You need to sell online. Someone's told you Shopify is easy. Someone else swears by WooCommerce. A developer mate says you should build custom. Now you're stuck trying to work out which advice to follow.
The honest answer is that all three can work, but they solve different problems. The question isn't "which is best?" but "which problems do I actually have?"
What Shopify actually solves
Shopify gets you selling quickly. You sign up, pick a theme, add products, connect Stripe or PayPal, and you're live. No servers to manage, no security patches to install, no worrying about whether your hosting can handle a traffic spike.
This matters most if you're testing a product idea, if you're selling straightforward physical goods, or if you just want the whole technology side handled by someone else. Shopify maintains everything. They process billions in transactions. When there's a problem, it's their problem.
The trade-off is lock-in and ongoing cost. You're paying monthly forever, plus transaction fees if you don't use Shopify Payments, plus apps for anything beyond basic functionality. Want custom shipping rules? That's an app. Need specific customer groups with different pricing? Another app. These add up quickly, and you can easily find yourself spending £200-300 a month once you've got a few apps running.
The bigger issue is control. You can't change how checkout works without going to Shopify Plus, which costs substantially more. You can't integrate deeply with unusual systems without fighting their API. You can't optimise page speed beyond what their themes allow. For many businesses, these limitations don't matter. For others, they become expensive friction.
Shopify suits you if you're selling products that fit standard categories, you want minimal technical involvement, you're comfortable with the monthly cost, and you don't need unusual customisation.
What WooCommerce actually solves
WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin. You install WordPress, add WooCommerce, and you've got an online store. It's free in the sense that the software costs nothing, though you still need hosting.
The appeal is flexibility and familiarity. Millions of people already know WordPress. You can customise almost anything. There are thousands of free and paid plugins. Your hosting costs can be lower than Shopify if you're technical enough to manage it yourself, or you can pay someone else to handle it.
The problem is that this flexibility becomes complexity. WordPress wasn't designed as an e-commerce platform. WooCommerce bolts commerce onto a content management system. This works, but it means you're running a complicated stack. WordPress needs updates. WooCommerce needs updates. Your theme needs updates. Your plugins need updates. Miss an update and you've got a security problem or a compatibility break.
We see this often. A business starts with WooCommerce because it's "free", then discovers they need a dozen plugins to get the features they want. Each plugin is another thing to maintain, another potential breaking point. The site slows down because WordPress and WooCommerce together are quite heavy, especially with multiple plugins. You end up paying a developer or agency to keep everything running, and the total cost often exceeds what Shopify would have charged.
WooCommerce makes sense if you're already invested in WordPress, if you have specific technical requirements that need that flexibility, or if you have reliable technical support available. It doesn't make sense just because the plugin itself is free.
What a custom build actually solves
A custom-built store means writing the code specifically for your business. This isn't a theme or a plugin. It's software engineered to do exactly what you need and nothing you don't.
This approach costs more upfront. There's no avoiding that. You're paying for development time instead of paying a monthly subscription. But the economics change over time, and the capabilities are fundamentally different.
Take a business we worked with that had complex subscription pricing with different rates for different customer types, plus a wholesale portal with different products and pricing, all integrated with their existing inventory system. Shopify couldn't handle it without expensive apps that didn't quite fit. WooCommerce could theoretically do it, but would have needed so many plugins and custom code that maintaining it would have been a nightmare.
We built them a custom platform. It does exactly what they need. It loads fast because there's no bloat. It integrates cleanly with their other systems. It costs them nothing monthly except hosting, which runs about £30. They own it outright. When they need changes, we make them, but they're not paying for features they don't use or working around limitations in someone else's platform.
The other advantage is performance. A custom build can be dramatically faster than platforms loaded with features you don't need. This matters for SEO, for conversion rates, and for the experience you're giving customers. We regularly see custom builds loading in under a second where equivalent WooCommerce sites take three or four.
Custom makes sense when you have specific requirements that platforms struggle with, when the monthly costs of platforms and their apps add up to more than the value you're getting, when you need maximum performance, or when you're building something you plan to own and grow for years.
The questions that actually matter
Platform choice comes down to honest answers to specific questions.
Do you need to be selling tomorrow? Shopify. You can be live in a day if you push. Custom takes weeks minimum. WooCommerce sits in between.
How standard is your business model? Selling physical products in straightforward categories with normal shipping and payment? Shopify or WooCommerce will probably do fine. Complex pricing, unusual fulfilment, specific integrations? Custom becomes attractive.
What's your technical situation? If you've got no technical support and don't want any, Shopify handles it for you. If you've got a WordPress developer you trust, WooCommerce is viable. If you're prepared to work with a developer on a longer-term basis, custom works.
What's your actual budget structure? Some businesses have cash for a larger upfront expense and prefer lower ongoing costs. Others prefer spreading costs monthly. Neither is wrong, but it affects which approach makes financial sense.
How long are you planning to run this? If you're testing an idea for six months, the calculus is completely different than if you're building something to run for five years. Monthly costs that seem reasonable short-term become substantial over years.
The migration trap
One thing to watch for is assuming you'll start with a platform and migrate later. This sometimes works but often doesn't. You build your business around the platform's capabilities and limitations. Your processes assume its features. Your team learns its interface. Migrating becomes harder than you thought.
If you have a strong sense that you'll outgrow Shopify or WooCommerce, factor that into the decision now. Sometimes it's worth building custom from the start even if it costs more upfront, because the total cost over time (including an eventual migration) is actually lower.
What we actually recommend
For most small businesses starting out with straightforward products, we say Shopify. Yes, we build custom solutions, so we're arguing against our own immediate interest here. But Shopify solves the "I need to be selling now" problem better than anything else, and most early-stage businesses should be focused on selling, not technology.
WooCommerce makes sense if you're already running WordPress successfully, if you have that technical support in place, and if you've genuinely got unusual requirements that Shopify can't handle without expensive apps.
Custom makes sense when you're past the experimental phase, when you've got specific needs that platforms handle badly, when the monthly costs of platforms start to bite, or when you're building something substantial that you plan to own for years. This is where we come in, but it's not the automatic first choice.
The worst decision is picking a platform based on what you read in generic comparison articles without thinking about what problems you actually need to solve. The second-worst decision is picking based purely on initial cost without considering what the total picture looks like over time.
Work out what you're actually trying to do, what constraints you're working under, and what matters most to your specific business. The right answer comes from that, not from which platform is theoretically "best".