You want to sell online, and two names always come up: Shopify, and WordPress with its commerce plugin, WooCommerce. Both do the job very well, and we develop on both. The question is which one suits your store. Whether you go with WordPress or Shopify depends less on features than on your catalogue, your team and the role content plays in your sales.
Renting a platform or owning your site
Shopify is a hosted service. You pay a monthly subscription, and Shopify takes care of the server, security, updates and payments. It’s a furnished apartment: the landlord maintains the roof and the furnace, but you don’t knock down a wall without permission, and the landlord sets the rent.
WooCommerce is a free WordPress plugin, installed on the server of your choice. The site, its code and its data belong to you. You can change everything, checkout included. In exchange, the upkeep is yours: updates, security, backups, hosting. You do it yourself or you hand it to someone.
Neither is a bad choice. They are two different ways of paying: Shopify costs little upfront and every month after that, while WooCommerce takes more setup and costs less to evolve.
What each platform costs, every month
Shopify offers three main plans, in Canadian dollars: Basic at $49 a month ($37 billed annually), Grow at $132 ($99) and Advanced at $517 ($389). Shopify Plus, for large stores, starts at $3,400 a month. Cards paid online with Shopify Payments cost from 2.8% plus 30 cents on Basic to 2.4% plus 30 cents on Advanced. If you prefer another payment provider, Shopify adds its own transaction fees: 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced.
Then come the apps. Customer reviews, subscriptions, advanced filters, loyalty programs: most are billed monthly, and the bill climbs quickly when you stack five or six of them.
WooCommerce itself costs nothing. Its price lies elsewhere: solid hosting (a store doesn’t belong with the cheapest host, as we explain in our article on web hosting), maintenance, and a few paid plugins depending on your needs. On the payment side, Stripe charges 2.9% plus 30 cents per Canadian card, with no extra platform fee. Moneris or Square are also options.
Upfront, Shopify is therefore cheaper: everything is ready. Over the years, the subscription, the apps and the transaction fees add up on one side, hosting, maintenance and plugins on the other. Before choosing, run both scenarios over three years with your projected sales: transaction fees follow your revenue, and the result varies from one store to the next.
Selling in Quebec: taxes, French and payments
Both platforms handle GST and QST. Shopify can calculate taxes automatically; WooCommerce is set up in its settings or with a plugin. Either way, it’s up to you to register with the tax authorities and file your returns: Shopify itself states that it doesn’t remit or file your taxes.
French, next. The Charter of the French language requires catalogues, order forms and other documents of the same nature available to the public to be in French, “regardless of the medium used” (section 52). For the Office québécois de la langue française, the website of a business established in Quebec that sells its products there must be in French. You can offer other languages, as long as the French version is available on terms that are at least as favourable.
For a bilingual store, Shopify offers the free Translate & Adapt app, which automatically translates up to two languages and accepts as many manual translations as you want. With WooCommerce, you need WPML, whose Multilingual CMS plan includes the store, or Polylang with its paid add-on for WooCommerce. We compare the two in our Polylang vs WPML article. In every case, a machine translation gets proofread: a badly translated product page drives away more customers than it convinces.
Day to day, for your team
The choice also plays out in the admin, the one your team will open every morning. Shopify’s is simple and very consistent: orders, products, inventory and customers in one place, with a mobile app to follow sales. It is quick to learn, even with no technical knowledge at all.
WooCommerce’s lives inside WordPress. It offers more settings, and every plugin adds its own: it is more powerful, and a little denser. On a well-built site, the team manages products and orders the same way as pages and articles, without switching tools. That is a real advantage when the same people handle the content and the store.
Either way, ask to see the admin of a real store before choosing, and place a test order there. An hour is enough to know which one your team will adopt.
Content and addresses
Shopify is cut out for the catalogue. Its pages and blog stay simple, and its addresses follow a fixed pattern: /products/ for products, /collections/ for categories. The checkout can only really be modified with Shopify Plus.
WordPress was born for content. Buying guides, recipes, advice, landing pages, addresses chosen one by one: if a good share of your sales starts with a Google search and a useful article, WordPress gives you more room to build that content around the store.
Your data and Law 25
On Shopify, your customer and order data is hosted by Shopify. It can be exported, but you don’t choose where it is stored. If it leaves Quebec, Law 25 requires you to assess the protection it will receive before sending it there, as we explain in our article on Law 25.
With WooCommerce, it sits on the server you choose, in Quebec if that matters to you. The tools you connect to the store (payments, newsletter, shipping) still need to be assessed the same way.
Changing platforms later
The choice isn’t final. A store can be migrated in either direction: products, customers and orders are exported and then imported, the pages are rebuilt, and every old address is redirected to the new one so you don’t lose the visits that come from Google. It is a project in its own right, but it goes well when it is prepared.
Still, it is better to choose for the next three years than for the next three months.
WordPress or Shopify: our rule for deciding
Here is how we decide with our clients:
- Shopify, if selling online is the core of your business, your team wants to sell without dealing with technical matters, and your catalogue fits Shopify’s framework: products, variants, collections.
- WooCommerce, if your site lives mainly on its content and the store is one part of it, or if your site already runs on WordPress and works well.
- WooCommerce too, if your sales rules fall outside the framework: customer-specific pricing, quote-based orders, bookings, an adapted checkout, without paying for Shopify Plus.
- When in doubt, a three-year simulation with your projected sales: subscription, apps and transaction fees on one side; hosting, maintenance and plugins on the other.
The comparison on our Shopify page sums up these criteria, and our WordPress development page describes how we build a WooCommerce store. Either way, the right platform is the one your team will use effortlessly three years from now.
