We build WooCommerce sites. That’s our default for any UK business that asks us to put them online with a shop. We’ve also built and migrated Shopify stores for clients where Shopify was clearly the better fit, so we have skin in this game on the WordPress side, and we’ll be honest about that as we go.

The post still makes the case for WooCommerce in most situations. But it tells you where Shopify wins, where it wins clearly, and where we’d send a client there ourselves rather than build them WooCommerce.

If you want the answer in one sentence: pick Shopify if you want to be selling tomorrow and never think about hosting again. Pick WooCommerce if you want to own the site outright and care about long-term cost and flexibility.

That sentence covers most cases. The rest of this post is for the cases it doesn’t.

What Shopify is genuinely better at

Some things Shopify simply does better than WooCommerce, and pretending otherwise wastes your time.

Speed to launch

If you sign up to Shopify on a Monday, you can have a passable store taking real orders by Friday. The platform handles hosting, security, payment processing, basic shipping setup, and tax calculations. You don’t have to think about any of those things until you want to go beyond the defaults. WooCommerce, even with managed hosting, has more setup steps. Not difficult ones, but more of them.

For a small business that just needs to be selling, that head start matters.

Hosting and scale handled

Every Shopify plan includes unlimited bandwidth and storage. As your traffic grows, the platform grows with you, and you don’t get a phone call from your hosting provider asking what you’ve done. WooCommerce can handle the same growth, but only if your hosting is set up for it. That means choosing a managed WordPress host that’s actually built for ecommerce, which is a real choice we’ve covered in our piece on managed WordPress hosting in the UK.

If “managed WordPress hosting” sounds like something you’d rather not spend a Saturday choosing, Shopify removes the question entirely.

Payment processing baked in

Shopify Payments works out of the box. You can be taking card payments within minutes of completing setup, with no third-party gateway integration to configure. Card rates are competitive (around 1.5% to 2% + 25p per transaction depending on plan), and using Shopify Payments avoids the additional transaction fee Shopify charges for using a third-party gateway: 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced.

WooCommerce supports every major payment gateway via free plugins, but each one needs setting up, and most need a few configuration choices that genuinely matter. It isn’t hard. It’s just another thing to do.

The app ecosystem for specific use cases

Shopify’s App Store has more than 5,000 apps, many of which are tightly integrated with the platform’s checkout. For some specific use cases, the Shopify equivalent is simply easier to install, configure and rely on than the WooCommerce equivalent. Subscription products, multi-location inventory, social-media selling, and high-volume order management are areas where Shopify often wins on out-of-the-box experience.

Predictable monthly cost

Your Shopify bill is your Shopify bill. Add Shopify Payments fees and that’s most of what you pay. Hosting, security patches, software updates, and platform improvements are all included.

WooCommerce monthly costs aren’t unpredictable, but they sit across more invoices: hosting, premium extensions, possibly maintenance support. Some businesses prefer the single-line-item simplicity Shopify offers.

What WooCommerce is genuinely better at

You own the site

WooCommerce is software that runs on hosting you control. You own your database, your content, your customers’ data, your code. If your hosting provider goes out of business, you take the site somewhere else. If WooCommerce as a project ever stalled (it hasn’t, and it has Automattic behind it, but hypothetically) the site doesn’t disappear with the platform.

Shopify is a platform. Your store exists for as long as your account exists, and the rules of operation are set by Shopify. That’s a fair trade for most businesses. It isn’t the right trade for everyone.

Flexibility, by a wide margin

WooCommerce sits inside WordPress, and WordPress is the most extensible CMS in the world. There’s a plugin or a developer or a snippet of code for almost any functional change you want to make. If your business has unusual needs (a non-standard checkout flow, a bespoke product configurator, a deep integration with a back-office system) you have more options on WooCommerce than on Shopify, because Shopify’s extension model is constrained by the platform’s architecture.

For most businesses, this flexibility doesn’t matter for the first few years. For some, it matters from day one.

Content marketing integration

WordPress was built for content. WooCommerce inherits that. If your ecommerce strategy depends on ranking for product-related searches, on running a blog that drives traffic to your shop, on long-form content that builds authority over time, WooCommerce has the edge. Shopify’s blogging tools are functional but not the platform’s strength. WordPress’s are. The breadth of what WordPress brings to the table as a content platform is one of the reasons we default to it.

If SEO and content are important to your strategy, this is a meaningful difference.

No per-transaction platform fees

WooCommerce doesn’t charge a transaction fee for processing payments through your chosen gateway. Stripe charges its rate, you pay Stripe’s rate, that’s the end of it. Shopify charges an additional fee on top of your gateway’s rate if you don’t use Shopify Payments, which is fair to them but a real cost to you.

