What both platforms actually do
Shopify and WooCommerce both give you a working online store — product pages, a shopping cart, checkout, payment processing, order management, and basic shipping tools. On that list alone, the gap between them is small. Where they diverge is in how much you own, how much you manage, and how much flexibility you get in exchange for complexity.
Core features shared by both platforms:
- Product catalog management with variants, images, and inventory tracking
- Shopping cart and checkout flow
- Payment processing (multiple gateways supported by both)
- Discount codes and promotions
- Order management and fulfillment tracking
- Basic shipping rate configuration
- Customer accounts
- Mobile-responsive storefronts
- SEO fields: meta titles, descriptions, alt text, canonical URLs
- Analytics and sales reporting
For a small business selling 50 to 500 products, both platforms can get you to a fully functional store. The difference is not whether the store works — it is who does the work to get it there, and what happens when something goes wrong at 11pm on a Saturday before a big sale.
"Shopify rents you a fully managed store. WooCommerce sells you the parts to build one yourself. Both can get you to the same destination. The question is whether you want to drive or fly."
Quick comparison: Shopify vs WooCommerce
| Feature | Shopify | WooCommerce |
|---|---|---|
| Base price | $39–$399/mo (billed annually) | Free plugin; hosting $10–$50+/mo |
| Hosting | Fully hosted — Shopify manages it | Self-hosted — you choose and manage hosting |
| Transaction fees | 0% with Shopify Payments; 2% with third-party processor | No platform transaction fees |
| Setup speed | Fastest to launch — days, not weeks | More setup steps; steeper learning curve |
| Customization | Solid but limited by Shopify's framework | Unlimited — open-source PHP/WordPress |
| Security & updates | Shopify handles everything | You manage plugin updates, backups, patches |
| App / plugin ecosystem | 8,000+ apps in Shopify App Store | 59,000+ WordPress plugins available |
| POS (point of sale) | Built in — Shopify POS included | Requires third-party plugin or hardware |
| Support | 24/7 live chat and phone support | Community forums; paid support through hosting or developers |
| Best for | Fast launch, no technical team, POS needs, pure e-commerce focus | WordPress users, high customization, large catalogs, no transaction fees |
Pricing: what you actually pay
Shopify's pricing is straightforward. Three main plans: Basic at $39 per month, Shopify at $105 per month, and Advanced at $399 per month, all billed annually. Most small stores run fine on the Basic plan. The big variable is payment processing. Use Shopify Payments and there is no additional transaction fee — just the standard credit card processing rate (2.9% + 30 cents on Basic). Use a third-party processor like Stripe or Square and Shopify adds a 2% fee on top, which adds up fast on volume.
WooCommerce is free to install. But the real number is higher. You need WordPress hosting — $10 to $50 per month depending on traffic and your host (Kinsta or WP Engine run $30 to $50, basic shared hosting runs $10 to $15). You need a domain. Most stores need at least a few paid plugins: a premium theme ($50 to $100 one-time), possibly a subscription plugin ($200/year), a shipping plugin, and so on. Realistic total for a small WooCommerce store: $30 to $100 per month, comparable to Shopify Basic. The difference is there are no platform transaction fees at any volume.
The transaction fee math: A store doing $10,000 per month in sales through a third-party processor on Shopify Basic pays $200/mo extra in transaction fees alone. On WooCommerce, that fee is $0. At $5,000/month in sales, the Shopify fee is $100/mo — already closing the gap with WooCommerce's hosting costs.
Shopify deep dive
Shopify is a fully hosted e-commerce platform. You pay a monthly fee and Shopify handles hosting, security, SSL, software updates, and uptime. You focus on products, marketing, and fulfillment. The server never becomes your problem.
This is genuinely valuable. A WooCommerce store that goes down because a plugin update broke something, or because the hosting plan could not handle a traffic spike, is a real business cost. Shopify does not have that problem. Their infrastructure is built for e-commerce at scale and the uptime is reliable.
Where Shopify wins:
- Fastest path from zero to a working store. A focused first-time user can have a functional Shopify store live in a day or two. WooCommerce requires more steps — hosting setup, WordPress installation, theme configuration — before you even start adding products.
- Shopify POS is built in. If you sell in person at a retail location, market, or pop-up alongside your online store, Shopify's POS syncs inventory automatically. WooCommerce requires a separate POS solution that may or may not integrate cleanly.
- 24/7 support via live chat and phone. For a small business owner who is not technical, having a real person to call when something breaks is worth real money. WooCommerce support runs through community forums, your hosting provider, or a hired developer.
