If you are starting or moving an online store, you will probably be choosing between WooCommerce and Shopify. Both are excellent, but they work in very different ways.

What is WooCommerce?

WooCommerce is a free plugin that turns a WordPress website into an online store. You host it yourself, so you have full control over the design, features and data.

What is Shopify?

Shopify is an all-in-one hosted platform. You pay a monthly fee, and Shopify handles hosting, security and updates for you.

Cost

WooCommerce itself is free, but you pay for hosting, a domain and any premium extensions. Shopify has a monthly plan, and many features come from paid apps. Shopify may also add transaction fees unless you use its own payment system. For many growing stores, WooCommerce works out cheaper over time.

Control and flexibility

This is where WooCommerce shines. Because it runs on WordPress, almost anything can be customised — product types, pricing rules, checkout steps and integrations. Shopify is flexible too, but you work within its rules.

Ease of use

Shopify is very easy to set up on your own. WooCommerce has more settings, but once it is built properly, day-to-day management is simple.

Content and SEO

WooCommerce sits inside WordPress, the world’s most popular content platform. If blogging, guides and SEO are part of your growth plan, this is a big advantage.

Payments

Both support major gateways. With WooCommerce you can choose freely from Stripe, PayPal, Razorpay, Authorize.net, Apple Pay and many more.

Which one should you pick?

• Choose Shopify if you want the quickest possible setup and don’t need much customisation.
• Choose WooCommerce if you want full ownership, custom features, strong content marketing and lower long-term costs.

Thinking about switching? We build WooCommerce stores and can migrate your products, customers and orders from Shopify safely.

Further reading

• WooCommerce plugin (WordPress.org)