Shopify vs WooCommerce: An In-Depth Comparison

Shopify vs WooCommerce comes down to what you are willing to trade. Shopify charges a monthly subscription and adds a fee of 0.6% to 2% per sale if you use any payment gateway other than Shopify Payments. WooCommerce is free but you pay for hosting, extensions and the build, and there is no penalty for choosing your own gateway. For a UK or Irish store taking mostly domestic card payments, WooCommerce usually costs less per sale and more upfront; Shopify costs more per sale and gets you trading faster. Neither is the better platform in general. The fit depends on your revenue, your technical support, and whether content sits alongside the store.

Most Shopify vs WooCommerce comparisons are written for American merchants, priced in dollars, and assume everyone uses the platform’s own payment processor. For a business selling from Belfast, Dublin or Manchester, those assumptions produce the wrong answer, because UK card interchange is regulated differently and the gateway you pick changes the maths considerably.

This guide compares the two on the things that actually move money: what each costs once fees are counted, who owns the store, how far you can push the design, and what you can do about SEO. There is no declared winner at the end, only a section telling you which platform suits which kind of business. ProfileTree builds and maintains stores on both for clients across Northern Ireland, Ireland and Great Britain, so the comparison below reflects what these platforms cost to live with rather than what their marketing pages claim.

What Does Shopify Actually Cost a UK or Irish SME?

Shopify sells four tiers: Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus. The tier formerly called “Shopify” is now Grow, which is why older comparison articles still list plan names that no longer exist.

UK merchants are billed in sterling and Irish merchants in euro. On annual billing, Basic starts from around £19 a month, Grow from around £49, and Advanced from around £259. Paying monthly rather than yearly adds roughly a quarter to a third to each figure. Shopify Plus starts at a different order of magnitude, around £1,800 a month, and is rarely the right answer below seven-figure turnover. Hosting, SSL and bandwidth are included in every tier, which is a genuine cost you are not paying separately.

The subscription is the part everyone quotes. The part that decides your annual bill is the fee structure underneath it.

The Fee Shopify Layers on Top

If you accept payments through anything other than Shopify Payments, Shopify charges an additional transaction fee on every sale, on top of whatever your chosen gateway already charges you. It is currently 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced and 0.2% on Plus, per Shopify’s own pricing page.

Shopify does not charge it on Shopify Payments, Shop Pay, Shop Pay Installments, PayPal Express Checkout or manual methods such as bank transfer. Stores created on or after 12 May 2025 also pay it on any portion of an order settled with store credit or a gift card, which is a recent change and worth knowing if you run a gift card programme. Shopify’s pricing and billing documentation sets out the mechanism in full.

In practice this means the decision is made for you. Using Shopify without Shopify Payments is expensive enough that almost nobody does it deliberately. That is the lock-in most cost comparisons miss: you are not just choosing a store platform, you are choosing a payment processor and accepting its rates for as long as you stay.

Shopify Payments charges UK merchants roughly 2% + 25p per online transaction on Basic, falling to about 1.7% + 25p on Grow and 1.5% + 25p on Advanced. Card rates step down as the subscription steps up, which is why the upgrade from Basic to Grow pays for itself somewhere around £10,000 a month in sales.

Apps are the third line. Features that WooCommerce often handles with a free plugin, such as advanced filtering or loyalty schemes, usually need a paid Shopify app. Three or four apps at £20 to £50 a month each will comfortably exceed your subscription.

What Does WooCommerce Actually Cost Once Hosting is Counted?

WooCommerce is a free, open-source plugin for WordPress. There is no subscription, no platform fee and no revenue share, and WooCommerce confirms this on its pricing page. The costs are all in what surrounds it, and most of them land in year one.

WooCommerce’s own guidance puts hosting at $25 to $350 a month for most stores and extensions at $29 to $299 a year each. For a UK store on managed WordPress hosting, budget £25 to £80 a month for a small to mid-sized shop, plus a handful of paid extensions for things like VAT handling, Royal Mail integration or subscriptions. Backups, security and updates sit on top, either as your own time or as a monthly arrangement with someone who has hosting and maintenance handled for you.

The build is the big one. A properly configured WooCommerce store costs more to set up than a Shopify store, because you are assembling hosting, theme, extensions and payment gateway rather than signing up to something already assembled. That is a one-off cost that shows up entirely in year one and distorts any twelve-month comparison.

Where WooCommerce Wins on Fees

WooCommerce charges nothing for your choice of payment gateway. Stripe, Worldpay, Opayo, Mollie, PayPal, Square: pick any of them, run two in parallel, switch next year, and WooCommerce takes no cut either way.

For a UK store this matters more than it sounds, because UK domestic card processing is cheap by international standards. Stripe’s standard UK rate is 1.5% + 20p for domestic cards, rising to 2.5% + 20p for EEA-issued cards and around 3.25% + 20p for cards issued outside Europe. A UK store selling mostly to UK customers is therefore paying meaningfully less per sale on WooCommerce with Stripe than the same store would pay on Shopify Basic with Shopify Payments.

Irish merchants should note the mirror image of this: selling from Ireland into Britain, or from Britain into Ireland, means a cross-border card mix and higher blended rates on either platform. Model your actual customer split rather than the domestic headline rate.

A Worked Example

Assume a UK store taking £10,000 a month across 200 orders, all domestic standard cards.

Around £60 a month, or £720 a year, in WooCommerce’s favour at this volume, before the build cost. The gap widens as revenue grows, because the percentage dominates. It narrows to nothing, or reverses, if WooCommerce maintenance eats more than a few hours of paid developer time a year.