- The Shopify App Store has over 8,000 apps. Most common needs — email marketing, subscriptions, reviews, loyalty, upsells, shipping automation — are covered by multiple competing apps. Quality varies, but the selection is deep.
- Checkout is fast and conversion-optimized. Shopify has run more A/B tests on e-commerce checkout than almost any company in the world. Their checkout converts well and they continue improving it.
- Shopify Payments simplifies payment processing. One dashboard for your sales, payouts, and disputes instead of managing a separate Stripe account.
Where Shopify has limitations:
- The 2% transaction fee on third-party processors is a real cost that scales with revenue. If you have an existing Stripe setup or are in a country where Shopify Payments is not available, that fee compounds.
- Customization is limited by Shopify's Liquid templating system. You can customize a lot, but there are things you simply cannot do in Shopify without workarounds. Complex business logic, unusual product configurations, and non-standard checkout flows hit walls faster than on WooCommerce.
- You are renting, not owning. If Shopify raises prices, changes terms, or discontinues a feature, your options are limited. WooCommerce on your own hosting is yours to move and modify as you please.
- Blogging and content is functional but not great. Shopify's blog is basic. For stores where content marketing drives traffic, WooCommerce's WordPress foundation is a meaningful advantage.
WooCommerce deep dive
WooCommerce is a free, open-source e-commerce plugin for WordPress. It turns any WordPress site into a fully functional online store. Because it runs on WordPress — itself open-source software running on hosting you control — you own the entire stack. No platform lock-in, no transaction fees, no monthly subscription to a vendor who decides what you can and cannot do.
That ownership comes with responsibility. You manage hosting, keep plugins updated, maintain backups, and handle security. For a business with even one technically capable person, this is manageable. For a solo business owner with no interest in website administration, it can become a burden.
Where WooCommerce wins:
- No transaction fees, period. Whatever payment processor you use — Stripe, Square, PayPal, or a specialized processor for your industry — WooCommerce does not take a cut. At higher volumes, this is significant money.
- Unlimited customization. WooCommerce is open-source PHP running on WordPress. A developer can modify any part of it — checkout flow, product page layout, pricing rules, conditional logic, integrations with unusual systems. Shopify has hard limits that WooCommerce does not.
- WordPress is the best platform for content marketing. If your store's growth strategy includes blogging, SEO-driven content, or a knowledge base, being on WordPress gives you tools — Yoast, Rank Math, Gutenberg, a mature content workflow — that Shopify's blog simply cannot match.
- Better for stores already on WordPress. If you have an existing WordPress site with years of content, design, and SEO equity, adding WooCommerce is far easier than migrating the whole thing to Shopify.
- The WordPress plugin ecosystem is enormous — over 59,000 plugins. More niche integrations exist for WooCommerce than for Shopify because WordPress has been around longer and has a larger developer community.
- Large product catalogs with complex attributes often run more smoothly on WooCommerce, which does not have the same SKU limits or variant restrictions that Shopify imposes on lower-tier plans.
Where WooCommerce has limitations:
- You are responsible for your own infrastructure. Hosting goes down, plugins conflict, updates break things. These are real problems that happen to real WooCommerce stores. Managing them requires time or a developer on call.
- Steeper learning curve. Getting a WooCommerce store fully configured — shipping zones, tax settings, payment gateway, product variants, checkout customization — takes longer and requires more decisions than equivalent Shopify setup.
- No native POS. If you sell in person as well as online, WooCommerce requires a third-party POS solution and careful integration work to keep inventory synced.
- Support is fragmented. Shopify support covers your entire store. WooCommerce support means your hosting provider covers the server, WooCommerce's forums cover the plugin, and your theme developer covers design issues. When a problem crosses all three, it can be difficult to diagnose.
- Security is your job. A WordPress site that is not properly maintained is more vulnerable than a Shopify store. Plugin vulnerabilities are real, and the responsibility for patching them lands on you.
"WooCommerce's real cost is not the hosting bill. It is the time spent managing the thing when you would rather be running your business. That cost is invisible until it is not."
Ease of use: who can actually launch this?
Shopify wins this one, and it is not close. The onboarding flow is guided. Products, payments, shipping, and domain are all configured through a single dashboard with clear step-by-step prompts. A non-technical business owner with a product to sell can have a working store in a weekend without hiring anyone.
