Introduction
E-commerce has never been more important. Whether it’s your only method of sales or an additional pipeline for a long-established company, your choice of platform will have a huge impact on success.
Two of the most popular options are Shopify and WooCommerce. Shopify is often praised for its ease of use and quick setup, while WooCommerce is known for its flexibility and long-term value. At first glance, they may look similar – both let you sell products online and manage orders – but the differences become clear once your business starts to grow.
Here we’ll share some of the key differences between WooCommerce and Shopify based on our experience. Spoiler alert – one of them is often the smarter choice for ambitious businesses investing in a website built to last.
Who This Article is For
This guide is designed for:
- New businesses looking to start selling online with a platform that can grow with them.
- Established businesses adding e-commerce with a solution tailored to their processes.
- Shopify users who feel limited by templates, rising costs, or lack of control.
If you’re trying to decide between Shopify and WooCommerce, or you’re curious about what a switch could mean for your business, this article is for you.
Shopify at a Glance
Shopify is a hosted e-commerce platform that lets you create a templated online store quickly. Its appeal is ready-made templates and an app marketplace that adds new features with a few clicks. For a small business looking to get online fast, this can feel like the perfect solution.
However, Shopify has limitations. You’re renting space on their platform, which means you’re bound by their rules and pricing. Features often require third-party apps that come with ongoing costs. While Shopify is simple to start with, many businesses find it restrictive when they want to customise their store beyond the basics.
WooCommerce at a Glance
WooCommerce is an open-source e-commerce platform built on WordPress, the world’s most popular content management system. Unlike Shopify, it’s not a “one size fits all” solution – it’s a flexible engine that website teams (like eighteen73!) can use to build a store tailored to your exact needs.
By it’s nature, WooCommerce gives you complete control over your website. You choose your hosting, you own your data, and you can extend or customise the site however you wish. From unique checkout journeys to complex integrations with accounting or CRM systems, WooCommerce makes it possible.
The trade-off is that WooCommerce works best when built and managed by an experienced development team. But for businesses seeking a site that performs, scales, and truly reflects their brand, this investment pays off in long-term flexibility and ROI.
Key Comparisons
Cost and ROI
Shopify sells itself on simplicity – one monthly fee, a theme, and a few apps, and you’re in business. At first glance this feels affordable. The catch is that Shopify’s real costs often emerge later. Transaction fees apply unless you use Shopify Payments. Many essential features (advanced reporting, subscription products, B2B pricing) live behind add-on apps with their own monthly charges. By the time a business is running at scale, it’s not uncommon to feel the pinch of hundreds of pounds a month leaving their bank in subscription and app fees.
WooCommerce takes a different path. The software itself is free, and you choose your hosting provider to suit your needs and budget. Development costs are usually front-loaded because WooCommerce is often built bespoke – but once the site is live, ongoing costs tend to be lower and far more predictable. You’re not tied to monthly app fees, and you can invest only where you see real return. Over the long term, WooCommerce often wins on ROI because you’re investing in assets you own, rather than renting access to features.
Flexibility and Customisation
Shopify gives you a set of building blocks, but those blocks are fixed. Themes can be customised within limits, but when it comes to complex product structures, unique checkout flows, or highly tailored branding, you quickly hit the wall of what Shopify allows. Businesses with unusual catalogues, niche fulfilment rules, or creative marketing ideas often find themselves bending their processes to suit Shopify rather than the other way around.
WooCommerce, by contrast, is endlessly adaptable. Because it runs on WordPress, developers can fully control design, functionality, and data structures. Want to run multi-level product filters, complex pricing rules, or a checkout journey that matches your exact sales process that adds extra website functionality outside of the scope of e-commerce? With WooCommerce, that’s achievable. This flexibility is why WooCommerce is trusted by businesses in industries as varied as fashion, manufacturing, wholesale, and events. The website becomes a true reflection of your brand and operations, not just a template.
Content Management and Ease of Use
A great e-commerce site shouldn’t need a developer for every change. One of WooCommerce’s greatest strengths is that it sits inside WordPress – a content management system trusted by millions of editors, marketers, and site owners worldwide. That means product updates, page edits, and blog content all live in the same familiar interface. If you can update a page in WordPress, you can manage your shop in WooCommerce.
