WooCommerce vs Shopify: What You Actually Pay, and What You Actually Own

Most comparisons of Shopify and WooCommerce start with the monthly plan price, which is the least interesting number in the whole decision. It is the one figure both sides advertise, it is small enough to feel irrelevant, and it is not where the money goes.

The costs that actually matter are the ones that scale with your sales, the ones you pay every month for functionality you never own, and the one nobody mentions until you try to leave. Here is the honest version, with the current figures.

What Shopify actually costs

Three separate things, and only the first is advertised.

The plan fee

At the time of writing, Shopify’s UK plans are £25 a month for Basic, £65 for Grow and £344 for Advanced on monthly billing, dropping to £19, £49 and £259 if you commit annually. Plus starts at £1,800 a month. For most small shops this is genuinely not a lot of money, and it is the number the decision usually gets made on.

The transaction fee for using your own payment provider

This is the one to understand. If you process payments with anything other than Shopify Payments, Shopify charges an additional fee on every order: 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced. That is on top of whatever your actual payment processor charges you.

It is worth being precise about what that fee buys, because it buys nothing. It is not a service you are using. It is a charge for the choice of not using theirs. On Basic, a shop turning over £10,000 a month through an external provider hands over £200 a month for that decision alone — eight times the plan fee.

Use Shopify Payments instead and the penalty disappears, replaced by their card rates: 2% + 25p on Basic, 1.7% + 25p on Grow, 1.5% + 25p on Advanced for standard online UK cards. That is a reasonable rate. The point is that the pricing is built to make choosing anything else expensive.

The apps

The third cost is the one that compounds quietly. Shopify’s core is deliberately lean, and most shops end up subscribing to a handful of apps to do things the business considers basic — bundles, subscriptions, trade pricing, delivery rules, reviews, advanced search. Each is a few pounds to a few tens of pounds a month, each renews forever, and none of it is yours. Stop paying and the functionality leaves.

What WooCommerce actually costs

WooCommerce itself is free and open source, which is true and slightly misleading, because a shop is never free. Being straight about it, you pay for:

• Hosting. A real cost, monthly, and the one place it is worth not being cheap. A shop on bargain shared hosting is a slow shop.
• Payment processing. You go direct to a processor. Stripe’s standard UK rate at the time of writing is 1.5% + 20p for standard UK cards, 2.5% + 20p for European cards and 3.15% + 20p for international. There is no platform taking a further cut on top.
• Extensions, where you need them. Many are one-off or annual rather than per-month, and a bespoke build replaces a good number of them outright.
• Maintenance. Updates, backups, security. This is the real trade-off: on Shopify that is included and invisible; on WooCommerce it is yours to handle, either in-house or through something like ongoing care. Pretending this cost does not exist is how people end up with a neglected shop.

The arithmetic, honestly

A worked example, so the shape is clear. This is an illustration with stated assumptions, not a quote — your numbers will differ.

Take a shop selling £10,000 a month across 200 UK card orders, on Shopify’s Grow plan at monthly billing.

• Shopify + Shopify Payments: £65 plan, plus 1.7% and 25p per order — about £170 and £50. Roughly £285 a month, before any apps.
• Shopify + an external provider: the same £65, plus your processor’s fees, plus Shopify’s 1% penalty at £100. Comfortably more.
• WooCommerce + Stripe: 1.5% and 20p per order — about £150 and £40 — plus hosting. Roughly £190 a month plus hosting, with no platform fee and no penalty.

At this size the monthly gap is real but not dramatic, and anyone telling you WooCommerce will transform your margins at £10,000 a month is overselling. Two things change that picture: volume, because the percentage difference compounds while the plan fee stays flat, and apps, because that is where Shopify costs quietly double for shops doing anything slightly unusual.

The thing the arithmetic misses

Run the numbers and you get a modest monthly difference. The larger difference is not monthly at all.

On Shopify you are renting a shop. The theme, the apps, the checkout and the data model belong to the platform. That is a perfectly reasonable arrangement — it is what you are paying for — but it means your shop is only ever as flexible as the platform allows, and leaving means rebuilding.