WooCommerce requires more prerequisite knowledge. You need to choose and set up WordPress hosting, install WordPress, install and configure WooCommerce, choose and configure a theme, and then build your store on top of that. Each step has decisions. Hosting providers, theme frameworks, page builders — a first-time WooCommerce user will spend more time on infrastructure decisions than on products.
That said, the complexity pays off in control. Developers and technically confident business owners often prefer WooCommerce specifically because they can see and modify everything. The constraint is that this requires either having the skill yourself or budgeting for someone who does.
Customization: what can you actually change?
This is the sharpest practical difference for businesses with specific needs.
Shopify's customization runs through themes (edited in the Liquid templating language) and apps. You can customize the look, add functionality through apps, and use Shopify's API for deeper integrations. But certain things are not changeable: Shopify's checkout is heavily locked on most plans, some URL structures are fixed, and complex pricing or conditional logic quickly runs into the ceiling of what the platform allows without hacks.
WooCommerce has no ceiling by design. Because it is open-source code running on a server you control, a developer can change anything. Custom pricing rules, unusual checkout flows, integrations with legacy inventory systems, industry-specific payment processors — all of it is possible with WooCommerce in a way that is genuinely difficult or impossible with Shopify. The tradeoff is that building and maintaining custom code requires ongoing developer involvement.
For a store selling standard products with standard checkout flows, Shopify's customization is more than sufficient. For stores with unusual requirements — auctions, configurable products, B2B pricing tiers, industry-specific compliance needs — WooCommerce is often the only realistic option.
Who each platform is actually for
Choose Shopify if: You want to launch quickly without managing technical infrastructure, your business does not have a dedicated developer, you sell in person and need POS functionality, you are comfortable paying monthly for a fully managed platform, or you use Shopify Payments and want to avoid transaction fees altogether.
Choose WooCommerce if: You are already on WordPress and have years of content and SEO equity you do not want to abandon, your store has complex customization needs that hit Shopify's limits, you are processing enough volume that transaction fees would cost more than managing your own hosting, you have a developer available, or you want full ownership of your store without platform lock-in.
Either works well for: Most small stores selling physical or digital products through standard checkout flows. If your main question is "which one can sell my products online," both can. The decision comes down to how much control you want versus how much you want to manage.
The automation gap that neither platform fills
Here is the part that does not appear on either platform's feature list.
When a customer places an order, both Shopify and WooCommerce send an order confirmation email. That is automated. Everything after that? Largely on you.
The customer who bought a coffee grinder from your store three months ago and has not returned — neither platform sends them a win-back email. No platform-native tool triggers that. The customer who received their order last week and presumably likes it — Shopify does not send a review request email after delivery. Your best customer, who has placed five orders, does not get a loyalty reward automatically. The customer who bought a French press does not automatically receive a follow-up email about coffee beans based on their purchase history.
None of this is a criticism of either platform. They are not built to be customer retention systems. But those automated sequences — win-back flows, review requests timed after delivery, loyalty triggers, cross-sell recommendations based on actual purchase history — are where a significant chunk of e-commerce revenue lives. Research consistently shows that repeat customers spend more per order and cost far less to convert than new ones. The economics of retention are not subtle.
The gap exists on Shopify. The same gap exists on WooCommerce. It exists regardless of which platform you choose. What fills it is a dedicated automation layer built on top of your store — sequences that activate when the right customer behavior happens, at the right time, with the right message. That is what Aplos AI builds. On Shopify. On WooCommerce. Whichever platform you are already using.
Your store takes the order. What it does with the customer after that determines whether they come back. We audit exactly where your post-purchase revenue is leaking and build the automations that recover it — on top of Shopify, WooCommerce, or whatever you are already running.
Get a Free Automation Audit →The verdict
Pick Shopify if you want to start selling as fast as possible without managing anything technical. It is the right call for a first store, for a business without a developer, for anyone who sells in person and needs POS sync, and for anyone who values 24/7 support when something goes wrong at 2am before a holiday sale.
Pick WooCommerce if you are already on WordPress, if your store has requirements that Shopify's framework cannot accommodate, if your volume makes the 2% third-party processor fee a real number, or if ownership and flexibility matter more to you than convenience.
Either way, the platform is only half the equation. The other half is what you do with customers after they buy. That part — win-back sequences, review requests, loyalty triggers, cross-sells based on purchase history — is not built into either platform. It never has been. That is the revenue layer that most stores are missing, and it has nothing to do with which platform you chose.
For related comparisons, see our breakdown of Klaviyo vs Mailchimp for e-commerce email and our comparison of Stripe vs Square for payment processing.