Shopify vs WooCommerce: Which Suits Your Online Store?
A straight comparison of Shopify and WooCommerce for Australian retailers, with real three year costs at two revenue levels, who carries the maintenance burden, and which type of store should pick which.
For most Australian stores under about 500 products, Shopify is the better bet: about $19,500 excluding GST over three years on $200,000 a year in sales, and nobody rings you when it breaks. WooCommerce lands within a few per cent of that once you pay someone to maintain it, and wins on content depth, custom product logic and owning your merchant account. Cost is rarely the decider.
What do Shopify and WooCommerce actually cost over three years?
Close to the same thing, which surprises people. We ran the numbers for two Australian stores we see all the time: one turning over $200,000 a year, one turning over $1.2 million, both with an average order value around $120. At both levels the three year totals land within roughly five per cent of each other. What changes is where the money goes and who does the work.
| Three year running cost | Shopify at $200k/yr | WooCommerce at $200k/yr | Shopify at $1.2m/yr | WooCommerce at $1.2m/yr |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Platform plan or hosting | $1,620 (Basic, annual billing) | $2,160 (managed AU hosting, $60/mo) | $4,140 (Grow plan, annual billing) | $9,000 (managed VPS, $250/mo) |
| Card processing | $12,000 (Shopify Payments, 1.75% + 30c) | $11,700 (Stripe, 1.7% + 30c) | $66,600 (Shopify Payments, 1.6% + 30c) | $54,300 (negotiated gateway, 1.3% + 25c) |
| Apps or plugin licences | $5,400 (approx $150/mo) | $1,800 (approx $600/yr) | $14,400 (approx $400/mo) | $4,500 (approx $1,500/yr) |
| Updates and maintenance | $0 (Shopify does it) | $5,400 (approx $150/mo retainer) | $0 (Shopify does it) | $18,000 (approx $500/mo retainer) |
| Theme or design refresh | $500 | $400 | $1,500 | $1,500 |
| Three year total | $19,520 | $21,460 | $86,640 | $87,300 |
All figures excluding GST and excluding the initial build, which costs similar money on either platform. Plan prices and card rates change; check current rates before you commit.
Two things do the heavy lifting there. The first is the card rate. At $1.2 million in sales, a difference of 0.3 percentage points is $3,600 a year, more than most people ever save by arguing about hosting. Shopify Payments charges less as you move up plans, roughly 1.75 per cent on Basic, about 1.6 per cent on Grow and around 1.4 per cent on Advanced, all plus 30 cents per domestic card transaction. With WooCommerce you can shop around, and above roughly $80,000 a month in card volume most Australian acquirers will negotiate. Genuine WooCommerce advantage, and it only shows up at volume.
The second is Shopify’s third party gateway surcharge. Process through anything other than Shopify Payments and Shopify adds its own fee on top of whatever the gateway charges: roughly two per cent on Basic, about one per cent on Grow, less on Advanced. On $1.2 million that can be $12,000 a year for nothing. It bites when Shopify Payments will not accept your category, which happens with vapes, some supplements and certain alcohol subscription models.
And the WooCommerce column assumes you pay someone. Do the updates yourself and you strip $5,400 or $18,000 out of that total. Plenty of owners do exactly that for a year, then quietly stop, which is how we end up rescuing a store running a three year old version of WooCommerce.
Who patches it, and who is on call at 11pm on a Friday?
On Shopify, Shopify does. Core updates, security patches, PCI compliance, uptime and checkout are all their problem, and their checkout does not go down when an app misbehaves. On WooCommerce it is you or whoever you have engaged. That single difference decides more platform choices than any feature list.
A typical WooCommerce store runs WordPress core, WooCommerce itself, a payment gateway plugin, a shipping plugin, a page builder, security and backup tools, and a handful of others. Every one updates on its own schedule, and occasionally two of them disagree. The failure mode is rarely dramatic. It is a checkout that silently stops sending order confirmations, or a shipping calculator returning zero for regional postcodes, and you find out on Monday from a customer who has already bought elsewhere.
We maintain plenty of WooCommerce stores and we are honest about what that involves: staged updates, a checkout test after every release, off site backups, and someone who will actually answer at 8pm on a Sunday in the week before Christmas. If nobody in your world is doing that, WooCommerce is not cheaper, it is deferred. It is the part we spend the most time on when we scope and build an ecommerce site, because it sets the running cost for years.