A WooCommerce shop is a WordPress site you own. It runs on hosting you choose, the code is standard and portable, and any competent developer can work on it. You can move it. That is the same reason we build websites in WordPress generally: the thing you paid for should still be yours the day you fall out with whoever built it.

What “built to spec” actually means

This is the real argument, and it has nothing to do with fees.

Template platforms are excellent at the shop that looks like every other shop: products, variants, add to basket, pay. If that is genuinely your business, they will serve you well and you should probably use one.

Plenty of businesses do not sell like that. They sell made-to-order items with a lead time that depends on the option chosen. They price differently for trade accounts. They deliver within a radius and quote beyond it, or handle bulky items that cannot go through a standard courier flow. They take a deposit and the balance on completion. They need stock to reflect what is physically in a workshop rather than an abstract number.

On a template platform each of those becomes an app, a workaround, or a compromise the customer can feel at checkout. Built to spec means the checkout matches how the business actually sells, because it was written for that business rather than bent towards it. It costs more up front and it stops costing every month afterwards.

Our own website builds that include e-commerce start at £7,995, quoted against an agreed scope, and are built in WordPress and handed over with full administrator access.

When Shopify is the right answer

Being fair about it, there are clear cases where we would tell you to use Shopify.

• You want zero operational responsibility. Updates, security and uptime handled by somebody else, permanently, is worth real money and Shopify does it well.
• You need to be selling in days, not weeks. A bespoke build takes time. If the priority is testing whether anyone wants the product at all, do not spend the money yet.
• You sell in a completely standard way and expect to keep doing so. If no part of your operation is unusual, the flexibility you are paying for is flexibility you will not use.
• Nobody will maintain it. A WooCommerce shop with no one looking after it becomes a liability. If there is no budget for care and no one in-house, the managed platform is the safer choice.

We also connect Shopify to other systems for clients who are already on it and happy — that is part of what our retail and e-commerce work covers. Moving platform is a real project, and “your platform is wrong” is not a diagnosis anyone should accept from an agency that has not asked what they actually sell.

How to decide

• Work out your real monthly cost on both, including the transaction fee if you would not use Shopify Payments, and including every app you would need.
• Write down the parts of how you sell that are not standard. If the list is empty, use a template platform. If it is long, that list is your specification.
• Be honest about maintenance. Who is doing it, and is that written down anywhere?
• Ask what happens if you leave. Both answers are legitimate; only one of them is a rebuild.

Common questions

Is WooCommerce actually free? The software is. The shop is not — you pay for hosting, payment processing and looking after it. What you avoid is a monthly platform fee and a charge for choosing your own payment provider.

Is WooCommerce slower than Shopify? It can be, and usually for the reasons any WordPress site is slow: oversized images, too many plugins, weak hosting. Built properly and hosted properly it is fast. We wrote separately about what actually makes a website slow.

Is WooCommerce secure enough to take payments? Card details do not touch your site — the payment processor handles them, exactly as on a hosted platform. The security work that matters is keeping the site updated and properly hosted.

Can I move from Shopify to WooCommerce? Products, customers and orders can be migrated. Themes and apps cannot — those are rebuilt. Worth scoping honestly before committing.

What about very large catalogues? WooCommerce runs large catalogues perfectly well with appropriate hosting and a build that accounts for it. It is a hosting and architecture question, not a platform limit.

Which do you recommend? It depends on whether the way you sell is standard. We build in WooCommerce when a business needs a shop shaped around its own operation, and we will say so when a template platform would serve you better and cost you less.

The short version

Shopify’s plan fee is not the cost. The cost is the percentage on your own payment provider, the apps you rent forever, and the fact that none of it is portable. For a standard shop that is a fair deal and a genuinely good product.

If how you sell is not standard — trade pricing, lead times, delivery rules, deposits, made-to-order — a WooCommerce shop built to your specification stops you paying monthly for workarounds, and leaves you owning the thing you paid for.