Shopify is an excellent platform. That genuinely holds, and I have no intention of arguing otherwise. It was built to sell, it runs reliably, and if you are moving real volume it takes a lot of work off your hands.
But there are two things people tend to learn only once they are already inside, and both go straight to what you keep at the end of the month. Worth knowing before you decide, not after.
The platform takes a cut of every sale, on top of card fees
On top of the monthly plan, Shopify charges a processing fee on each transaction. If you use Shopify Payments, that is the card fee. If you choose to use a different payment provider instead, Shopify adds its own extra fee on top of whatever that provider already charges you, and that extra sits at around 2% on the entry plan, dropping to roughly 1% and 0.6% on the dearer plans.
That is the part people miss. The monthly price is the headline, but the per-sale cut is where the real cost lives, and it scales with your success rather than with your effort. On a WordPress shop with WooCommerce you connect your card processor directly, and that extra platform layer on top of the processor simply does not exist. You pay the processor, and that is the end of it.
For almost every small thing, there is an app
The second surprise is how much on Shopify runs through paid add-ons.
Core Shopify does the core things well. But the moment you need something slightly specific, you often get the same answer: there is an app for that. Customising the cart and checkout, a proper post-purchase upsell, tighter invoicing, bundles, subscriptions, more control over the buying flow. A lot of it either needs an app or needs you on the top plan.
And those apps add up. Some charge a monthly subscription, some take a percentage of every sale. Once you have three or four, the monthly cost of the shop quietly grows to a figure you did not have in mind when you were looking at the entry plan. Checkout is the clearest example: on the standard plans your control over it is limited, and full control means either apps or moving to Shopify Plus, which is an entirely different order of cost. With Shopify closing off its old checkout scripts in favour of the newer extensibility model, custom checkout logic increasingly has to live in apps rather than in code you keep.
When Shopify really is the right call
I do not want this to read as anti-Shopify, because it is not. There are cases where I would recommend it to you without hesitation.
You are moving serious volume. Shopify is built to carry a large catalogue and a lot of orders without you thinking about hosting or maintenance. The bigger your volume, the more its ecosystem earns its keep.
You sell across borders. Multi-currency, multiple markets, international cards. Shopify handles a great deal of that for you, and doing the same on your own takes real setup.
You want to stay out of the tech entirely. If not thinking about servers, updates and backups is worth more to you than avoiding the per-sale cut, then Shopify sells you exactly that peace of mind, and that is a legitimate purchase.
If you recognise yourself here, Shopify is probably your better option, and you should go with it.
When WordPress and WooCommerce make more sense
For a lot of shops the sum comes out the other way.
If your catalogue is not huge, if you want your own invoicing, if you would rather not pay a platform a cut of every order, and if you want the shop and the rest of your site to live in one place that is entirely yours, then WooCommerce gives you that. No per-sale platform tax, and no monthly subscriptions just to get back features you already expected to have. On top of that, everything is yours: the data, the content and the system itself.
The difference does not show on the day you open the shop. It shows at the end of every month, in the figure that actually stays with you.
Related: What a website costs per year · Who owns your website
If you are choosing between Shopify and WooCommerce, tell us what you sell, how many products you have, and where your customers are. We will send back an honest view of which one suits you better, with the fee maths for both, no sugar-coating.