Shopify has its own version of this, worth naming. Apps break, developers abandon products, and a paid app you built a workflow around can double its price or vanish. You also cannot opt out when Shopify changes plan pricing or checkout rules. Different risk, not no risk.
Does a store with 30 products need the same platform as one with 3,000?
No, and this is where the answer stops being close. At 30 products, Shopify almost always. At 3,000 it depends entirely on how complicated those products are, not how many there are.
A 30 product store spends its energy on photography, copy and traffic, not software. Shopify gets you selling in days and there is nothing to maintain. Building the same store on WooCommerce is perfectly doable, and we do it when there is a reason, but if the only reason is that someone told you WordPress is free, you will spend the savings on your own time.
At 3,000 products, ask what the products are like. Straight retail SKUs with a size and a colour? Shopify handles that volume fine, though bulk editing and product feed apps become part of your monthly bill. Now change the question. Products with twelve custom attributes, trade pricing that differs by customer group, made to order configuration, minimum order quantities, or a live feed from an inventory system that predates the internet? That is WooCommerce territory, or a custom build. WordPress lets you model product data the way the business actually works instead of bending the business to fit the platform.
Large WooCommerce catalogues do need proper infrastructure: object caching, a tuned database, and hosting sized for the admin as well as the storefront. A 3,000 product Woo store on $15 a month shared hosting is miserable, and the person who suffers most is whoever processes your orders.
Which platform gives you more room for content and SEO?
WooCommerce, clearly, because it is WordPress underneath. If your plan is to win search traffic with buying guides, comparisons and technical content that then funnels into products, WordPress gives you real content architecture and Shopify gives you a blog that feels bolted on.
Shopify forces its URL structure, so products sit under /products/, collections under /collections/ and articles under /blogs/. You cannot change that. The blog supports tags but not proper categories, template control is narrower than WordPress, and building a large interlinked content library is fiddly. Metaobjects and JSON templates have improved things and a competent developer can do plenty, but you are working inside the fence. WordPress lets you build whatever taxonomy the content needs, control every URL, and interlink articles and products freely.
For stores where content is the marketing, that matters. For stores where the marketing is Google Shopping, Meta ads and email, it is worth almost nothing, and we would rather you put the money into ad spend.
Both can be fast. Shopify is fast by default because its CDN and checkout are tuned for it; WooCommerce can match or beat that, but only with decent hosting and someone who cares about page weight. Neither platform ranks better simply because of what it is. Anyone promising rankings on the basis of platform choice is selling something.
Rule of thumb we use: if the store is the business, and the person running it wants to think about products and customers rather than software, Shopify. If the website is a bigger thing than the store, with content, service pages, member areas or unusual product logic, and there is a budget for ongoing maintenance, WooCommerce. There are more guides on choosing and running a site in our websites knowledge centre.
How do Shopify and WooCommerce handle Australian shipping, GST and local payments?
Both handle the Australian basics properly. Shopify does it with less configuration, WooCommerce does it with more control. There is one real gotcha on Shopify: live carrier calculated shipping rates at checkout are only included on the Advanced plan, or on lower plans if you pay annually. If your freight varies wildly by weight and postcode and you are on monthly Basic billing, you will hit that wall.
| Australian requirement | Shopify | WooCommerce |
|---|---|---|
| Australia Post rates and labels | Native app, plus Sendle, Shippit and Starshipit integrations | Official Australia Post plugin plus the same third party services |
| Live carrier rates at checkout | Advanced plan, or lower plans on annual billing | Included, no plan tier restriction |
| GST inclusive pricing | Single setting, handles it cleanly | Works well but the tax settings need configuring correctly |
| GST free exports | Removes GST for overseas customers automatically | Supported, needs a tax rule set up |
| Afterpay, Zip, PayPal, Apple Pay | All available, plus Shop Pay express checkout | All available via official plugins |
| Complex freight rules | Possible, usually via a paid app | Fully customisable, including custom code |
On GST, Australian Consumer Law expects the total price a consumer pays to be clearly displayed, so retail stores should show prices including GST. Both platforms do that; WooCommerce just gives you more ways to set it up wrong. If you sell B2B and your buyers expect prices excluding GST, WooCommerce handles a dual display more gracefully. Buy now pay later is close to mandatory in Australian retail and both support Afterpay and Zip. Shop Pay is the one real Shopify exclusive, and saved card details across the Shopify network do help repeat conversion, though nobody can promise you a specific lift.
