The Big Decision Merchants Face: WooCommerce vs Shopify

As an ecommerce expert team who helps brands scale their operations daily, one of the most frequent questions we get is: Should I sell through WooCommerce or Shopify?

This decision early on could be the difference between growing your business from £50,000 or £100,000 to £500,000+ turnover. Leaving it too late when you’re at scale can make replatforming extremely chaotic and detrimental.

Over the years of working with merchants on both WooCommerce and Shopify, some clear pros and cons have emerged. Here are 5 key reasons more UK small businesses are currently choosing Shopify over WooCommerce:

 

Less Need for Custom Development

Shopify offers a wider range of built-in functionality out-of-the-box versus WooCommerce which requires more custom plugin development. For example, Shopify has features like abandoned cart recovery, marketing automations, and customisable checkouts that require very little extra work.

With WooCommerce, you’d need developer resources to build and integrate these types of tools. This adds to costs and headaches. Shopify’s robust feature set allows less time and money spent on customisation.

Lower Hosting Costs

With WooCommerce, you need to take care of securing hosting, managing updates, maintenance, speed optimisation – all the server-side responsibilities. Shopify handles all that behind the scenes on their enterprise-grade infrastructure. This saves you the overhead of expensive hosting and admin.

For example, one jewellery brand saw hosting costs slashed from £500/month on WooCommerce to £50/month on Shopify. Those savings go straight to the bottom line.

Superior Support Resources

Shopify offers 24/7 support access via live chat, phone, and email. Their customer service team is extremely knowledgeable – which gives merchants peace of mind.

WooCommerce support is primarily through community forums and documentation. But information can be fragmented and tricky to navigate. The level of hands-on support is noticeably less versus Shopify.

More Payment Options

Shopify has 100+ built-in payment gateways from all the major providers like Stripe, PayPal, Apple Pay etc. WooCommerce offers around 30 gateways, with the more advanced ones requiring custom setup.

More payment options means higher conversion rates. For example, one fitness apparel brand saw a 5% boost in conversions after adding Apple Pay in Shopify. That’s revenue they were missing out on.

Easier to Scale

Shopify is purpose-built to support growing businesses of all sizes. The platform can smoothly scale up as your orders, traffic, and product catalog grow.

WooCommerce can struggle with performance issues as you expand. Buggy behavior and downtime can occur without careful monitoring and expensive optimisations. Shopify’s enterprise infrastructure means you avoid these platform limitations.

 

The key takeaway is that Shopify removes many of the common headaches that come with operating on WooCommerce. The investment is well worth it to avoid hurdles down the road that can restrain growth.

Making the switch proactively when you’re still small streamlines the migration process versus waiting until you’re at scale. If you’re weighing up WooCommerce vs Shopify, I’d be happy to offer guidance based on your specific business needs. Feel free to get in touch!