WooCommerce vs Shopify: What Your Store Actually Costs to Run

WooCommerce is marketed as free. The plugin is free. The software is free. What nobody shows you is the invoice at the end of the year.

We've worked with enough WooCommerce stores to know what they actually spend — and when you add it all up, the number is rarely what anyone expected when they chose the platform.

What WooCommerce Really Costs

The WooCommerce cost conversation always starts with hosting. Shared hosting works fine for a brochure site. For a live eCommerce store with a few hundred orders per month, you need managed WordPress hosting — Kinsta, WP Engine, or a VPS configuration on DigitalOcean or AWS. That runs $50–$400 per month depending on traffic and the setup you need.

Then there's the plugin stack. The average WooCommerce store runs 30–40 plugins. A handful are free. The important ones — subscriptions, memberships, product bundles, advanced shipping, abandoned cart, loyalty — are paid. Most charge annual renewal fees. You're probably looking at $1,500–$4,000 per year in plugin licenses before you've added anything specialised.

Developer time is where it gets expensive. WooCommerce stores need maintenance that a standard WordPress site doesn't. PHP updates break plugins. Plugin updates break themes. Security patches need testing before they go live. An hour of developer time every week for maintenance adds up to 50+ hours per year. At UK or US agency rates, that's $4,000–$10,000 before you've built a single new feature.

Security and compliance sit on your shoulders. On a self-hosted WooCommerce store, PCI compliance is your problem. SSL certificates, malware scanning, regular backups, security audits. Shopify handles all of this at the platform level — it's part of every plan.

A realistic WooCommerce total for a store doing $500K/year in revenue: $800–$2,000 per month in combined platform costs. That's $10,000–$24,000 per year just to keep the store running.

What Shopify Actually Costs

Shopify's pricing is published and fixed. The Shopify plan is $79/month. Advanced is $299/month. Apps on Shopify are modular — you pay for what you actually use. Most stores doing $500K/year run $100–$300/month in apps.

Hosting, security, SSL, CDN, and platform maintenance are all included. There's no server to manage, no PHP version to worry about, no Black Friday infrastructure panic. Shopify's infrastructure scales automatically.

Total Shopify cost for a $500K/year store: $200–$600 per month. $2,400–$7,200 per year. The savings versus WooCommerce are real — but they're not the main reason brands make the switch.

The Revenue Side of the Equation

Platform costs matter. Revenue matters more.

Shop Pay is Shopify-exclusive. It has 100 million registered users who can complete checkout in one tap on any Shopify store. The conversion lift is well-documented — Shopify's own data shows Shop Pay converts at a rate 50% higher than standard guest checkouts. On a store doing $500K/year, a 15% improvement in checkout conversion is $75,000 in additional annual revenue. That's before you've changed a single thing about your marketing.

Multi-channel selling is where Shopify's ecosystem really separates. TikTok Shop, Instagram Shopping, Facebook, Google Shopping, Pinterest, and Amazon all integrate natively with Shopify. Your inventory syncs automatically. Orders land in one dashboard. Setting up a new channel takes hours, not weeks. On WooCommerce, each channel integration is a custom project — most stores skip them entirely because the setup cost isn't worth it for an unproven channel. On Shopify, the cost of trying is low enough that you actually try.

Shopify Markets opens up international revenue with a few clicks. Localised currencies, translated storefronts, international pricing rules. If you've been avoiding international expansion because it felt complicated, Shopify removes most of that friction.

The Migration Investment

A WooCommerce to Shopify migration typically costs $3,000–$10,000 depending on your product count, custom functionality, and integrations. Most stores recover that in the first few months from platform cost reduction alone — before any revenue uplift from better checkout conversion or new channels.

The stores that keep putting off the migration usually end up spending that amount on WooCommerce maintenance in the same period anyway, without the upside.

If you want an honest assessment of what migration would look like for your store, book a free audit. We'll scope the work, give you a realistic timeline, and tell you what to expect — no commitment required.