Lower long-term cost (usually)

The maths section below covers this properly. Short version: at low volumes, Shopify Basic is cheap and easy. At higher volumes, the combination of plan fees and transaction fees on Shopify can outpace what a well-hosted WooCommerce store costs. The crossover point depends on your revenue and your gateway choices, but it exists.

Control over your data

GDPR is a UK and EU concern, and ownership of customer data matters more under GDPR than under most other regulatory frameworks. With WooCommerce, your customer data lives in your database, on hosting you’ve chosen, in a country you’ve chosen. With Shopify, the data lives on Shopify’s infrastructure, which is well-managed but not yours.

For most small businesses this isn’t a deal-breaker. For some, it is.

The UK-specific considerations

Both platforms can do most things UK businesses need. The differences are in the detail.

VAT

Both handle UK VAT, including the digital-services rules and the post-Brexit EU/UK split. Shopify has built-in VAT compliance tools that work out of the box. WooCommerce supports VAT through configuration in its tax settings, with a free plugin available for EU VAT compliance if you’re selling cross-border. Both work. Shopify has the slight edge on convenience for first-time setup.

UK payment gateways

Stripe, GoCardless and Worldpay all integrate with both platforms. Stripe is the default choice for most UK ecommerce, and it works well on either. GoCardless (for direct debits) and Worldpay (for businesses already using their wider services) are both available via free plugins on WooCommerce and via apps on Shopify. The connection options are similar. The difference is the additional Shopify transaction fee that applies when you use a third-party gateway: 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced.

Royal Mail, Evri and DPD

Both platforms integrate with the main UK couriers. Royal Mail Click & Drop has direct integrations with both. DPD and Evri are accessible via their own integrations or via shipping aggregators (Shippo, EasyShip, ShipStation) that connect to either platform.

WooCommerce gives you more granular control over shipping rules (custom rates, conditional pricing, multi-zone setups) at the cost of more configuration. Shopify is faster to get to a working baseline.

GDPR and data ownership

Covered above. WooCommerce gives you direct data ownership. Shopify is GDPR-compliant but operates on its own infrastructure. Most UK businesses won’t see a practical difference. A few will.

The honest cost comparison

Here’s where most agency comparisons get vague. We’re going to be specific, including about ourselves.

Three options for a UK business doing around £20,000 a month in revenue across roughly 200 orders. All figures are annual.

Option 1: Shopify Basic, you run it

Plan: £228 a year (£19 a month, annual billing). Card processing via Shopify Payments: 2.0% + 25p per transaction. No additional Shopify transaction fee, because you’re using their payments product.

Year-one total: roughly £5,628.

What’s included: hosting, security, automatic platform updates, daily backups, payment processing, basic shipping setup, VAT compliance tools, access to the App Store, standard Shopify support via email and chat.

What you’re handling: design choices, content, theme customisation, app selection and configuration, store setup, marketing, anything the platform doesn’t do natively. If something breaks, you contact Shopify or you fix it yourself.

Who it suits: small operations where simplicity is worth more than ownership, where time saved is worth more than long-term cost, and where the website isn’t strategically central to the business.

Option 2: WooCommerce, you maintain it

Plugin: free. Hosting on a managed WordPress host that handles ecommerce well: around £30 to £60 a month, so £360 to £720 a year. Card processing via Stripe: around 1.5% + 20p for UK cards, with no additional platform fee.

Year-one total: roughly £4,440 to £4,800.

What’s included: hosting, the WordPress and WooCommerce software, Stripe payments, your own domain, full ownership of your code, content, and customer data.

What you’re handling: everything else. Plugin updates, security monitoring beyond what your host bundles, performance tuning, theme maintenance, SEO when things change, fixing problems when they appear. The site doesn’t take care of itself; you take care of it.

Who it suits: businesses with someone in-house who can wear the developer hat, or a founder with the technical confidence and the time to be the site’s maintainer. Genuinely cheaper than Shopify in cash terms. The cost lives in the hours you’ll spend on it.

Option 3: WooCommerce, professionally managed (with us)

Plugin: free. Our own ecommerce hosting: £499 a year. Our Growth care plan: £149 a month, so £1,788 a year. Card processing via Stripe: around 1.5% + 20p for UK cards.

Year-one total: roughly £6,367. (Our Business care plan, at £249 a month, brings that figure to roughly £7,567 a year for businesses with heavier ongoing requirements: more frequent content updates, deeper SEO involvement, larger product catalogues.)

