E-commerce
Shopify, WooCommerce or a custom store: how to choose
Three good ways to sell online, each right for a different kind of business. A plain comparison, and the five questions that settle it.
The short version
- Shopify is the quickest to launch and the easiest to run. You trade some flexibility and pay monthly.
- WooCommerce gives you control and has no platform fee, but someone has to maintain it.
- A custom store is for businesses whose catalogue, pricing or checkout doesn’t fit either.
Start with how you sell, not with the platform
The right choice depends less on feature lists than on a few plain facts about your business: how many products you have, how unusual your pricing or checkout is, who will run the store day to day, and what else it has to connect to.
Shopify
Shopify is a hosted service. You pay a monthly fee and it looks after the servers, security and updates.
- Good: the fastest route to a working store, very little to maintain, a large app store and a checkout customers already trust.
- Trade-offs: the monthly fee and paid apps add up. Checkout changes are limited on standard plans. Shopify charges an extra transaction fee when you use a payment gateway other than its own, and its own gateway isn’t available in every country.
Choose it when your catalogue is fairly standard and you would rather spend time selling than maintaining.
WooCommerce
WooCommerce is a free plugin that turns a WordPress site into a store. You host it yourself.
- Good: no platform fee, any payment gateway, full control over checkout, shipping rules and design, and it sits alongside your existing WordPress content.
- Trade-offs: you are responsible for hosting, updates, backups and security. Too many plugins make it slow. It needs a developer now and then.
Choose it when you already use WordPress, need checkout or shipping rules a hosted platform won’t allow, or want to avoid per-sale platform fees.
A custom store
A custom store is built for your business alone.
- Good: it fits unusual catalogues such as configurable products, quotes, trade price lists, rentals or bookings. It connects deeply to your own systems, and there are no platform limits or fees.
- Trade-offs: it costs more to build and takes longer, and you depend on good code and documentation, which is why ownership and handover matter.
Choose it when the way you sell is your advantage, and platforms force you to compromise it.
Side by side
| Shopify | WooCommerce | Custom | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Time to launch | Shortest | Short to medium | Longest |
| Cost to build | Lowest | Low to medium | Highest |
| Running cost | Monthly fee and apps | Hosting and upkeep | Hosting and upkeep |
| Flexibility | Within the platform’s rules | High | Complete |
| Who maintains it | Shopify | You or your developer | You or your developer |
The five questions we would ask you
- How many products do you have, and how often do they change?
- Is your pricing simple, or does it vary by customer, quantity or location?
- Which payment methods and couriers do you need?
- Who will manage orders day to day?
- What must the store connect to: accounting, inventory, a marketplace?
Five answers are usually enough to recommend one of the three with confidence.