Shopify’s interface is polished, but it can be rigid. Tasks like editing layouts, adding enticing landing pages, or publishing rich marketing content often need paid apps or developer time. WooCommerce keeps those tools at your fingertips. Its block-based editor makes it easy to mix products, content, and calls-to-action in a single page, while built-in versioning and roles mean you can delegate confidently — marketing staff can’t accidentally break checkout, and product managers can’t overwrite design work.
Ownership and Control
One of the most overlooked differences is ownership. With Shopify, you are essentially renting shop space. Your site lives on their servers, under their rules, and if Shopify changes pricing, policies, or features, you have no choice but to adapt. Moving away from Shopify can be painful because you don’t own the underlying code or database in a portable format.
WooCommerce flips that dynamic. You own (for all intents and purposes) the site, the code, and the data. If you want to move hosting providers, you can. If you want to integrate a new system or build a custom feature, there are no platform restrictions. This control reduces business risk: you’re not locked into one company’s ecosystem, and you can evolve your site in whichever direction your business needs.
Scalability and Performance
Shopify is engineered to scale inside its ecosystem. If your traffic spikes, Shopify handles the load automatically – as long as your business model fits within their boundaries. But scaling isn’t just about server load; it’s also about adapting to new needs. If you expand internationally, add B2B ordering, or want highly tuned performance enhancements, Shopify can become restrictive.
WooCommerce is as scalable as the infrastructure you put behind it. Pairing WooCommerce with professional-grade hosting, caching, and optimisation means it can comfortably serve all the concurrent customers you’re ever likely to have. Because you’re not tied to one provider, you can upgrade or swap hosting to match growth. For businesses with foresight, this freedom to scale on your own terms is a huge advantage.
Integrations and Marketing
Shopify’s app ecosystem is polished and wide, but it’s a walled garden. Apps are designed to work broadly for many users, not specifically for your unique workflows. Deep integrations – such as linking to a bespoke ERP, building custom subscription logic, or tailoring the checkout to unique marketing funnels – can be difficult or impossible.
WooCommerce integrates with almost anything. Its open-source nature and WordPress foundation mean developers can build direct links with CRM’s, inventory systems, accounting platforms, marketing automation tools, even remotely-connected dispatch label printers – we’ve done the work to prove it! From SEO plugins to advanced analytics, you have a full toolbox. For businesses that see their website as the hub of marketing, sales, and customer relationships, WooCommerce offers a depth of integration Shopify simply can’t match.
Case Study: From Limitations to Liberation for a Leading Spirits Brand
A leading British spirits brand came to us frustrated with its Shopify setup. Despite paying a premium for the platform, their e-commerce experience had become an obstacle rather than an asset. Monthly costs had rocketed due to the growing number of paid apps they relied on, and their marketing team found even small content updates slow and restrictive – often needing developer support. The site’s theme had been stretched far beyond its limits, leaving it fragile and difficult to maintain.
The client’s creative ambitions were also boxed in. Shopify couldn’t deliver the brand storytelling and design flexibility they wanted, so they’d resorted to running a second WordPress site purely for non-commerce pages. On top of that, their distillery tour ticketing system was cumbersome for staff to manage and confusing for customers to use.
We replaced both sites with a single bespoke WooCommerce build — a unified platform for commerce, content, and marketing. The new website delivers seamless ticket sales, easier product management, and fast page editing directly within WordPress. We migrated the entire customer and order history, including active subscriptions, with zero downtime or data loss.
After launch, the brand enjoyed a significant increase in online sales, dramatic reductions in admin time, and far lower running costs. Marketing teams could control content confidently, while the site’s solid technical foundation eliminated the fear of breaking anything. What began as a cost-saving exercise became a platform for huge growth.
Conclusion
Shopify is often the go-to for businesses taking their first steps into e-commerce. It’s quick, easy, and can look good out of the box, and they have done a brilliant job at achieving mindshare. But for businesses serious about performance, growth, and long-term return on investment, WooCommerce offers far more flexibility, control, and scalability.
With WooCommerce, you own your site, your data, and your future. It’s built around your brand and processes, not forced into a template. When paired with the right creative and development partner, it becomes a powerful sales engine that can evolve as your business grows.
Next Steps
At eighteen73, we specialise in designing and developing bespoke WooCommerce websites that don’t just look good – they perform. Our clients choose us because we build sites that are fast, flexible, and ready to deliver results.
If you’re considering your first e-commerce site, or you’re ready to move beyond the limitations of Shopify, get in touch with our team today. Let’s build you a store that pays for itself and more.
