WooCommerce vs Shopify: the real cost of selling online

No. WooCommerce is a free, open-source plugin and it takes no platform fee and no per-sale cut whatsoever — this is the single biggest difference from Shopify. The only percentage you pay is your payment processor's standard rate, typically around 2.9% + 30¢ per transaction, which you would pay on virtually any platform including Shopify. Shopify, by contrast, adds its own transaction fee of up to ~2% on top of processing unless you use Shopify Payments, and that fee applies to every order you take. On a store doing $15,000/mo that surcharge alone can quietly cost thousands per year, which is money that stays in your pocket on WooCommerce.

For the large majority of small and mid-size stores, yes — meaningfully. WooCommerce's recurring cost is essentially just managed hosting, around $25/mo, with no plan fee and no per-sale cut. Shopify runs $39–$399/mo for the plan, plus its per-transaction surcharge if you don't use Shopify Payments, plus the paid apps that most serious stores stack up (often $150/mo or more combined). Over three years on a $15k/mo store, the Shopify path commonly runs around $9,000 while the WooCommerce path — hosting, a few premium plugins, and fully-managed maintenance — lands near $2,500. The gap widens as you grow, because Shopify's cost scales with your sales and your hosting bill does not. Where Shopify can win on cost is if you value never touching maintenance and are happy to pay for that convenience.

Yes, and we do it regularly without losing data. We export your products, variants, customers and order history from Shopify and import them into WooCommerce, then rebuild your theme and checkout, reconnect your payment processor, and set up redirects so your existing product URLs keep their Google rankings. For a typical store the migration fits inside our standard 30-business-day eCommerce build. The one thing that doesn't transfer automatically is any logic locked inside paid Shopify apps — we identify those upfront and replace them with WooCommerce plugin equivalents (usually free), so nothing breaks on launch day.

This is where we're honest: on Shopify, they handle hosting, software updates, PCI compliance and fraud screening for you, and that is a genuine convenience you're paying for. On WooCommerce, that responsibility is yours — but it doesn't have to fall on you personally. Our maintenance plans start at $29/mo and cover WordPress and plugin updates, daily backups, security hardening, uptime monitoring and PCI-compliant payment configuration. So you get WooCommerce's ownership and zero per-sale fees while still having a team on the hook for the technical upkeep. If you'd genuinely rather never think about any of it and are fine paying Shopify's premium for that, we'll tell you so.

Substantially more. WooCommerce gives you code-level access to the entire checkout, so we can add custom fields, conditional logic, custom shipping and tax rules, one-page checkouts, and tailored upsell flows without restriction. Shopify locks down checkout customization heavily on its lower plans — deep checkout editing is largely reserved for its top-tier Shopify Plus, which starts around $2,300/mo. For owner-operators who need the checkout to match a specific workflow (subscriptions, custom quotes, B2B fields, unusual tax handling), WooCommerce removes the ceiling entirely, and because you own the code there's no plan you have to upgrade to unlock it.

Both platforms extend through add-ons, but the economics differ. Shopify's app store is large and polished, which is a real strength — but many of the apps that matter (subscriptions, reviews, upsells, advanced shipping) carry their own monthly subscription, and a serious store easily stacks $150/mo or more across six or more of them. WooCommerce has tens of thousands of plugins, and a large share of the common ones are free or one-time purchases rather than recurring fees. Shopify's ecosystem can genuinely win when you need a very specific turnkey integration that simply exists there and nowhere else. For most stores, though, the WooCommerce equivalents cover the same needs without the stacking monthly bill.

Yes, completely — and this is the ownership point that matters most long-term. On WooCommerce the store software, the theme code, the product catalog and the customer database all live on hosting you control, in your accounts, exportable at any time. Nothing is locked to a vendor. On Shopify you're renting: if you ever leave, you rebuild your store elsewhere and migrate your data out of their ecosystem. Your customer list is your most valuable asset for repeat sales and email marketing, and on WooCommerce it sits in your own database with no platform standing between you and it. That independence is a big part of why we build on WooCommerce.

Then we'll tell you, and there's no pressure to proceed. We've built stores since 2017 for businesses across all 50 states, and part of that experience is knowing when Shopify is genuinely the better call — very high SKU counts, complex dropshipping operations, teams with no technical partner who truly want everything hands-off, or a niche app that only exists on Shopify. If that's you, we'll say so during your free store audit and point you in the right direction, even though it means we don't get the build. There's no cost and no commitment to getting our honest read, so the worst case is you walk away with a clear answer and keep looking. You lose nothing by asking.