E-commerce
Shopify, WooCommerce or a custom build: choosing without regretting it
Choose Shopify for a conventional catalogue you want trading immediately. Choose WooCommerce when content and SEO are central and the catalogue is standard. Choose a custom build when the catalogue does not fit a product grid or the checkout carries business logic. Any other basis for the decision is preference dressed as advice.
The comparison that matters
| Shopify | WooCommerce | Custom (PHP/MySQL) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Time to first sale | Days | 3–5 days | 7–10 days |
| Monthly platform cost | Subscription + transaction fees | Hosting only | Hosting only |
| Catalogue flexibility | Good within its model, immovable outside it | Good, extensible with work | Whatever you model |
| Checkout control | Very limited below Plus | Moderate | Total |
| Maintenance burden | Shopify handles it | Yours — plugins and core, forever | Yours — but far fewer moving parts |
| Exit cost | High: data export, theme rebuild | Moderate | Low: you own everything |
When Shopify is genuinely the right answer
Standard products with standard variants. A team that wants to add products without a developer. No requirement to change how checkout behaves. In that situation Shopify will get you trading faster and more reliably than anything I could build, and the subscription buys real operational value.
The constraint to understand before you commit: below Shopify Plus you do not control checkout. If your business needs a field, a rule or a step that Shopify does not offer, the answer is no, and no amount of budget changes it.
When WooCommerce earns its place
WooCommerce makes sense when content is the acquisition channel. If your plan is to rank for informational searches and convert readers, being inside WordPress is a genuine advantage, because the publishing tooling is already there and your team already knows it.
The cost is maintenance. A WooCommerce store is a core, a theme and typically fifteen to thirty plugins, each of which updates independently and any of which can break checkout. That is a real, recurring obligation — budget for it deliberately rather than discovering it during an outage.
When a custom build is the only honest option
Three conditions push a project to custom, and each one is a hard blocker on the hosted platforms rather than an inconvenience.
- The catalogue is not a product grid — configurable plans, made-to-measure pricing, or combinations that must be validated before they can be sold
- Checkout carries business logic — approvals, credit terms, per-customer pricing, or fulfilment that must happen inside the payment transaction
- The economics do not work — at high volume, percentage transaction fees on top of a subscription can exceed a build cost within a year
The proxy stores I have built are the clearest example: a plan varies by type, location, bandwidth and term, and credentials must be provisioned the moment payment confirms. That is a data model and a webhook, not a product page with a dropdown.
The decision in four questions
- Can a customer choose everything they need from a standard variant dropdown? If no, custom.
- Does your checkout need a rule the platform does not offer? If yes, custom or Shopify Plus.
- Is content marketing your main acquisition plan? If yes, WooCommerce is a strong fit.
- Do you need to be trading in under two weeks? If yes, Shopify, and revisit in a year.
Questions people ask about this
- You build custom stores — why would you recommend Shopify?
- Because a reference beats a margin. Selling a custom build for a twenty-product catalogue with standard variants means charging four times as much for a worse operational outcome, and the client works that out eventually.
- Can I migrate from Shopify to a custom build later?
- Yes. Products, customers and orders export cleanly; the theme does not, and URL structure changes need a redirect map or you lose the rankings you paid to build. Plan the migration as a project, not as a weekend.
- Is WooCommerce slower than the others?
- It is slower by default, mostly from plugin load and unoptimised queries, and it can be made fast with caching, image discipline and plugin restraint. Whether it stays fast depends on whether anyone keeps doing that work after launch.
Who wrote this
Anas Bin Masud builds e-commerce sites and does technical SEO for businesses in the UK, Canada and Pakistan — fifteen live client sites, six of them stores taking real payments. The examples in these guides come from those builds and from the audit that rebuilt this site, not from a content brief. More about how I work, or read the case studies.