WooCommerce vs Shopify for a UK business

We build online shops on WooCommerce at Genius Division, so you know which way I lean. Shopify is good software. It’s built for selling and it does that well. Where the two really differ is who owns the shop, and that starts to matter a couple of years in, once the shop is bringing in money.

What’s the difference between WooCommerce and Shopify?

Shopify is a hosted platform. You pay Shopify every month, your shop lives on Shopify’s servers, and it does what Shopify and its app store let it do.

WooCommerce is a free plugin that turns a WordPress website into a shop. It’s open source, so you put it on whatever hosting you like and nobody at WooCommerce gets a say in what you do with it after that. If your hosting company gets expensive, you move the whole shop to another one.

Nearly everything else in the comparison comes back to that.

Do you own your shop on Shopify?

You’re renting it. Your products and your words are yours, but the shop itself only runs on Shopify, so leaving means rebuilding it somewhere else.

That also makes the price Shopify’s decision. I said this about website builders in my WordPress video: if Squarespace decide to double their prices tomorrow, you’re stuck. Pay up, or leave and start again. A hosted shop works the same way.

Then there’s what you pay on top of the monthly bill. Most shops end up adding paid apps to do the things the platform doesn’t, and Shopify charges an extra transaction fee when you take payments through a third-party provider instead of Shopify Payments.

On WooCommerce you pay for hosting and for whoever builds and looks after the shop. You still pay your card processor on every order, same as you would anywhere. The platform itself takes nothing.

▶Play the video: 43% of ALL websites are using this 'dead' platform

When is Shopify the right choice?

When the shop is simple and speed matters more than anything else. Twelve products, one price each, nothing clever at the checkout, and you want it selling by next Friday. A hosted platform is the right answer there and we’d tell you so on the first call.

It’s also right when there’s nobody to look after a WordPress site. Shopify deals with hosting and updates for you, and that’s a fair chunk of what the monthly fee pays for.

What’s the catch with WooCommerce?

Somebody has to look after it. WordPress and every plugin on it need updating (WooCommerce counts as a plugin), something needs to be taking backups, and when a payment gateway changes how it works, somebody has to notice before your customers do. On a shop that matters more than on a brochure site, because a broken checkout costs you money every hour it’s broken.

That somebody is you, or somebody you pay. Factor it into the sum.

Where does Shopify run out of road?

Trade. This is most of the ecommerce work we do, and it’s where hosted platforms struggle.

Trade customers don’t shop like the public. They want their own account, prices agreed for them and nobody else, minimum order quantities, and a lot of them want a quote instead of a checkout. You can get some of that from Shopify apps. Each paid one is another monthly bill, and you’re stuck with however the app’s developer decided it should work.

Glasscraft are one of the UK’s only independent glass manufacturers, selling to trade and residential customers. A checkout was never going to suit them. Their customers need a price for glass cut to their own sizes, then want to know when it’ll be ready. So we built their site on WordPress with a Quick Quote tool that drops every request into a dashboard for their team, and an order tracker wired into their own manufacturing system. It brings in 60 to 80 quote requests a month, and customers check their orders 100 to 200 times a month without ringing anybody.

None of that comes out of an app store. It got built because the website was theirs to build on.

The other place it shows is when the shop has to talk to everything else: stock, accounts, shipping, the CRM. If somebody in your office types orders from the website into another system at five o’clock every day, the shop and that system should be talking to each other. Connecting them is a normal job on a platform you own, and how fiddly it gets depends far more on the other system than on WooCommerce.

Does the platform make the shop sell?

No. The best example I’ve got isn’t even a shop.

Wolf Laundry sell commercial laundry equipment. They’d just had a new WordPress website built and were spending £3,000 a month on Google Ads to it. Zero leads. The site took ten seconds to load, and more than half the people they paid Google to send gave up before it finished. We rebuilt it from scratch, got it loading in one second, and it now brings in 150 to 200 leads a month.

Their old site was on WordPress, the platform I’m recommending in this post, and that didn’t save it. A slow, confusing shop loses sales whichever platform it’s on. With a big catalogue, the bits that sell are search, filtering and speed, because nobody scrolls through four thousand products to find the one they want.

Pick the platform, then spend the effort on the bit between the product page and the checkout. That’s where most shops lose people.

How much does a WooCommerce shop cost?

Ours start at £8,000. A handful of products with a simple checkout sits at the lower end. Trade pricing and links into your stock or accounts systems push it up, and so does a big catalogue with lots of variants. You get a fixed price before we start, and our prices are on the website.

To compare it fairly with Shopify, add up what you’d pay Shopify in a year: the plan, the apps, any transaction fees, and whoever you’d pay to set it up and keep it right. For a small, simple shop Shopify wins that sum. For a growing shop with trade customers, do it over five years before you decide, and remember that with WooCommerce you own the thing at the end.

So, WooCommerce or Shopify?

If you’re selling candles to the public and want to start this month, Shopify.

Selling to trade, with a different price for every customer and an order that has to land in three other systems? You already know what I’m going to say. I’d build it on WooCommerce, on hosting you control, with everything in your name.

If you’re on Shopify now and it’s doing the job, stay put. Move when the apps and fees start adding up to more than the shop would cost to own, or when there’s something your customers need that Shopify won’t do. I’ve gone through the same question for normal websites in Wix vs WordPress.