WooCommerce or Shopify for a small Australian shop?

Shopify suits small Australian shops that want the easiest day-to-day running, sell in person as well as online, or will manage everything from a phone. WooCommerce suits shops that want full ownership, run a content-heavy WordPress site, or sell unusual products, and it asks more of you (or your web person) in return. Neither is “better”. One will suit how your business works.

We build online stores on both, so we don’t have a reason to push you towards either. What we do have is a fair bit of experience watching what happens a year or two after launch, which is where the real differences show up.

The quick comparison

Fees: what you pay

This is where people get caught, because neither platform’s headline price is the full cost.

Shopify

You pay a monthly subscription for your plan. The entry plans suit most small shops, and the price goes up as you move to plans with lower card rates and more staff accounts. Check the current Australian prices on Shopify’s site, because they change and depend on whether you pay monthly or yearly.

Then there are card fees. If you use Shopify Payments, you pay a percentage plus a small fixed amount per transaction, with higher rates for international cards and Amex. If you use a different payment provider instead, Shopify charges an extra transaction fee on top of that provider’s fees. For most small Australian shops, that makes Shopify Payments the sensible default.

The cost that sneaks up is apps. Shopify does a lot out of the box, but things like product reviews, advanced shipping rules, subscriptions, wholesale pricing or extra product options are often paid apps with their own monthly fees. It’s not unusual to find a shop paying more for apps each month than for the plan itself. Before you choose a theme, list the features you need and check which ones need an app.

WooCommerce

The WooCommerce plugin itself is free. You pay for:

• Hosting. Good WordPress hosting suitable for a shop. Don’t go cheap here. A store on bargain shared hosting will be slow at checkout, and slow checkouts lose sales.
• Extensions. Things like subscriptions, bookings or advanced shipping are paid extensions, usually billed yearly. Plenty of shops need only one or two.
• Payment fees. Set by your payment provider (Stripe, Square, PayPal, WooPayments and others). There’s no extra platform transaction fee on top.
• Maintenance. Someone has to keep WordPress, WooCommerce and plugins updated and backed up. That’s either your time or a maintenance plan.

Over a few years, a simple WooCommerce shop on good hosting with a maintenance plan often costs about the same as a Shopify shop on an entry plan with a handful of apps. The difference is where the money goes, and who’s responsible when something breaks.

Ownership

With Shopify, your products, customers and orders are yours and can be exported. The theme and the store itself can’t be moved anywhere else. If Shopify changes its prices or policies, you go along with it or rebuild on another platform.

With WooCommerce, you own everything: the code, the design, the data and the hosting choice. If you fall out with your host or your developer, you can move the whole site. That matters to us, because we’ve seen enough businesses stuck on platforms they can’t leave. It’s the same reason we talk about owning your website rather than renting it.

The trade-off is that with ownership comes responsibility. Nobody’s going to update your plugins for you unless you’ve arranged it.

Flexibility

Shopify’s theme system is good and keeps getting better, but you work within its rules. Custom checkout changes are limited on the standard plans. Unusual product setups (made-to-order furniture with dozens of options, or a product that’s half service, half physical item) often need apps or custom development.

WooCommerce can do nearly anything, because it’s WordPress underneath. Combined with Elementor, we can design product pages, category pages and the cart to look exactly how you want. You can also run a proper content-heavy site alongside the shop, with service pages, guides and a blog, which helps a lot with SEO for shops that sell considered purchases.

The flip side: “can do anything” also means “can be built badly”. A WooCommerce site with forty plugins bolted on by three different developers is a maintenance problem waiting to happen.

Ease of use

Shopify wins here. The admin is clean, the mobile app is excellent for checking orders and fulfilling from your phone, and it’s hard to break anything.

WooCommerce is fine once it’s set up, and the day-to-day jobs (adding products, processing orders, issuing refunds) aren’t hard. There are just more settings, and when something goes wrong it’s often a plugin conflict rather than a support ticket you can hand to someone else.

If you’re a one-person business who’ll run the shop from your phone at the markets, that matters.

Australian payments

Both platforms handle the main Australian payment options well:

• Cards and digital wallets (Apple Pay, Google Pay) through Shopify Payments, or Stripe, Square or WooPayments on WooCommerce.
• PayPal on both.
• Buy now, pay later such as Afterpay and Zip, which integrate with both. Check the fees with the provider, because they’re higher than card fees and come out of your margin.
• Bank transfer for wholesale or high-value orders. Easy on both.

If you also sell in person, at a shopfront or markets, Shopify’s POS system keeps your stock and sales in one place. WooCommerce can connect to Square for in-person sales, but it’s more setup.

Whichever you choose, make sure prices display including GST. Both platforms can be set up that way, and Australian consumer law expects you to show the total price. Our guide to product pages that sell covers this and the other details shoppers look for.

Shipping in Australia

Shipping is where small Australian shops often struggle, because a flat rate that works for Ballina doesn’t work for Broome.

Both platforms can do flat rates, free shipping thresholds, local pickup and local delivery zones out of the box. For live carrier rates and printing labels, both connect to Australia Post, Sendle, and multi-carrier tools like Shippit and Starshipit through apps or plugins. Check the carrier you want to use has a current, supported integration before you commit, and check whether it’s free or a monthly fee.

Heavy or bulky items (furniture, building supplies, garden products) almost always need custom rules. WooCommerce generally handles odd shipping logic more flexibly. On Shopify it usually means a paid shipping app.

Which suits which business

Shopify usually suits:

• Product-only businesses that want to spend their time on stock and marketing, not the website.
• Shops that sell in person and online and want one system for both.
• Owners who’ll manage everything themselves from a phone.
• Brands planning to grow quickly, where the platform handling hosting and security is worth paying for.

WooCommerce usually suits:

• Businesses with an existing WordPress site that want to add a shop.
• Shops where content matters: guides, recipes, how-tos, service pages.
• Unusual products, custom pricing, bookings or a mix of products and services.
• Owners who want full ownership and are happy to pay for maintenance (or already have it).
• Small catalogues where a subscription and app fees feel like overkill.

The setup matters more than the platform

We’ve seen excellent shops on both and terrible shops on both. The things that sell products are the same everywhere: good photos, clear prices with shipping costs up front, honest descriptions and a quick checkout. If your product photos are let down by poor lighting, a product photography session will do more for sales than switching platforms.

If you’ve picked WooCommerce, our WooCommerce setup guide for Australian stores walks through the settings to get right before launch.

Making the call

Write down three things: how many products you’ll sell, whether you sell in person as well, and who’ll look after the site once it’s live. Those three answers decide it for most people.

We build stores on both platforms through our Shopify and e-commerce service, with e-commerce builds from $4,500 + GST. Still torn after those three questions? Tell us about your products, where you sell them and who’ll run the shop, and we’ll say which platform we’d pick in your position.