The difference between Shopify and WooCommerce is mostly a difference in who does the maintenance. Shopify is a hosted service, so the store, the checkout and the servers underneath belong to one company, and you rent the whole arrangement. WooCommerce is a free, open-source plugin for WordPress, which means the store lives on a host you picked, behind a login you are responsible for keeping current. Themes, apps, payment options and price all come after that one fact.

WooCommerce vs Shopify (2025) — Which One Is Best?, Elegant Themes on YouTube

A disclosure before going further. I own Marcellino NY, which sells handmade briefcases and has been my own business since 2010, and the Marcellino site runs on WordPress. I have not built a Shopify store, and I am not going to claim that I have run WooCommerce either. Everything below about the two platforms comes from their own documentation, linked where it is used, and I say plainly near the end what I have done myself and what I have not.

Who runs the machinery

A shop needs a few things to exist at all: a computer somewhere that serves the pages, software that holds the products and takes the order, a way to take the card, and somebody who notices when something breaks. On Shopify, one company covers most of that list. Shopify’s own overview describes a platform for building an online store, selling in person, and selling through channels such as social media, with themes from its Theme Store and apps from its App Store layered on top.

On WooCommerce the list is split among several parties. WordPress is the foundation, a host supplies the computer, WooCommerce is the plugin that adds the cart and the checkout, and whoever sells you the payment service does the card part. The owner is the one standing in the middle, which is where the owner of a small shop usually stands anyway.

I know this arrangement from the other side of a counter. The Heritage Diner, the family restaurant where I work, ran Aldelo for more than twenty years on a server in the building, with a lifetime license, free upgrades and paid support when something went wrong. Then it moved to Square, which runs in the cloud, after COVID, because delivery through DoorDash and Uber did not connect well to Aldelo. The in-house server was ours to look after. The cloud system is run by someone else, on their terms. A WooCommerce store behaves like the first arrangement and a Shopify store like the second, and neither is wrong, only differently expensive in attention.

What Shopify takes off your hands

Shopify’s pitch is that the parts you would otherwise worry about are included. Checkout, Shopify Payments and Shop Pay run on its infrastructure, and the company publishes an uptime figure for those services on its overview page, with exclusions for third-party outages, theme or app errors and planned maintenance. That last clause matters more than the number. If a store goes down because of an app a merchant installed, the uptime promise does not cover it, and the merchant is back to being the person who has to find out why.

Hands wrapping a parcel in brown paper and twine on a wooden bench

Plans are tiered, with different monthly charges and different transaction fees, and Shopify’s pricing plans page says a store can move to a higher plan later. I am leaving the dollar amounts out on purpose. They change, and a figure that was right when I wrote this paragraph may be wrong by the time you read it, so check the pricing overview Shopify links from that page.

The structure is worth understanding even without the numbers. You pay a recurring charge to rent the store, and some of what you sell carries a fee on top, depending on how the card is processed. That is a predictable shape. A small shop that wants to know what the software costs each month can look at one bill.

What WooCommerce asks of the owner

The software itself is free. The WordPress.org listing says the core is free, that the store owner keeps full ownership of the store data, and that optional paid extensions and support come through the WooCommerce Marketplace. It also lists requirements: current versions of PHP, MySQL or MariaDB and WordPress, with a recommended memory limit and HTTPS. A reasonable host handles all of that without you reading the list, but someone has to choose the host and stay with it.

Installation is not the hard part. WooCommerce’s installation page describes adding the plugin from the WordPress admin, activating it, and answering a setup wizard about the store, the industry and the product types. A person who can install a WordPress plugin can have a working shop page in an afternoon.

The upkeep is the harder part, and it never ends. WordPress tells owners to update to the latest version and to take a full backup before an update so a failed one can be undone. The WordPress backup documentation says a complete backup has two halves, the files and the database, and that a smaller site should back up about weekly and a busier one daily. A store with orders coming in belongs in the busier group, since the database is where the orders live.