Which one should you pick?
Pick Shopify if you are selling straightforward physical products, you have fewer than a few hundred SKUs, nobody in your business enjoys software, and Shopify Payments will accept your category. That covers most Australian retailers we talk to, and anyone whose last website was a maintenance headache. You pay a little more in card fees and app subscriptions, and get your weekends back.
Pick WooCommerce if any of these apply: your products need data or pricing logic Shopify cannot model, you are running a serious content strategy alongside the store, you already have a WordPress site with real traffic, you need your own merchant facility for rate or compliance reasons, or your card volume is high enough that a 0.3 per cent difference funds the maintenance retainer by itself. Also pick it if you genuinely want to own the thing, files and database included, with no platform able to change the rules on you.
Two situations where we push back. Choosing WooCommerce purely to save money, with no maintenance budget, ends badly often enough that we will talk you out of it. And choosing Shopify when you already know you need custom product configuration means paying app developers to fake it, which costs more than doing it properly. If you are weighing this up for a specific store, that is exactly the sort of thing to work through before anyone writes code, and it is where our web design and build service starts.
Before you switch: migrating an established store between these platforms is not a weekend job. Budget $3,000 to $8,000 excluding GST for a clean move of products, customers, orders and URL redirects on a small to mid sized store, and expect a short dip in organic traffic while Google reprocesses the new URLs. Switching to save $40 a month is not worth it.
Common questions
Is WooCommerce actually free?
The WooCommerce plugin is free and always has been. The store around it is not. Real costs are hosting sized for ecommerce, paid extensions for subscriptions, bookings or advanced shipping, a page builder licence, and someone to keep it all patched. A working Australian WooCommerce store typically runs $200 to $700 a month excluding GST, all in. Free refers to the licence, not the operation.
Can I move from Shopify to WooCommerce later, or the other way?
Yes, in both directions, and it is done regularly. Products, customers and order history migrate with established tools. The parts that hurt are redirects, because the URL structures differ, plus rebuilding the theme and reconnecting every integration. Expect a few thousand dollars and two to four weeks for a small to mid sized store. Plan the redirect map carefully or you will lose search rankings you have paid for.
Does Shopify or WooCommerce rank better on Google?
Neither, on its own. Google ranks pages based on content, relevance, links and technical health, not on the software behind them. WooCommerce gives you more flexibility to build a large content library and control URLs, which helps if content is your traffic strategy. Shopify is fast by default and perfectly capable of ranking. Be wary of anyone who guarantees rankings; nobody can, and the ACCC takes a dim view of it.
Is Shopify Plus worth it for an Australian store?
Usually not until you are well past $5 million a year in sales, or you need checkout customisation, multiple storefronts or wholesale channels that the standard plans cannot handle. Plus starts in the low thousands per month excluding GST. Below that turnover the extra fee rarely pays for itself, and the card rate improvement alone will not justify it. Advanced plan plus a couple of good apps covers most growing Australian stores.
Can I do wholesale or trade pricing on either platform?
Both can, differently. WooCommerce handles customer group pricing, minimum order quantities and hidden trade catalogues natively with extensions, which is why trade suppliers often land there. Shopify does it through apps, a separate wholesale channel, or Plus level B2B features. If wholesale is a meaningful share of your revenue rather than an afterthought, WooCommerce usually costs less to get right and gives you more control over the rules.
What happens to my store if I stop paying?
On Shopify the store goes offline and eventually the data is purged, though you can export products and customers first. You never owned the software. With WooCommerce the site is files and a database you control, so if you stop paying a maintenance retainer the store keeps running, unpatched, until something breaks or it gets compromised. Stop paying for hosting and it disappears the same as anything else.
Not sure which platform fits your store?
We build and maintain both, so we have no reason to push you one way. Tell us what you sell and how you sell it, and we will tell you straight which one we would use and what it will cost to run.