WooCommerce vs Shopify for a small store

What you pay, and to whom

WooCommerce itself is free to download and use. WooCommerce's pricing page (opens in a new tab) splits the rest into hosting, bought from whichever host you choose, and extensions, each a yearly licence. Card processing is a fee on each sale to whichever processor you pick; the table uses WooPayments' card fee for businesses in Canada (opens in a new tab). Those are separate bills from separate companies, and the extensions line grows one plugin at a time.

Shopify's Canadian pricing page (opens in a new tab) lists each plan with a pay-monthly price and a lower pay-yearly one, in Canadian dollars, and hosting is part of the plan. The card rate falls as the plan goes up. Keep another payment provider instead of Shopify Payments and Shopify adds its own fee to every order, which also falls on the higher plans. Advanced sits above the two plans shown here, with a higher plan price and a lower card rate.

Which total is lower depends on your host, how many paid extensions or apps you need, and how much you sell. The bigger difference is what the money buys. On WooCommerce you are paying for infrastructure and assembling the rest. On Shopify you are paying for a finished, hosted checkout and adding what you need on top.

Who does the maintenance

A WooCommerce store is a WordPress site with a shop inside it. Core updates, plugin updates, theme updates, PHP versions, backups and security are yours, or your host's if you pay for that. When a plugin update breaks the checkout on a Friday evening, the person who notices is a customer and the person who fixes it is you.

Shopify runs the hosting, the checkout, security and platform updates. What is left to you is the theme and the apps you install. That is the product you are buying: fewer things that can go wrong at nine at night, and a smaller list of things you are responsible for.

This is the part most comparisons undercount. The plan price is easy to read. The hours spent keeping a plugin stack working, or the invoice from the developer who does it for you, are the larger number for many small stores.

What you give up

Checkout customisation. Below Shopify Plus the checkout is Shopify's, with settings rather than code. If your store depends on unusual pricing rules, custom fields at checkout or logic a developer wrote into WooCommerce, some of it will become an app, some will become a workaround, and some will not come across.

WordPress content. If the shop sits inside a content site with a large blog and page-builder layouts, WordPress is the stronger publishing tool. Shopify's blog and pages are adequate for a store and thin for a magazine.

Your choice of payment provider, at a price. Shopify Payments is the default and the surcharge for using another provider is real money on every order. And data lives on Shopify's terms: everything can be exported, but the platform is not yours the way a WordPress install is.

What decides whether the move hurts

Redirects. Google knows your old product, collection and blog addresses, and every one of them needs to point at its new home before launch. A move without an address map is where the stories about lost traffic come from. A move with one, checked before the switch and watched afterwards, keeps the visitors you already earned.

Product data. Sizes, colours and options that were plugins in WooCommerce become variants in Shopify, and the mapping has to be checked product by product rather than assumed. Images, weights and stock counts come across; anything a plugin added may not.

Customers and orders. Customer records come across by spreadsheet or app, and Shopify's migration guide (opens in a new tab) lists historical orders among the data a migration app or its API can bring over, imported after the products and customers they belong to. Passwords cannot move between platforms, so customers sign back in a new way, and how that is explained to them matters more than it sounds. The WooCommerce to Shopify migration page lists what moves and what does not.

The theme. Themes belong to their platform, so the design is rebuilt on Shopify rather than transferred. If the current design works, rebuild it to match; a migration is a poor time to also redesign.

The rehearsal. Do the whole move on a test store first, compare it against the live one, and write down how to switch back. Launch day should be a repeat of something that already worked. Afterwards, a free Shopify store review of the live store is a quick outside check of the theme, the apps and how heavy the home page is.

Who should stay on WooCommerce

Stores where the content is the business and the shop is a side door. Stores with pricing or checkout logic that would need a Plus plan to reproduce. Owners who have a developer they trust on WordPress and are comfortable owning the maintenance. And anyone on a very tight monthly budget who has more time than money, because WooCommerce's cost floor is lower if you do the work yourself.

Who should move

Owners who would rather never think about hosting again. Stores where a broken plugin has cost a weekend of sales. Teams that need staff to change a product page or run a promotion without calling anyone. Stores whose plugin stack has grown fragile enough that nobody wants to press update. Those are the cases where the monthly plan buys back real time.

How to decide in an afternoon

List every plugin and what it does; most stores find a third of them do nothing. Export the addresses Google sends traffic to from Search Console; that is the redirect map you would need. Count products and variants. Write down anything custom at checkout. Add up last year's hosting, plugins and fixes, then put a Shopify plan and the two or three apps you would actually need beside it.

If the custom list is short and the maintenance number is large, the move pays for itself in time. If the custom list is long, stay, and spend the money on the plugin stack instead.