That is the honest shape of it. The platform cost difference is real but modest, and it is smaller than the difference a good or bad build makes. Anyone showing you a three-year total that differs by tens of thousands is guessing at the developer line and presenting the guess as arithmetic.

Who Owns the Store, and What Happens if You Want to Leave?

Shopify is hosted. Your store runs on Shopify’s infrastructure under Shopify’s terms. You can export products, customers and orders whenever you like, but the theme customisations, the apps and the platform itself do not travel. Leaving Shopify means rebuilding somewhere else. This is not a criticism of Shopify’s reliability, which is excellent. It is simply what a hosted platform is: you are renting infrastructure that works very well.

WooCommerce sits on hosting you choose. The code, the database and the content are on a server you control. You can change hosts without rebuilding the store, export everything in one file, and hand the whole thing to a different agency without asking anyone’s permission. The flip side is that backups, updates and security are now your responsibility, or your host’s, or your agency’s.

Lock-in is also a negotiating position. If a WooCommerce store’s hosting or agency relationship stops working, the store moves. A Shopify store stays on Shopify. For many businesses that is a fair trade for never thinking about a server again, but it is worth naming before you sign up rather than three years in.

Ownership tends to matter most to businesses building something long-term around the store rather than just selling through it, which is why our e-commerce web design packages are scoped so the finished asset belongs to the client.

How Much Design Flexibility Does Each Platform Give You?

Shopify’s themes are polished, mobile-first and consistent in quality. You will get a professional-looking store quickly, and the theme editor is genuinely usable by someone who is not technical. The boundary is the platform: you can edit Liquid templates, but anything the platform does not support natively means finding an app or commissioning a Shopify developer. Checkout in particular is locked down on every tier below Plus.

WooCommerce has no meaningful ceiling. It is open source running on WordPress, so any part of the storefront, the cart, the checkout or the product logic can be changed. The trade is variance: WordPress theme quality ranges from excellent to dreadful, plugin conflicts are a real category of problem, and a WooCommerce store needs someone who knows what they are doing more than a Shopify store does.

If nobody in your business can tell a well-built WordPress site from a badly built one, that variance is a risk rather than an opportunity, and Shopify’s narrower range of outcomes is worth paying for.

Which Platform Gives You More SEO Control?

WooCommerce, clearly, though the gap matters less than SEO articles tend to claim.

WordPress with Rank Math or Yoast gives you granular control over titles, meta, canonical tags, schema markup and sitemap structure. You can restructure URLs, control pagination and indexation on category and filtered pages, and implement structured data exactly as you want it. For a store where the blog and the shop feed each other, running both from one CMS on one domain is a real advantage rather than a theoretical one. The catch is that this control has to be used: faceted navigation generating thousands of thin URLs is one of the commonest faults in the technical work a WordPress store needs, and it does not fix itself.

Shopify’s SEO is solid for most purposes. Technical fundamentals are handled, the CDN keeps pages fast, and metadata is editable. The constraints are structural: URL paths are partly fixed, with /products/ and /collections/ baked in, some duplicate content patterns from collection filtering are awkward to resolve, and schema control is shallower than WordPress. For a small store these limits will not decide your rankings. For a large catalogue in a competitive category, they can.

Either way, platform choice is rarely what holds a store back. A catalogue of three thousand products cannot all rank, and the harder job is to decide which pages are worth the effort before spending anything on content.

Page speed is a draw with different failure modes. Shopify is consistently fast because the infrastructure is not your problem. WooCommerce is as fast as your hosting, which means excellent on good managed hosting and poor on cheap shared hosting. The cheapest WooCommerce setup is the one that costs you rankings.

Which Platform Fits Your Business Type?

The first-time seller testing a product. Shopify. You want to find out whether anyone buys the thing before you spend money on a build. Basic plus Shopify Payments gets you trading this week, and if the product fails you have lost a month’s subscription rather than a project budget.

The established retailer with no technical resource. Shopify. If nobody in the business can manage a WordPress site and you are not retaining an agency, the maintenance burden of WooCommerce will become a slow tax on someone’s week. Predictable costs and a platform that patches itself are worth the fee difference.

The content-led business. WooCommerce. If your organic traffic comes from articles, guides or recipes that lead into products, running everything from one WordPress install on one domain is materially easier than bolting a Shopify store onto a WordPress blog.

The store with awkward products. WooCommerce. Configurable products, unusual pricing rules, trade and retail pricing side by side, bookings, hire, made-to-order: these are where Shopify’s variant limits and app dependencies start to bite, and where WooCommerce’s open architecture earns its extra setup cost.

The high-volume domestic seller. WooCommerce, on the maths, provided you have support in place. Above roughly £30,000 a month in UK card sales, the per-transaction difference becomes a real number and you can negotiate directly with your processor rather than accepting a published rate.

The business selling internationally from day one. Shopify. Shopify Markets, multi-currency, duty and tax estimation and translated storefronts work out of the box. Matching that on WooCommerce is possible and costs a build.

The business already running a WordPress site. WooCommerce, almost always. You have the hosting, the CMS and the skills in place, so adding a store extends something that works rather than introducing a second system to learn.

If two of those describe you and they point in different directions, the tiebreaker is usually support: whoever is going to look after this in eighteen months when you are busy. A platform that nobody in the business can maintain is the wrong platform regardless of the fee table.

FAQs About Shopify vs WooCommerce

Whichever platform you land on, the store only earns its keep if people find it, which makes search engine optimisation part of the build rather than something bolted on afterwards.

Prices and fees in this guide were verified against Shopify’s and WooCommerce’s official pricing pages on 19 September 2026. Platform pricing changes; check the linked pages before making a decision on the numbers.