WordPress with WooCommerce is an open-source ecommerce platform. You install the WooCommerce plugin on a WordPress website and it turns your site into a fully functional online store. There’s no mandatory platform subscription beyond your hosting, which typically costs $20–$50 per month for quality Australian hosting.

For businesses selling anywhere from 10 to several hundred products, WooCommerce gives you:

• Third-party apps – Shopify’s built-in functionality is limited by design, so businesses typically install paid apps for features like advanced shipping rules, product customisation, SEO tools, email marketing, and review systems. Each app is usually a separate monthly subscription. It’s common for a Shopify store to accumulate $100–$300 per month in app fees on top of the platform cost. 

• Transaction fees for non-Shopify payment gateways – if you use a payment provider other than Shopify Payments (say Stripe, or Afterpay outside of Shopify’s checkout), Shopify charges an additional fee per transaction on top of whatever your provider charges. These range from 2% on Basic down to 0.6% on Advanced. 

To put numbers on it: a small retailer on Shopify’s Basic plan paying monthly ($56) who adds a reviews app ($15/month), an email marketing app ($30/month), a shipping calculator ($20/month), and an SEO tool ($30/month) is paying $151 per month before payment processing. A comparable WooCommerce setup with equivalent free or one-off plugins, plus quality Australian hosting, typically comes in at $30–$50 per month. 

Design flexibility is also more limited than you might expect. Shopify uses its own theme framework, and while you can customise within it, you’re working inside guardrails. If your brand needs a layout or checkout experience that doesn’t fit Shopify’s structure, you’ll hit walls. With WordPress, your developer works with a completely open codebase. 

Shopify is marketed as simple. For a basic store with a handful of products, it can be. But businesses quickly find themselves managing an ecosystem of third-party apps, each with its own login, settings dashboard, update cycle, and billing date. That’s not simplicity – it’s complexity distributed across a dozen different subscriptions instead of one cohesive system. 

Shopify isn’t a bad platform. For certain businesses, it’s the right choice: 

• Large product catalogues (1,000+ products) – Shopify’s built-in inventory management and scalable infrastructure are a genuine advantage at this volume. The subscription cost is justified by the reduced technical overhead. 

• Self-managed stores – if you don’t have a web developer and don’t want one, Shopify’s dashboard is easier to navigate day-to-day than WordPress. You’re paying a premium for that convenience, but if self-management is the priority, the trade-off can make sense. 

• Social and multi-channel selling – if you’re selling primarily through Instagram Shopping, Facebook, or TikTok, Shopify’s built-in multi-channel tools are well-developed and straightforward to set up. 

The key is going in with realistic expectations about total cost, not just the monthly plan price. 

This is the part of the website development decision that doesn’t show up in feature comparison tables. 

A WordPress site paired with a professional support plan means you have a team that knows your specific site: how it’s built, which plugins it uses, how it’s configured. Security updates, plugin compatibility checks, performance monitoring, and someone to call when something breaks – all handled by people who understand your setup. 

With Shopify, you’re relying on Shopify’s general support team. They know the platform well, but they don’t know your business, your customisations, or your specific app configuration. When something goes wrong with a third-party app interaction or a custom theme modification, you’re often on your own. 

Here’s what that looks like in practice. A plugin update conflicts with your theme and your checkout page stops loading on mobile. With a dedicated support team, you contact someone who already knows your site’s plugin stack and can identify the conflict quickly. With general platform support, you’re explaining your entire setup from scratch to someone who has never seen your site before. 

For businesses that depend on their online store for revenue, that difference is significant. A dedicated support partner handles the things that keep an ecommerce site running smoothly behind the scenes: WordPress core updates, WooCommerce version upgrades, plugin compatibility testing, security patches, uptime monitoring, and regular performance checks. These aren’t glamorous tasks, but skipping them is how online stores end up slow, vulnerable, or broken at the worst possible time. 

We offer ongoing support plans for our WordPress and WooCommerce clients for this reason, and it’s one of the most practical advantages of the WordPress approach that most platform comparisons leave out. 

If you’re weighing up your options for an online store, we’re happy to talk it through. CJ Digital builds on both WordPress and Shopify, and we’ll recommend whichever one is genuinely right for your situation. Get in touch for a conversation – no commitment, just honest advice.