WooCommerce vs Shopify: Real Costs and Fees for a Small Store (2026)

WooCommerce is free software you run on your own WordPress hosting. Shopify is a hosted service you rent by the month. Which one costs less depends on your sales volume, how much you want to customise and how much technical work you want to hand off. This guide puts the real fees side by side.

The short answer

• Choose Shopify if you want a hosted shop that is simple to start, with hosting, security and checkout handled for you, and you are happy to pay a monthly fee that grows with the plan.
• Choose WooCommerce if you want to own the store, need custom checkout or product logic, or already run a WordPress site and want the shop inside it.
• If you sell a lot through a third-party payment gateway, the extra Shopify surcharge adds up and WooCommerce often comes out cheaper. If you mostly use the platform's own payments, the gap is smaller.

Monthly costs side by side

Shopify's entry plan looks cheap, and often it is at the start. The sums change when you add apps, move to a higher plan or take payments through a processor other than Shopify Payments.

A worked example

On a $100 sale paid through Stripe on Shopify Basic, Stripe's own fee is 2.9% + 30¢, which is $3.20. Shopify then adds its 2% surcharge, $2.00, for not using Shopify Payments. WooCommerce would charge only the $3.20 processor fee, but you also pay for hosting. That example is from a published pricing guide; your real figures depend on your processor and card mix.

Hidden costs on both sides

• Shopify: theme purchases, paid apps for things like subscriptions or advanced filtering, and the monthly plan itself. Moving up a plan to reduce fees is a real cost.
• WooCommerce: hosting quality matters because a slow shop loses sales; paid extensions; and ongoing updates and backups. A maintenance plan covers that for a monthly fee, or you do it yourself.

Who owns the store

With WooCommerce you hold the code, the database and the customer list on hosting you pick. You can change host or developer at any time. With Shopify you rent the platform. You can export products and customers, but the theme and app setup do not move with you. If a long-term exit matters to you, that is the biggest difference between the two.

Control and flexibility

Shopify is quicker to launch and has fewer things that can break. WooCommerce can do almost anything, including custom checkout steps, unusual shipping rules and tight integration with a WordPress content site, but it needs someone who knows WordPress to set it up well. If your needs are standard, Shopify's limits will rarely bother you. If your store has custom products, bookings or B2B pricing, they might.

What it costs to build

Build cost is a separate question from platform fees. Published guides put a freelance Shopify build at about $2,000 to $10,000 and a freelance WooCommerce build at about $1,900 to $8,000 in the US, with catalog size as the main driver. These are market ranges, not my prices. For a breakdown of what drives the cost, see how much an ecommerce website costs.

Which should you pick?

1. 1Under a few hundred orders a month, standard products, no developer: Shopify is usually the easier start.
2. 2Already on WordPress, or you want a content-led shop: WooCommerce keeps everything in one place.
3. 3Higher volume with a third-party gateway: run both sets of numbers; the gateway surcharge on Shopify can tip it to WooCommerce.
4. 4Custom features or full ownership matter: WooCommerce.

I build WooCommerce stores, so I have a bias. The honest way to decide is to total up the first year on both: platform, hosting, apps and extensions, payment fees at your expected sales, and build cost. If you want help with that, see my WooCommerce development service or ask for a quote and I will tell you plainly whether WooCommerce is the right fit.

Sources

• Shopify plan prices and fees: sellfy.com, enzuzo.com, firstpier.com
• WooCommerce pricing, hosting range and WooPayments rate: woocommerce.com/pricing
• Build cost ranges: ecosire.com, projectcostestimator.com

Related reading: how much an ecommerce website costs and what a small business website costs in the USA.