WooCommerce vs Shopify: how to choose the right platform for your online shop

Short answer: choose Shopify if you want to get going quickly, avoid hosting and security, and spend your time selling. Choose WooCommerce if you already have WordPress, want to own the whole shop and customise everything, or have content and shop that need to work closely together. Both work very well for UK shops with cards, Apple Pay, PayPal, Klarna and Xero. The difference is who handles the technology and how freely you want to build.

The basic difference

Shopify is an e-commerce platform sold as a service. You pay a monthly fee and get the shop, hosting, security, updates and checkout in one package. Shopify Payments is available in the UK (Shopify), and the Shopify App Store has thousands of apps (Shopify App Store).

WooCommerce is a free plugin that turns WordPress into a shop, with more than seven million active installations (WordPress.org). You install it on your own hosting and own both the code and the database. In return, you or your agency are responsible for updates, security and performance.

Both are big. According to W3Techs, WooCommerce is used by 47.6 percent of websites with a known e-commerce system and Shopify by 32.1 percent (W3Techs, W3Techs). And the market is there: internet sales made up about 27 percent of all UK retail sales in August 2026, peaking above 32 percent in November 2025 (ONS).

Side-by-side comparison

What do they cost in the UK?

Shopify costs £19 a month for Basic, £49 for Grow and £259 for Advanced billed yearly, or £25, £65 and £344 billed monthly. Shopify Payments charges from 2% + 25p per online card payment on Basic. If you use a third-party payment provider instead, Shopify adds a fee of 2 percent on Basic, 1 percent on Grow and 0.6 percent on Advanced (Shopify). That matters if you want your own payment provider.

WooCommerce is free to install. WordPress hosting in the UK can start at a few pounds a month, for example IONOS from £5 a month excluding VAT after the introductory offer, though a shop with many products usually needs a bigger plan (IONOS). Card payments through WooPayments cost 1.5% + 25p for UK cards, plus VAT on the fees unless you give a VAT number (WooCommerce), and Stripe charges from 1.5% + 20p for standard UK cards (Stripe). Paid plugins and maintenance come on top.

We go through the full sums, with payments, apps, domain and accounting, in Ecommerce website cost.

Payments and Xero

• Shopify Payments in the UK covers cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay and Shop Pay, and you can switch on Klarna as a local payment method (Shopify). PayPal is added as a separate provider.
• WooCommerce has official extensions for PayPal (WooCommerce) and Klarna, which supports the UK (WooCommerce), and WooPayments or Stripe for cards.
• Xero with Shopify: Xero's own free integration syncs sales, payouts, fees and taxes (Xero App Store).
• Xero with WooCommerce: the official Xero for WooCommerce extension can create invoices in Xero for your sales automatically (WooCommerce).

If your shop has special rules, such as several warehouses or customer-specific prices, a custom integration may work better. Read Xero API: how to connect Xero to your other systems.

SEO and content

Both platforms can rank well on Google. Shopify gives a stable base with fast servers, but has a fixed URL structure, such as /products/ and /collections/. WooCommerce gives full control over URLs, structured data and technical settings, and WordPress is stronger for anyone who wants to write guides and articles that bring traffic to the shop.

If content is an important part of how you sell, that points to WooCommerce. If products and ads drive sales, the difference matters less. Whichever you choose, keep the shop fast. Read Core Web Vitals explained.

Ownership and switching later

With WooCommerce you own everything and can move the shop to another host whenever you like. With Shopify you can export products and customers as CSV files, but product images are not included in the product file (Shopify). A move in either direction takes work, with redirects from old URLs so you keep your Google rankings.

How to choose

Choose Shopify if

• you want to get started quickly without thinking about technology
• the shop is the core and content is a smaller part
• you expect to grow in volume and want a stable checkout
• you want to sell in a physical shop with the same system

Choose WooCommerce if

• you already have a WordPress site that works
• content, guides and SEO are an important part of sales
• you want to own the whole solution and customise everything
• you have someone to handle updates and security

Read more about how we build e-commerce websites on both platforms.