCommerce’s own hosting guide, though, points a newer, lower-revenue store toward WordPress.com’s Commerce plan instead, at $70 a month, which bundles several extensions a Pressable-hosted store would otherwise buy separately, including Product Add-Ons and Gift Cards. Which number is closer to reality depends on the host you actually pick, and that choice is yours to make, not WooCommerce’s.

Card processing is close to a wash at the entry level. Shopify Payments charges 2.9% plus 30 cents per online card transaction on Basic, and WooPayments charges the same 2.9% plus 30 cents on WooCommerce, whichever host you use. Shopify’s rate improves to 2.5% plus 30 cents on its Advanced plan; WooCommerce’s stays flat no matter how big the store gets.

Which is cheaper as your store grows?

The bills above show WooCommerce staying cheaper than Shopify at every size shown, and the gap has a clear cause: Basic allows the store owner and no one else, so Shopify forces a plan upgrade the moment a store needs even one staff login beyond the owner, while WooCommerce’s WordPress user roles are free and unlimited at any size. That is a real, structural advantage, not a coincidence of the assumptions behind those numbers.

It is not the full picture, though. Those WooCommerce totals cover only the core plugin and hosting. A store that wants to sell subscriptions or take bookings adds a paid extension, and the common ones run $249 to $279 a year each, on top of whatever the host already charges. Add two or three of those and a lot of WooCommerce’s price advantage over Shopify’s Grow or Advanced plans narrows, or disappears, depending on which extensions the store actually needs. For how this fits into the rest of a store’s software choices, see the shopify-store stack.

Do you need to know how to code to run a WooCommerce store?

Not to launch a standard one. A managed host that installs WordPress and WooCommerce together, such as WordPress.com’s Commerce plan, lets you pick a theme and add products with no code, similar to signing up for Shopify. The two part ways once you want something a standard theme cannot do. WooCommerce’s checkout, templates and database are open PHP code that you or a developer can edit directly. Shopify’s equivalent customization happens through its own Liquid templating language and app store, on Shopify’s infrastructure, not yours.

A business that only ever needs a standard catalog and checkout will rarely notice the difference. One that wants a custom product configurator, a nonstandard checkout flow, or a tight integration with another system will need a developer on either platform, but only WooCommerce hands that developer the full underlying code to work with.

What does a real WooCommerce store end up paying beyond hosting?

WooPayments, WooCommerce’s own payment processor, adds several charges beyond the base 2.9% plus 30 cents: 1.5% more for a card issued outside the US, another 1% if the customer pays in a currency that does not match your payout account, and a flat $15 for each disputed charge. A card reader also costs $5 a month once it processes three or more transactions in a month. None of that shows up in the $0 plugin price, and a store that sells internationally or handles many disputes should expect it to add up. Shopify’s own pricing page lists only a flat 1% international surcharge on top of its online card rate; it does not list a separate currency-conversion charge the way WooPayments does.

What happens if you want to switch platforms later?

Both platforms let you export your product catalog to a CSV file, so your product data is rarely the hard part of a move. The difference is where the store lives. A Shopify store only runs on Shopify’s own servers, so leaving the platform, WooCommerce included, means rebuilding the storefront and checkout somewhere else. A WooCommerce store is a WordPress site you host yourself, so you can move it to a different host at any time without touching the storefront at all; only moving off WooCommerce itself, to a different ecommerce platform, requires the kind of rebuild Shopify would.

Payment gateways work differently from hosting. WooCommerce charges nothing extra no matter which gateway processes a sale, so switching away from WooPayments costs nothing beyond whatever the new gateway itself charges. Shopify allows the same freedom to use another gateway, but keeps charging its own fee, 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow or 0.6% on Advanced, on every sale that does not run through Shopify Payments.

Where most advice gets this wrong

Most comparisons frame this choice as beginner versus developer: Shopify for someone who wants things simple, WooCommerce for someone comfortable with code. That framing misses the actual dividing line, which is whether a WordPress site already exists. A business building a store from nothing pays the full cost of standing up WordPress, a host, a theme and someone to maintain all three, and that cost can erase most of WooCommerce’s advantage over Shopify’s flat plan price well before the store sells its first order. A business that already runs on WordPress for a blog, a membership area or a content-marketing site adds WooCommerce onto infrastructure it is paying for anyway, so the plugin really is close to free there. The right question is not how technical you are; it is whether you already have a WordPress site to add this to, or you would be starting one just to save a subscription fee.