Shopify vs WooCommerce: which is right for you?

The short answer

Choose Shopify if you want to sell, not maintain. Choose WooCommerce if you need control over data, checkout logic or content, and you have a developer. Shopify starts at $29 a month with 2.9 percent plus 30 cents card rates. WooCommerce is free software with $25 to $350 monthly hosting.

What actually drives the number

Both platforms can run a serious store. The cost difference shows up in three places, and only one of them is the monthly fee.

Platform fees and card rates. Shopify’s pricing lists Basic at $29 a month on annual billing or $39 monthly, Grow at $79 or $105, Advanced at $299 or $399, and Plus starting at $2,300 a month. Card rates step down by plan: 2.9 percent plus 30 cents on Basic, 2.7 percent on Grow, 2.5 percent on Advanced. Third-party payment gateways carry an extra fee of 2 percent on Basic, 1 percent on Grow, 0.6 percent on Advanced and 0.2 percent on Plus.

WooCommerce’s real cost. The software is free and open source. WooCommerce lists hosting at $25 to $350 a month for most stores, extensions at $29 to $299 per year each, and WooPayments card processing at roughly 2.5 to 2.9 percent plus 30 cents. There is no revenue share and no third-party gateway penalty. A typical Woo store with six paid extensions and managed hosting lands between $150 and $500 a month all in.

Who maintains it. This is the line item nobody quotes. Shopify handles hosting, PCI compliance, uptime and updates. WooCommerce puts all four on you or your developer. Budget 2 to 6 developer hours a month for a healthy Woo store, more after a major WordPress release.

Scale of each ecosystem. WooCommerce remains the volume leader. Store Leads data cited by Barn2 in April 2026 showed WooCommerce on over 32 percent of online shops across 13 million tracked sites, with 4,231,951 live WooCommerce sites, while BuiltWith counted 6,774,190. The plugin has more than 7 million active installs. Shopify leads on higher-revenue merchants, Woo on total store count.

How to tell which applies to you

Choose Shopify if you have no in-house developer, you are under 5,000 SKUs, your checkout is standard, and you want to spend your time on merchandising and acquisition. Also choose Shopify if you sell in multiple currencies or channels, because that plumbing is included rather than assembled.

Choose WooCommerce if you need custom checkout logic, complex pricing rules such as trade or wholesale tiers, deep content integration with an existing WordPress site, or full ownership of customer data. Also choose Woo if your gateway is non-standard, since Shopify’s third-party fee of up to 2 percent is a real tax on volume.

Run the arithmetic at your volume. On $150,000 a month in sales using an outside gateway, Shopify Basic’s 2 percent third-party fee is $3,000 a month on its own. That single line usually decides the platform for merchants above roughly $1 million a year.

Do not switch platforms to fix a conversion problem. Baymard Institute puts the documented average cart abandonment rate at 70.22 percent across 50 studies, with a range from 55 to 84 percent. That number is not platform-driven. It is checkout friction, shipping surprises and trust.

What we’d do

TACK™ is a Shopify Partner and has built on WordPress since 2009, so we do not have a house platform to defend. We pick based on your checkout requirements and whether you will have a developer in 12 months.

Our build sequence is the same either way. Model the true monthly cost including gateway fees at your actual volume, not the sticker price. Audit page speed before design, because Google’s analysis of 11 million mobile landing pages found bounce probability rising 123 percent as load time goes from one to ten seconds, and conversion probability dropping 95 percent as page elements grow from 400 to 6,000. Then build checkout first and the homepage last, because that is the order that matters to revenue.

Store work runs through Get Leads and pairs with Get Found. See our capabilities and how we work. Engagements start at $5,000 per month.

Common mistakes

Comparing $29 to free. WooCommerce is free the way a puppy is free. Hosting, extensions, security and developer time typically land a real store at $150 to $500 a month. Cost of the error: a budget that is short by $2,000 to $5,000 in year one.

Ignoring the third-party gateway fee. Shopify charges up to 2 percent on Basic when you do not use its own payments product. At $2 million a year in sales that is $40,000 annually, more than the difference between every plan tier. Cost: five figures a year, quietly.

Loading the store with apps and plugins. Every app adds script weight, and page weight is measurably tied to conversion. Twelve apps you barely use will cost you more in speed than they return in features. Cost: typically 10 to 30 percent of mobile conversion rate.

The bottom line

Shopify buys you time. WooCommerce buys you control. If you do not have a developer and your checkout is ordinary, take Shopify and spend the saved hours on acquisition. If your pricing, data or checkout is genuinely non-standard, take WooCommerce and budget the maintenance honestly.

We will model both at your real order volume and gateway. Book 20 minutes at calendly.com/tack-media-agency/talk-to-an-expert or call 310-620-1141.

Sources

• Shopify pricing
• WooCommerce pricing
• Barn2: WooCommerce Stats 2026
• Baymard Institute: Cart Abandonment Rate Statistics
• Think with Google: New Industry Benchmarks for Mobile Page Speed