Shipping and sales tax are handled by extensions. WooCommerce Shipping, which prints labels, is described in WooCommerce’s payments and extensions documentation as a free extension, and tax calculation has its own extension and its own documentation. Each one is another thing that gets updated, and each update is a small chance that two plugins disagree.

Payments and where the fees come from

Both platforms will take a card, and both prefer you use their own processor. WooCommerce has WooPayments, which its documentation calls designed exclusively for WooCommerce, and the WordPress.org listing says over a hundred gateways exist, Stripe, PayPal and Square among them. Shopify has Shopify Payments, and it also lets a merchant use a third-party provider.

Open toolbox beside a laptop on a workshop table

Here is where the structure shows. Shopify’s page on third-party providers states: “Third-party transaction fees apply to all transactions processed through third-party and alternate payment gateways.” The one exception it names is PayPal, when Shopify Payments is the primary provider. So the freedom to pick any processor exists, and the platform charges a fee for using it. On WooCommerce the platform charges nothing for that choice, and the processor charges what it charges.

I am not able to say which comes out cheaper for a given shop, because that depends on volume, average order and which plan and processor are in play, and because I would have to quote rates I cannot confirm were current. I have written about card payments with Square from the restaurant side, and the general lesson carries over: the processing rate is the cost that grows when the business does, so it deserves a look before the monthly fee does.

Getting your products out again

Any platform decision is partly a decision about how to leave. Both systems let you export the catalog as a spreadsheet, which is the minimum a shop owner should insist on before moving in.

Shopify’s export page says the export is always a CSV in UTF-8, either spreadsheet-compatible or plain, and that very large catalogs may need to be split into smaller files if the export times out. WooCommerce’s product CSV importer and exporter works the same way in outline, with a choice of columns, categories and product types to include, and a mapping screen when you import. It adds a few rules that anyone who has wrestled with a spreadsheet will recognize, such as using 1 and 0 for true and false, and keeping image links publicly reachable so they can be downloaded.

A CSV carries products. It does not carry the look of the store, the customers’ history on its own, or the habits your buyers have built around the old address. The file gets the catalog across and the rest has to be rebuilt, a detail the comparison articles tend to skip.

What I have done and what I have not

I have not built a store on Shopify. I have not set up WooCommerce for a client or for Marcellino NY, and I do not know whether the Marcellino store would be easier or harder on the other platform, so I am not going to guess. What I can say from experience is narrower. I have worked in a business that ran on software it hosted itself and then on software someone else hosted, and the trade between the two was control against attention.

Overhead view of an owner's desk with notebook, coffee, shipping boxes and a tablet showing blurred product photos

At Nanos Media, the technology consulting group I used to run for restaurants, I installed point-of-sale systems and built training sessions for the managers and staff who would use them, which is a different job from choosing an online store platform. The overlap is only that both involve deciding who answers when the system misbehaves. On Shopify that answer is support from the company. On WooCommerce it is whoever you pay, whether that is your host, an extension’s vendor or a developer you hired once.

A way to decide without a price list

Start with a question about time rather than money. How many hours a month can you spend on updates, backups and the occasional broken plugin without resenting it? If the answer is close to none, the rented store is easier, and the monthly charge is the price of not being the maintenance department.

If you already have a WordPress site that carries your writing, your pictures and your search traffic, the other answer becomes more attractive, since the shop can live under the same roof. I would still price in the work of keeping it updated before telling myself it is free.

A third consideration is how much the shop will change. A shop with forty products and no plans to grow is a different animal from a catalog of four thousand, and neither export format is fun at that second size. If you are weighing a marketplace as well, selling on Amazon or your own store covers that tradeoff separately.

For informational purposes only. Fees, plan terms and software requirements change, so confirm current terms with each vendor and consult a licensed attorney or financial advisor before relying on any cost comparison.

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