Comparisons
Shopify or WooCommerce
What I would pick: Shopify if you want to sell rather than administer: the checkout, the hosting, the updates and payment compliance are not your problem. WooCommerce if you need total control of the code, or the store is a small part of a content site already living in WordPress, and you have somebody to maintain it.
The differences
| What we compare | Shopify | WooCommerce |
|---|---|---|
| Hosting and updates | Included; no server to maintain | Yours: server, versions, backups |
| The checkout | Shopify’s; you extend it, you do not rewrite it | Entirely yours, maintenance included |
| B2B / wholesale | Native on Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus | Via plugins; you choose the model |
| Customisation ceiling | High in the storefront, bounded at checkout | None; you can change anything |
| Who fixes an outage on a Saturday | Shopify | You or your supplier |
| Cost | Predictable plan fee and transaction costs | Hosting, plugins and maintenance hours |
The right question is not technical
Both platforms sell online perfectly well. The difference that actually decides is whose problem it is when something breaks.
On Shopify, the checkout, the hosting, the scaling and payment compliance belong to Shopify. On WooCommerce they belong to you, and that is not a flaw: it is the price of total control. The mistake is choosing WooCommerce for the control and then having nobody to exercise it.
Where WooCommerce still wins
- When the store is a small part of a content site. A publication, a community, or a project with hundreds of articles already in WordPress that sells something on the side.
- When you need to change the buying process in a way Shopify does not allow. Shopify’s checkout extends at specific points; it is not reordered or laid out freely.
- When the data model is genuinely strange. Products that are not products, calculations that are not prices.
Where Shopify wins, which is the usual case
When the business is selling. There is no server to size for a campaign, the checkout has been tested by millions of orders, and what used to be a wholesale plugin is now native B2B on nearly every plan.
And there is one advantage that rarely makes the comparison tables: on Shopify, maintenance cost tends towards zero when nobody touches the store. On WooCommerce, an unmaintained store degrades by itself, because PHP, WordPress and the plugins keep moving.
If you are considering migrating
The risk in a migration is not the data: it is the URLs. Traffic loss almost always comes from old addresses landing on a 404 or all redirected to the home page. The URL inventory comes first, before design is discussed, and it is the part you cannot cut.