Imagine you run a home decor store with 400 products, around 1,500 orders a month and an average order of $60. You are choosing where the store will live for the next five years, and three options keep coming up: Shopify, WooCommerce, or a store built from scratch. Most Shopify vs WooCommerce comparisons stop at a feature table. The decision really turns on three things: what you will pay every month once the store is busy, who will keep it running, and whether your products and pricing fit the standard catalog, cart and checkout shape.
What each option is
Shopify is a hosted platform. You pay a monthly plan, and Shopify runs the servers, the security patches and the checkout. You shape the store with a theme and apps. You own your theme code and any custom apps, but the platform itself is rented.
WooCommerce is a free, open-source e-commerce plugin for WordPress. You choose the hosting, the extensions and the payment gateway, and you, or someone you pay, keeps WordPress, the plugins and the server up to date.
A custom store is built on a web framework such as Laravel or Node.js. You own every line and every decision, and you maintain every line too.
What Shopify really costs once orders arrive
On Shopify's US pricing page, the plans cost $39 (Basic), $105 (Grow) and $399 (Advanced) a month on monthly billing, or $29, $79 and $299 a month billed yearly. Shopify Plus starts at $2,300 a month. Prices and billing currency depend on your location; merchants can be billed in USD, EUR, GBP or INR.
The plan fee is the small number. Payment fees are the big one. With Shopify Payments, online card rates on that page are 2.9% + 30 cents on Basic, 2.7% + 30 cents on Grow and 2.5% + 30 cents on Advanced. If you use a third-party payment provider instead, Shopify adds its own transaction fee of 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow or 0.6% on Advanced, on top of whatever your provider charges.
That second case matters more than it sounds, because Shopify Payments is not available everywhere. India, for example, is not on Shopify's list of supported countries, so Indian stores use a third-party gateway. Check the pricing page for your own country before you budget.
Running the numbers for the example store
Our example store takes $90,000 a month (1,500 orders at $60). With Shopify Payments available:
- Basic: $39 + $2,610 in percentage fees + $450 in per-order fees = about $3,099 a month
- Grow: $105 + $2,430 + $450 = about $2,985 a month
- Advanced: $399 + $2,250 + $450 = about $3,099 a month
At this volume Grow is the cheapest plan, even though it costs more than Basic on paper. Now take a store that must use a third-party gateway. Shopify's extra transaction fee alone comes to $1,800 a month on Basic, $900 on Grow and $540 on Advanced. Add the plan fee and Advanced ($939) beats Grow ($1,005), which beats Basic ($1,839), before the gateway's own charges. Run the same arithmetic with your real numbers. Plan choice is a volume question, not a feature question.
Then add apps. Subscriptions, product bundles, advanced search and many other features come from third-party apps, and many of them charge monthly. List the ones you need before you compare totals.
One more limit worth knowing early: Shopify's checkout UI extensions for the information, shipping and payment steps are available only on Shopify Plus. If your plan depends on a heavily customized checkout, price that in.
WooCommerce: free software, paid upkeep
WooCommerce has no platform fee and no revenue share. Its own pricing page estimates hosting at $25 to $350 a month for most stores, scaling with traffic, and paid extensions at $29 to $299 a year each. You can use any payment gateway without a platform penalty, paying only the gateway's fees.
For our example store, that is hosting somewhere in that range plus perhaps five paid extensions. On paper, this is where Shopify vs WooCommerce tilts toward WooCommerce: with no platform fee, it is clearly cheaper when you cannot use Shopify Payments.
The cost that doesn't appear on any pricing page is maintenance. WordPress core, WooCommerce, every plugin and the server's PHP version all need updates, and each update should be tested against the checkout before it goes live. An unmaintained store with thirty plugins is where security problems and broken checkouts come from. Budget for a developer's time every month, in-house or on a retainer, or WooCommerce stops being the cheap option.
What a custom store costs to build
A custom store has no platform fee, but you pay to build everything a platform gives you for free. The honest way to estimate is to list the modules and put hours against each. Here is an illustrative estimate for a straightforward store like our example:
- catalog, categories, search and filters: 120 hours
- product pages with variants: 60 hours
- cart, checkout and payment gateway integration: 140 hours
- customer accounts and order history: 60 hours
- admin for products, orders, inventory and coupons: 200 hours
- shipping and tax rules: 60 hours
- emails, content pages and SEO basics: 60 hours
- testing, deployment and project management: 150 hours
That is 850 hours. Rates vary widely by region and team, so treat any figure as a rough market range; at a hypothetical $30 to $60 an hour, it comes to $25,500 to $51,000. And that is before building the feature that made custom worth considering in the first place, and before hosting and ongoing maintenance.
For a standard catalog store, that money buys you little that Shopify or WooCommerce wouldn't. For some businesses, it buys exactly what they need.
Where each option earns its place
Shopify
Shopify suits a standard retail catalog, a small team with no developer on staff, and a need to launch quickly. You stop worrying about servers and updates and spend your time on products and marketing. Furniselan, an online furniture store we built and customized on Shopify, is an example of this route. If you go this way, our Shopify development work covers themes, apps and store setup.
WooCommerce
WooCommerce suits a business whose traffic already comes from a content-heavy WordPress site, such as guides, recipes or tutorials, and that wants the store in the same place. It also suits owners who want full control of hosting and data and no platform transaction fees, and who have maintenance covered.
Custom
Custom code earns its cost when the thing that makes your business different is logic a platform can't express cleanly: product configurators where one choice limits the next, per-customer B2B price lists with credit terms and approvals, marketplaces that pay out to many sellers, or a store that is one part of a larger ERP and warehouse system. VitKart, a computer parts web app we built with a custom PC builder, is the kind of project where the builder is the reason to go custom.
Shopify vs WooCommerce vs custom: how to choose
- Choose Shopify if your products fit the standard catalog, cart and checkout model and you don't have a developer on staff. Do the plan arithmetic with your own order volume, and check whether Shopify Payments works in your country.
- Choose WooCommerce if WordPress content already drives your traffic, or you want no platform fees and full hosting control, and you have ongoing maintenance covered by staff or a retainer.
- Choose custom if your core selling logic doesn't fit a platform (configurators, B2B pricing and approvals, multi-seller payouts, deep ERP integration) and you can fund both the build and its upkeep.
- If you are unsure, start on Shopify, prove demand, and keep a written list of everything the platform blocks. Moving a proven store later is a manageable project. Building custom for demand you haven't proven is the more expensive mistake.
Before you talk to any developer, write down four things: monthly orders and average order value, the country you will take payments in, the three features you would pay extra for, and who will maintain the store. Those answers settle most platform debates, and they are also the inputs our guide to what a website really costs to build uses to size a budget.
If you want help with the arithmetic, our e-commerce development team can look at your catalog and order numbers and tell you which platform fits, including when the answer is a well-chosen Shopify theme and no custom work at all. You can also send the details through our contact page.
