If you’re building an online shop in the UK, two names dominate the shortlist: WooCommerce and Shopify. Both are excellent. Neither is “the best” in the abstract — the right one depends on how you want to run your business. Here’s an honest comparison from a team that builds on both, without the affiliate-link bias that colours most articles on this topic.
The one-line difference
Shopify is a rented shop — you pay monthly, it’s hosted and maintained for you, and you trade some control for convenience. WooCommerce is a shop you own — it runs on your own WordPress hosting, there are no platform fees, and you can change absolutely anything, but you (or your agency) are responsible for it.
Shopify: the case for renting
Strengths: quick to launch, hosting and security handled for you, reliable checkout, a huge app store, and it scales smoothly if you suddenly go viral. If you want to start selling this week and never think about servers, Shopify is genuinely great.
The trade-offs: you pay a monthly subscription (roughly £19–£259/month), and unless you use Shopify Payments you’re charged an extra transaction fee on every sale on top of the normal card fees. Customisation is limited to what Shopify and its apps allow — and those apps often carry their own monthly fees, which stack up quietly. You’re also renting: if Shopify changes its pricing or rules, you live with it.
WooCommerce: the case for owning
Strengths: it’s free and open-source, so there’s no platform fee and no forced transaction charge — you only pay standard payment processing. You own everything: your data, your store, your customer relationships. And because it’s built on WordPress, your shop and your content/SEO live in one place. Most importantly, it’s infinitely customisable — if your business needs something unusual, it can be built.
The trade-offs: you’re responsible for hosting, security and updates (or you pay someone to manage that for you). A cheap host will make WooCommerce feel slow — it needs proper hosting to fly. There’s a bit more to look after, which is exactly why care plans exist.
The honest decision guide
- Choose Shopify if: you want the simplest possible launch, you’re comfortable with monthly + transaction fees as the price of convenience, and your store fits within standard ecommerce patterns.
- Choose WooCommerce if: you want to own your store outright, avoid ongoing platform fees, keep your content and shop under one roof for SEO, or you know you’ll need custom functionality down the line.
The fee that catches people out
Over a few years, the maths matters. Shopify’s subscription plus per-transaction fees on a growing store can quietly become one of your bigger overheads. WooCommerce shifts that spend to hosting and one-off development instead — often cheaper at scale, but more hands-on. Neither is “cheaper” universally; it depends on your volume and how custom you go. Work it out on your numbers, not a blog’s.
Why we build on WooCommerce
We’re WooCommerce specialists — in fact, we’ve built our own licensing and commerce engine on top of it (WLU Commerce), which means we can create custom plugins and functionality that off-the-shelf stores simply can’t. For most of our clients, owning the store outright and avoiding perpetual platform fees is the right long-term call. But we’ll tell you honestly if Shopify is the better fit for how you work — this is the same “which side of the line are you on” thinking as our guide to custom or WordPress.
Before you commit either way, it’s worth knowing what an ecommerce website costs on each, and you can see our ecommerce web design if you’d like a hand deciding. The wrong platform isn’t a disaster — but switching later is a faff, so it’s worth ten minutes of honest thought now.