For most small businesses in the United States the practical choice is Shopify or WooCommerce, and the deciding question is not features — it is whether you have someone to maintain the store. Shopify maintains itself and charges for it. WooCommerce is free and expects you to do it.
We build on both and hold no affiliate arrangements with any platform, which is worth stating because most comparison articles ranking for this term do.
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Shopify costs $25 to $399 a month ($19 to $299 billed annually) across the three plans a small business would use, and fits businesses that want to sell rather than administer software. Hosting, security, updates and PCI compliance are Shopify's problem, and that is most of what you are buying. The enterprise tier, Plus, starts at $2,300 a month.
The cost most people miss: if you use a payment provider other than Shopify Payments, Shopify adds 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced and 0.2% on Plus to every transaction. On a store doing $30,000 a month on Basic through an external gateway, that surcharge is $600 — many times the plan itself. It changes which plan is cheapest, and sometimes whether Shopify is cheapest.
Choose Shopify if: you sell physical products, you have no developer, uptime matters more than control, or you want to launch in weeks rather than months.
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Keep reading: How much should a small business spend on marketing? · 12 questions to ask a marketing agency before you sign
WooCommerce core is free and open source. The real cost is hosting at $25–$350 a month and paid extensions at $29–$299 per year each, per WooCommerce's own pricing page. There is no platform fee and no revenue share.
What you gain is control: your data, your server, any integration you can write, and no transaction surcharge. What you take on is maintenance. WordPress and its plugins need updating, and an unmaintained store is a security problem rather than an inconvenience. If nobody owns that, it will not happen.
Choose WooCommerce if: you already run WordPress, you need custom logic Shopify will not allow, you have technical support available, or transaction volume makes the surcharge painful.
| Shopify | WooCommerce | |
|---|---|---|
| Platform fee | $25–$399/mo (Plus from $2,300) | $0 |
| Hosting | Included | $25–$350/mo |
| Extensions | Per app, monthly | $29–$299/yr each |
| Third-party gateway fee | 0.2%–2% | None |
| Maintenance | Shopify | You |
| Time to launch | Faster | Slower |
| Customization ceiling | Lower | Effectively none |
They are viable and they fit narrower cases. Squarespace and Wix are excellent when the store is secondary to a beautiful site and the catalog is small; they become constraining as catalog and operations grow. BigCommerce is the closest direct alternative to Shopify. We have not priced it against the other two here, and rather than repeat a comparison we have not verified, we would point you at their current pricing page before deciding.
None of them is a mistake for the right business. The mistake is choosing on the marketing site rather than on a list of what your store has to do.
Answer four questions and the platform usually picks itself.
The software side of a migration is cheap; the search side is where the money is lost. Products, customers and orders export and import with tooling. What does not come across automatically is the URL structure, and that is what carries your rankings.
Every product and category page on the old store has an address that Google has indexed and that other sites link to. If the new store uses a different address for the same product — and it almost always does, because platforms structure URLs differently — every one of those needs a 301 redirect pointing old to new. Skip that step and the store relaunches with its search visibility reset to zero, which is a cost that does not appear on any quote.
The three things to insist on in a migration scope:
Neither, in any way that will decide your rankings. Both Shopify and WooCommerce can produce technically sound stores, and both can produce bad ones. The platform sets a floor, not a ceiling, and every store in your category is standing on a similar floor.
What actually differentiates ecommerce sites in search is the same everywhere: product and category pages that answer what people search rather than restating the manufacturer's copy, a site that loads quickly on a phone, and internal linking that connects new pages to pages that already have authority. None of that is a platform feature.
The one structural difference worth knowing: WooCommerce gives you complete control over URLs, templates and markup, which matters if you have unusual requirements. Shopify's structure is more fixed, and for the overwhelming majority of stores that constraint costs nothing — it is a guardrail rather than a limit.
Whether measurement was installed before launch. Every platform on this list can run a profitable store. What separates stores that grow is knowing which products, channels and pages produce revenue — and that comes from analytics and conversion tracking configured at launch, not added once something feels wrong.
The second is sales tax. U.S. economic nexus rules mean a store can owe tax in states it has never physically been in, and this fails silently: the store keeps taking orders and the liability accumulates. It is configuration, not opinion, and it belongs in the build.
WooCommerce has the lowest software cost, since the core plugin is free — but hosting runs $25–$350 a month and extensions $29–$299 a year each, so the total is not automatically lower. Shopify Basic at $19 a month billed annually is often cheaper in practice for a small catalog once hosting and maintenance are counted.
Neither is better in general. Shopify is better when you do not want to maintain software. WooCommerce is better when you need control or have volume that makes the third-party gateway surcharge expensive. We build on both.
Yes, and people do. Migration is real work — products, customers, orders, URLs and redirects — so it is worth choosing deliberately now. The part most often botched is redirects: without them, a migration throws away every ranking the old store earned.
Both handle it, and both need it done properly: separate URLs per language and hreflang declared in both directions. The platform matters less than whether the Spanish is written rather than machine-translated, which is what determines whether it ranks and whether it converts.
Deciding? See how we build stores for U.S. brands, read what a Shopify store really costs, or check our pricing.
Ready to sell online with a store that converts?
We build your store on Shopify, WooCommerce or Tiendanube with local payments, ready to sell. Get a quote.
Keep reading: How much should a small business spend on marketing? · 12 questions to ask a marketing agency before you sign
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