The short answer: Shopify is the simplest choice if your business is the store: you sell products, you want to manage it yourself, and you don’t need much beyond a catalog and checkout. WooCommerce is usually the better fit when the store is one part of a bigger website, sitting alongside content, courses, coaching, wholesale accounts, or custom features, or when you want to own the whole thing outright.
PowerUp builds WooCommerce stores, but I’d still point some businesses to Shopify. Here’s how to tell which camp you’re in.
What’s the main difference?
Shopify is a hosted e-commerce platform. You pay a monthly subscription, and Shopify runs the hosting, security, and checkout. You add features through its app store, many of which carry their own monthly fees.
WooCommerce is a free plugin that turns a WordPress site into a store. You choose your own hosting and payment provider, and add features with extensions or custom code. You own the site, the data, and the design, and someone has to keep it updated.
| WooCommerce | Shopify | |
|---|---|---|
| Who owns the store | You | Lives on Shopify |
| Setup | Usually built by a developer | Easy to start yourself |
| Ongoing upkeep | Updates needed (or a care plan) | Handled by Shopify |
| Content alongside the store | Excellent: it’s WordPress | Basic blog and pages |
| Custom features | Almost anything can be built | Limited to apps and theme customization |
| Payment providers | Your choice (Stripe, PayPal, Square, and others) | Shopify Payments, or extra fees on most plans for others |
| Typical recurring costs | Hosting, care, some extension licences | Subscription plus paid apps |
When is Shopify the better choice?
- The store is the whole business, and products are what visitors come for.
- You want to run it yourself, with no developer and no updates to think about.
- You sell in person too and want one system for online and point-of-sale.
- Your needs fit what Shopify and its apps already do.
When is WooCommerce the better choice?
- Your store sits inside a bigger story. For Potter’s Crackers, PowerUp built a WooCommerce storefront alongside a pairings-and-recipes hub and a “where to buy” retail locator, so content keeps customers coming back between purchases.
- You sell more than products. Yin-care’s WooCommerce site sells its flagship product while giving equal space to coaching, courses, and a podcast.
- You have different kinds of customers. For YAO Company, PowerUp built a login-gated wholesale storefront with account dashboards, order history, and a continuing-education course library for practitioners, kept separate from the consumer brand.
- You need something custom. Spira Manufacturing needed a guided product selector to help engineers find the right part, which is far easier to build into WordPress than to bolt onto a hosted platform.
- You sell subscriptions or memberships and want them on your own site. PowerUp’s own Care plans run on WooCommerce Subscriptions.
Which one costs less?
It depends on what you need. Shopify usually costs less to start, since there’s no build, but the monthly subscription and app fees keep running, and transaction fees can apply if you don’t use Shopify Payments. WooCommerce usually costs more up front, because most stores are built by a developer, and then a predictable monthly amount for hosting and upkeep. At PowerUp that’s $60/month for hosting plus maintenance.
Either way, you’ll pay your payment provider’s card processing fees on every sale. The bigger cost difference is usually how much custom work your store needs, not the platform itself.
Can I move from Shopify to WooCommerce later?
Yes. Products, customers, and orders can be migrated, and page URLs redirected so you keep your search rankings, the same approach I describe for moving off Squarespace or Wix. It’s a real project, though, so it’s worth choosing carefully the first time.
How do I decide?
Ask yourself one question: in two years, will your website be mostly a store, or a business that also sells online? If it’s mostly a store, look hard at Shopify. If it’s the second, WooCommerce will grow with you.
If you’re weighing it up, tell me what you sell and how, and I’ll give you an honest recommendation. Adding a store to an existing WordPress site is part of PowerUp’s Feature Development work, and full builds are covered under Custom Builds.