Shopify or WooCommerce? Deciding Who Owns Your Store

Most comparisons of Shopify and WooCommerce line up features. The features are close enough that they rarely decide anything. The better question is who owns the store, what it costs you every month, and what happens if you ever want to leave.

The real question is ownership

Shopify is a hosted platform. You pay a monthly subscription, and Shopify runs the software, the servers, and the checkout. Your store lives on their system, under their terms, and the price is whatever they set it to next year.

WooCommerce is a free plugin that turns a WordPress site into a store. (A plugin is an add-on that gives WordPress a new ability.) The software runs on hosting you choose, the files and database are yours, and no one can change the terms of your store but you.

Neither of those is wrong. Renting is a fine choice for plenty of things. But it is a choice, and it shapes every other part of the decision: what you pay, what you can change, and how hard it is to move.

Here is the plain version of the trade:

• With Shopify, you rent a finished store. Less to set up, less to maintain, and less control over the price and the platform.
• With WooCommerce, you own the store. More decisions up front, someone has to keep it updated, and you control where it lives and what it costs.

Monthly costs on each side

Shopify's costs are predictable at the start, then grow with your sales. As of November 2026, Shopify's pricing page lists three main plans. Billed monthly, Basic is $39 a month, Grow is $105, and Advanced is $399. Paying yearly lowers those to $29, $79, and $299 a month.

On top of the plan, every sale carries a card processing fee. On the Basic plan, Shopify lists online card payments at 2.9% plus 30 cents. If you use a payment provider other than Shopify's own, Shopify adds a separate transaction fee on each sale: 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, and 0.6% on Advanced. That fee is on top of whatever your outside processor charges.

Then there are apps. Shopify stores usually add apps for things the base plan doesn't cover, and many of those carry their own monthly charges. Those add up quietly, so price them before you commit, not after.

WooCommerce's costs look different. The plugin itself is free. You pay for:

• Hosting. A store needs a solid server. My hosting is $350 a year per site, on a private server, with Cloudflare included.
• Payment processing. I recommend Stripe for most stores. You pay Stripe's processing fee on each sale, and there is no extra platform fee on top of it.
• Any paid extensions the store needs, such as live shipping rates or subscriptions. Many stores need few or none.
• Upkeep. Someone has to keep WordPress, WooCommerce, and the plugins updated. You can do that yourself, or a Webcare plan handles it starting at $129 a month.

The difference that matters most over time is the per-sale fee. A flat hosting bill doesn't change when your sales double. A percentage of every sale does.

Moving a store later

Ask this before you build anything: if I want to leave in three years, what comes with me?

Shopify lets you export products, customers, and inventory as spreadsheet files (CSV, a plain table format most software can read), and you can export orders and discounts too. That is useful. But your theme, your apps, and the way your store works are tied to Shopify. Moving means rebuilding the store somewhere else and bringing that data along.

A WooCommerce store moves as a whole. The site, the products, the customers, and the order history live in your files and your database, so changing hosts or developers means copying the store, not rebuilding it.

Either way, a move has to protect your search rankings. Every product and page address either stays the same or gets a 301 redirect, a permanent forwarding rule that sends visitors and Google from the old address to the new one. When I rebuilt Firemen Clothing as a new WooCommerce store, the store's database came across so no product, customer, or order was lost. The Cozy e-commerce case study covers how that went.

Why I build on WooCommerce

I build new stores on WooCommerce, and I recommend it to most of the businesses I work with, for one reason above the rest: you own it.

• No platform fee on every sale, and no terms that change under you.
• It does what the hosted platforms do: variations, inventory, coupons, tax, shipping, abandoned-cart email, reviews, and the rest. The pieces you don't need aren't bolted on.
• It is still a website. Your blog, your landing pages, your SEO, and your store live in one place, under one login, and search engines treat them as one site.
• It handles more than boxes on a shelf. Services, tickets, classes, memberships, and subscriptions all fit.

WooCommerce has a reputation for being slow, mostly because many WooCommerce sites carry dozens of plugins. Mine don't. I build on the Kadence theme and Shop Kit, keep plugins to what the store needs, set up caching properly, and make plugins load only on the pages that use them. I measure speed in Google PageSpeed Insights before launch, and I build to industry best practices for accessibility, with a target of a 100% accessibility score in PageSpeed Insights on every page.

The Cozy case study shows what that looks like in practice: three WooCommerce stores for one client, each built around a different job. One sells personalized gifts and bulk firehouse orders from the same catalog. One is a formalwear catalog meant to send people into the shop instead of to a cart. One sits alongside a promotional-products platform the client doesn't control, styled so the two read as one site.

Shopify may still be the right fit for some businesses, especially an owner who wants to run everything alone and never think about software updates. That is a real reason. It just comes with a monthly bill and a per-sale cost that you don't control.

When a store doesn't need either

Some businesses asking this question don't need a store at all.

If you sell a handful of services, take deposits, or send invoices, you may only need a way to get paid. A payment link from a processor like Stripe takes a card payment without a cart, a catalog, or a checkout to maintain. That works on a WordPress site, and it works on a static website, a site built from plain files with no database or plugins to update.

A real store earns its keep when you have products with options, inventory to track, shipping to calculate, or customers who come back and reorder. If you sell three things and want zero maintenance, I'll tell you that too.

Not sure which one fits?

Start with what you sell, how people pay for it, and how much of the store you want to run yourself. Those three answers usually settle it. My e-commerce website design page covers what a WooCommerce build includes, and the small business website cost guide explains how I estimate time.

I bill by the hour and give you an hours estimate before any work starts. No commitments, no contracts, no gotchas.