Both of these will sell things perfectly well. The difference isn't really features — it's what happens on a Tuesday afternoon eighteen months from now, when something breaks and somebody has to deal with it. That's the question worth deciding on.
The honest summary
Shopify is a product you rent. WooCommerce is software you run. Neither is better; they fail in different directions, and the right answer depends almost entirely on who's looking after the store day to day.
Where Shopify wins
It stays up, and it isn't your problem
Hosting, security patching, PCI compliance, checkout — all handled. You cannot break a Shopify checkout with a bad update, because you don't control it. For a business without technical support on hand, this is worth a great deal.
Checkout quality
Shopify's checkout is genuinely excellent and heavily optimised. Matching it on WooCommerce takes real work.
Predictable running cost
A monthly fee plus transaction costs. Higher than self-hosting at small scale, but you know what it is.
Where WooCommerce wins
You own the whole thing
Data, templates, checkout logic, the lot. If you need the store to do something unusual — trade pricing, odd shipping rules, an integration with a system nobody's heard of — you can simply build it.
Content and commerce together
It's WordPress, so the store and a serious content operation live in one place. For businesses where search traffic drives the sales, that matters.
Cost at scale
No per-transaction platform fee. At volume the maths shifts, though hosting a busy WooCommerce store properly is not the cheap option people expect.
The real deciding questions
- Who patches it? WooCommerce needs someone maintaining WordPress, plugins and PHP versions. If the answer is "nobody, really", pick Shopify.
- How weird are your products? Simple catalogue, standard shipping — Shopify. Trade accounts, made-to-order, complex variants — Woo will fight you less.
- How much does content matter? If organic search is the plan, Woo's content side is a genuine advantage.
- What's the exit plan? Getting off Shopify is more work than getting off Woo. Not a reason to avoid it — just worth knowing before you're three years in.
What we'd actually say
For most small Australian retailers with a straightforward catalogue and no in-house technical help, Shopify removes an entire category of problem and we'd recommend it without hesitation. For a business with unusual trade requirements, heavy content ambitions, or an existing WordPress site doing real work, WooCommerce is the better foundation — provided somebody is genuinely committed to maintaining it.
What we'd avoid is choosing on price alone. The cheap option is the one that doesn't need rescuing in two years, and that's rarely the one with the smallest monthly fee.
We build and look after both.
Shopify development →