WooCommerce vs Shopify: Which Is Cheaper for a Small Store?

For a store doing under about £5,000 a month in sales, Shopify is usually cheaper overall. Above roughly £15,000 a month, WooCommerce almost always wins, and the gap widens fast. In between it depends on how much you value not thinking about hosting.

That is the short answer. The long answer is that the pricing pages of both platforms are designed to make this comparison hard, so here is what actually lands on the bill.

The costs Shopify's pricing page shows you

Shopify's subscription is the honest, easy part: a fixed monthly fee per plan. What the pricing page is quieter about is everything stacked on top.

Transaction fees. Shopify takes a percentage of every sale on top of your card processing fee if you use anything other than Shopify Payments. Even on Shopify Payments you are paying card rates. On £10,000 a month, a difference of 0.5% is £600 a year — more than most people's hosting.

Apps. This is where Shopify budgets actually break. Subscriptions, bundles, advanced filtering, review collection, upsells, proper reporting — each is an app, most are monthly, and most price by order volume or store size. A store running eight apps at £15–£40 each is spending more on apps than on the platform. Ask any Shopify store owner what their app bill is; the pause before they answer is the point.

Themes. £150–£300 one-off for a premium theme, plus development if you want it to stop looking like the theme.

The costs WooCommerce's "free" hides

WooCommerce is free in the sense that a puppy is free.

Hosting. You need real hosting, not the cheapest shared plan. Budget £20–£80 a month for a store; below that, checkout slows under load and you lose sales you never find out about.

Extensions. Subscriptions, bookings, advanced shipping, memberships — most are £100–£250 a year each. Cheaper than the Shopify app equivalents in most cases, but annual and easy to forget.

Maintenance. This is the real one. WordPress updates, plugin updates, PHP version changes, security, backups. Either you do it, or you pay £50–£200 a month for someone to. Ignoring it works fine right up until the morning it does not.

Setup. WooCommerce takes longer to build properly, so the up-front build cost is typically higher.

Three years, one store, both platforms

Take a store doing £12,000 a month, 300 orders, needing subscriptions and decent filtering.

On Shopify, over three years, you are looking at roughly: subscription around £2,300, transaction and gateway fees around £11,000, apps around £2,900, theme and setup around £3,500. Call it £19,700.

On WooCommerce: hosting around £1,700, extensions around £1,400, maintenance around £3,200, gateway fees around £9,300, build around £6,500. Call it £22,100.

Shopify wins — at that volume. Now double the revenue. Shopify's transaction fees double to around £22,000 while WooCommerce's gateway fees rise more slowly and everything else stays flat. WooCommerce comes out several thousand ahead, and it keeps pulling further ahead every year after that.

The crossover is roughly £15,000–£20,000 a month. Below it, Shopify. Above it, WooCommerce, and increasingly so.

The part that is not about money

Cost is the easy comparison. These two are genuinely different tools.

Shopify is better when you want to launch quickly, you do not want to think about hosting or updates, your product catalogue is straightforward, and you would rather buy a solution than build one. It is genuinely excellent at being reliable.

WooCommerce is better when your checkout does something unusual, you need pricing rules or product configurations Shopify resists, you want your store on the same site as a substantial content operation, you care about owning the whole stack, or you are big enough that percentage fees have become a real line item.

The friction points are predictable. On Shopify, the thing you eventually want to change is the checkout, and on most plans you cannot. On WooCommerce, the thing that eventually goes wrong is that nobody updated anything for eight months.

What I would actually tell you

Starting out, under £5,000 a month, no unusual requirements: use Shopify. Get selling. Do not spend six weeks on a platform decision for a business that does not have customers yet.

Established, over £15,000 a month, or with any real complexity in pricing, subscriptions or shipping: WooCommerce, and budget properly for maintenance rather than pretending it is optional.

In between: pick the one whose failure mode you would rather live with. Do you want to pay a percentage forever and never think about servers, or pay a fixed cost and accept that maintenance is now your problem? Both are defensible. Neither is a mistake.

And if you are already on one and wondering whether to move — migration costs real money and loses you some SEO in the short term. "The other platform is slightly cheaper" is not a good enough reason. "The platform is actively blocking something my business needs to do" is.

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We build on both, and we will tell you which one your business actually needs rather than the one we would rather build. Talk to us about your store.