WooCommerce vs Shopify (UK, 2026): Cost & Ownership

Shopify is a shop you rent: it runs the servers, checkout and updates, and takes a monthly fee plus a slice of every sale. WooCommerce is a shop you own: the software is free WordPress, the data and code are yours, and the hosting, updates and security are your responsibility. Cost, control and maintenance are the real trade.

Neither is wrong. The right choice depends on your revenue, your appetite for maintenance, and how much the word 'own' matters to you. Shopify is a hosted platform: you sign up, pick a theme, add products, and it manages everything behind the scenes. WooCommerce is a free, open-source plugin that turns WordPress into a shop, with no licence fee and no platform taking a percentage of sales.

This guide prices both for a UK business, works out the revenue point where the maths flips, covers who carries the security burden, and ends on a third path most comparisons miss. For the hosting side of a self-hosted store, our ecommerce hosting page covers how a WooCommerce shop actually runs in production.

Shopify's headline UK price is around £25/month on Basic, but that is rarely the real bill. On top sits card processing on every sale, paid apps that are mostly monthly subscriptions, and a one-off theme cost. The subscription tier also sets your per-sale card rate: higher tiers cost more monthly but process cards more cheaply, which shifts the maths as you grow.

Apps are the other silent line. Serious stores commonly run several paid apps for reviews, subscriptions, upsells or advanced shipping, each on its own monthly fee. A realistic Basic store often lands well above the £25 sticker once apps, a theme and card fees are counted. Email is not included, so business mailboxes are a separate cost too.

WooCommerce itself is free. Your only fixed cost is hosting, and your only per-sale cost is your payment processor's card rate. There is no platform fee and no percentage taken by anyone above your card processor. The variable people fixate on is hosting, and it is smaller and more predictable than assumed.

Managed WooCommerce hosting on G7Cloud's Business plan is £24/month fixed: a dedicated container, its own database, daily backups that are restore-tested nightly, and no visit metering, so a viral product does not change your bill. Card fees on Stripe run about 1.5% + 20p per UK online transaction. See ecommerce hosting for what runs your store, and WooCommerce hosting for the WordPress-specific detail.

The monthly fee is what you compare on day one; the per-sale fees are what you actually pay at scale. Shopify's economics include a percentage of every sale through its card rates, and an extra platform fee if you use an outside gateway. WooCommerce has no platform fee at all: you pay only your processor's card rate. That gap widens with every order, so model it at your target revenue, not today's.

Model your own basket, at your own average order and app list, before deciding on cost alone. One nuance on Shopify: higher tiers cut the card rate, so the break-even against your monthly fee moves. A £30,000/month store often does better on the £65/month Shopify tier than on Basic, because the lower per-sale rate more than pays back the extra £40. The right comparison is always monthly fee plus card rate at your revenue, not the sticker price alone.

On Shopify you own your brand and your (exportable) customer data, but not the shop itself. The theme runs on Shopify's platform, the checkout is Shopify's, apps stop existing for you the day you stop paying, and if Shopify changes pricing or policy your options are to accept it or replatform. Leaving means rebuilding: the CSV exports carry your products and customers, not your store.

On WooCommerce the store is a pile of files and a database that belong to you. Move hosts, fork your theme, edit the checkout, keep running versions the vendor no longer sells. Nobody can reprice or deprecate your shop from under you. The price of that freedom is stewardship: updates, backups and security are your responsibility, or your host's.

"The ability to pick up your entire store and move it to any host is not hypothetical; on WooCommerce it is a Tuesday."

That last clause is where hosting choice matters: managed WooCommerce hosting exists precisely to keep the ownership while delegating the stewardship. On G7Cloud that means dedicated isolation, daily restore-tested backups, free automatic TLS and a firewall with bot protection in front of every site, while the code and data stay fully yours.

A well-built WooCommerce store keeps your PCI obligation light. With Stripe or a similar hosted checkout, card data never touches your server, so your PCI scope drops to the lightest self-assessment (SAQ-A). Your host and your payment processor carry the rest. Shopify keeps card data inside its own systems, which handles that scope for you too, so on this point both routes leave you with very little to carry.

The security work that does remain on WooCommerce is keeping WordPress, plugins and the server patched, and keeping bad traffic out. That is exactly what managed hosting is for. Our ScaleShield firewall and bot protection sits in front of every site, and restore-tested backups mean a bad update is a rollback, not a rebuild. See our guide to WooCommerce speed optimisation for how performance and security work together on a live shop.

WooCommerce wins on economics at scale (no platform percentage), on flexibility (it is WordPress, so content, SEO and commerce live in one system you can shape freely), and on ownership (the code and database are yours). For content-led shops, where articles, guides and search traffic drive sales, running the blog and the store in one system is a structural advantage Shopify cannot match.

The content advantage is concrete, not vague. One WordPress install serves your blog and your shop under one domain and one URL structure, so a guide at /blog can link straight to a product at /shop with no cross-domain friction, shared internal linking, and a single sitemap that search engines crawl as one site. On Shopify, deep content usually lives on a separate blog engine or a third-party tool, which fragments that authority.

It also wins on exit rights. The ability to pick up your entire store, theme customisations and order history included, and move it to any host is real option value, worth money even if you never use it. And on unit economics: past a few thousand pounds a month, keeping the platform percentage in your own pocket adds up fast.

Migrating either direction moves your catalogue and customers cleanly but leaves the store design behind, because the two platforms build shops in completely different ways. Products, variants, collections, customers and order history export and import well through CSV or migration tools. The theme, checkout customisations and app-specific data do not carry: you rebuild those on the destination.

If you are moving to a self-hosted store, G7Cloud performs free assisted migration for you, with a preview you approve before anything goes live. You see the finished store first, then we cut over, so there is no window where the live shop is broken.

Yes: an AI-built shop that you own outright, with no WordPress and no Shopify. Most WooCommerce-vs-Shopify comparisons have not caught up with it. G7Cloud's AI Website Builder shop ships a database-backed e-commerce application from a description: a product catalogue, order management, image uploads, and Stripe checkout on your own Stripe keys. Like WooCommerce and unlike Shopify, there is no platform percentage on your sales.

It comes with an admin panel you log into to manage products and orders, a real database underneath, and a code browser: the code is yours to read and export. You refine it by clicking on things and telling the AI what to change, with checkpoints to undo any step. It runs in its own dedicated container on the same UK infrastructure as our WooCommerce hosting, from £24/month on the Business plan, and you can try the builder on the free plan without a card.

Choose Shopify when speed and hands-off operation are worth a monthly fee plus a share of every sale, and your needs fit existing apps. Choose WooCommerce when ownership, content-led selling and better unit economics past a few thousand pounds a month justify managed stewardship. And if you want the ownership without inheriting the WordPress stack, an AI-built shop on G7Cloud is the third path.

Whatever you choose, do the transaction-fee arithmetic at the revenue you intend to reach, not the revenue you have today. It is the single most commonly skipped step in this decision, and the most expensive one to skip. Ask any host or platform two questions: what happens to my bill if sales double, and when was my backup last test-restored. The answers tell you more than any feature grid.