What’s included: hosting, the WordPress and WooCommerce software, the bespoke build itself, security monitoring, daily backups, plugin updates carried out and tested before they hit production, performance tuning, uptime monitoring, ongoing content and SEO support, and a UK person who picks up the phone when something needs attention.

What you’re handling: running the business. The day-to-day operation of the site isn’t your problem.

Who it suits: businesses where the website is load-bearing for revenue, where an hour of downtime costs more than the monthly care fee, where you’d rather not learn the things you don’t want to learn, and where the cost of “we’ll fix it on Monday” is real money.

What the numbers actually say

The three figures in order:

  • WooCommerce, you maintain it: £4,440 to £4,800
  • Shopify Basic: £5,628
  • WooCommerce, professionally managed (Growth care): £6,367

The cheapest option, in pure cash terms, is the one where you’re the maintainer. Shopify sits in the middle. The professionally-managed WooCommerce route is the most expensive, by roughly £700 a year against Shopify and roughly £1,500 to £1,900 against DIY.

This is the comparison most agency content quietly avoids. We’re putting it in writing because the alternative is leaving you to do the maths yourself and reasonably wondering whether we’d hoped you wouldn’t.

So why would you choose the most expensive option? Because the question isn’t really “which is cheapest”. It’s “what does it cost when something goes wrong, and who handles it?”

Against Shopify, the extra spend buys ownership of the site outright, a content and SEO platform Shopify can’t match, no platform-imposed fees on top of card processing, and a UK human attached to the build by name rather than a ticket queue. The cost gap also narrows and eventually inverts at higher revenue, because Shopify’s percentage card fees keep climbing while a fixed care fee doesn’t.

Against DIY, the extra spend buys someone other than you watching the site. Plugin updates that have been tested before they go live, instead of plugin updates that have taken your checkout offline at nine o’clock on a Friday. The hours back. The peace of mind that the site isn’t quietly drifting eighteen months toward a forced rebuild because nobody’s been looking after it.

Shopify will win on cash cost at low volumes, and we’re not going to pretend otherwise. We compete on a different question: what you own, what you’re building toward, and who answers when the site stops behaving. That’s a different conversation, and it has a different answer.

What happens if you outgrow your choice

Migrations between the two platforms are doable, but they aren’t free.

WooCommerce to Shopify

The slightly easier direction. Shopify has a Store Importer app that brings products, customers and orders across reasonably well. Themes and design need rebuilding. SEO needs careful attention because URL structures change, and a migration without 301 redirects mapped properly can lose months of search traffic. A small store can be migrated in a few weeks. A larger store takes longer, mostly because of theme rebuild and SEO migration.

Shopify to WooCommerce

The harder direction. Plugins exist for migrating products and customer data, but more of the work tends to be bespoke. You’re rebuilding the storefront in WordPress, reconfiguring tax and shipping, and choosing your hosting. Realistic timelines run from six weeks for a small store to several months for a more complex one.

The reason this section matters: pick a platform you aren’t planning to leave. The impulse to switch usually fades when the work is properly scoped, and the cost of switching is rarely justified by the cost of staying.

Our recommendation, by business type

Solo crafter, maker, or low-volume seller

Shopify, probably. The simplicity is worth more than the per-transaction fees at low volume, and the time you’d spend setting up WooCommerce is better spent on your products. Exception: if you’re already on WordPress and the shop is an extension of a content-driven site, WooCommerce is sensible from the start.

SMB with content marketing in the strategy

WooCommerce, usually. The combination of WordPress’s content tools with WooCommerce’s ecommerce capability is hard to beat if your traffic comes from search and your blog matters. The hosting choice is the variable to get right, and it’s the choice we manage on behalf of clients via our managed partnership plan.

A growing brand with brand-building ambitions

It depends on the rest of the stack. If your team includes someone who can manage a WooCommerce build properly, or you’re working with an agency that can, WooCommerce gives you more room to do something distinctive. If your team is small and you’d rather not think about the underlying tech, Shopify lets you focus on the brand and the product without losing sleep over plugin updates.

Anyone selling internationally, with multi-currency requirements

Both can do it. Shopify makes it slightly easier on the higher tiers. WooCommerce gives you more control once you’re set up. The deciding factor is usually whether you want to manage that complexity yourself or have it abstracted away.

When to call us

Trying to work out which platform is right for what you’re selling? Take a look at how we approach ecommerce builds, then tell us about your site and we’ll have a look. We’ll give you a straight answer, even if the answer is Shopify.