Custom online shop or WooCommerce/Shopify?

The question isn't "which one is best". It's "what am I selling, how much will it grow, and what will I need to connect to it". The answer falls out of those on its own.

I'll be straight about my side of it: I build custom online shops. That is exactly why you'll find the cases below where I tell you not to — there are more of them than you'd think.

The three options at a glance

The custom prices are mine and exclude VAT. The platform prices are as the platforms published them in October 2026, and they change.

Where the money actually goes

The up-front cost is the small part. What decides the difference is what runs every month and every year.

Shopify

The subscription is clear: the basic plan is €27 a month billed monthly, or €19 a month if you pay for the year in advance. Over three years that's €684 on annual billing — manageable.

The unpredictable part is the apps. Almost every shop needs a few, for things the platform doesn't do on its own: advanced filters, bulk product imports, invoicing, local couriers. Each one has its own monthly subscription. Three or four apps often cost more than the Shopify subscription itself, and they are paid for as long as the shop exists.

Watch out for one charge that doesn't show up front: if you don't use Shopify Payments, the platform keeps an extra 2% of every order, on top of your bank's fee. Shopify Payments is available in a long list of countries, so this is usually avoidable — but if your business needs a specific provider or an existing bank terminal, that 2% is a real cost that grows as you sell more.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce itself is free, and that is what confuses people. The cost sits elsewhere:

• Hosting. A shop with few products runs on cheap hosting. As the catalogue and the traffic grow it needs a serious server, or it slows down.
• Extensions. The official add-ons cost 29–299 dollars a year each, and it is a yearly licence: stop paying and the security updates stop. A typical shop needs several.
• Maintenance. WordPress, WooCommerce, the theme and ten or fifteen plugins update constantly and all have to stay compatible with each other. Either you do that or you pay for it.

Custom

You pay for the build once, and after that only for hosting. There is no platform subscription, there are no yearly licences, and no charge grows because you sold more. The remaining cost is the changes you ask for, when you ask for them.

In every case you pay card fees to your payment provider. Those exist everywhere, so they aren't a reason to choose one option over another — except for Shopify's 2%, above.

Speed: where ready-made platforms lose

An off-the-shelf theme is built to fit thousands of shops, so it carries code for features you don't use: a slider, a page builder, galleries, five product-page layouts. All of it is sent to the visitor's browser, on a single product page, not only where it's needed. On top of that comes a CSS and a JavaScript file for every plugin or app you have installed.

The browser doesn't just have to download them; it has to execute them, using the device's processor. On your customer's phone — far slower than your laptop — that shows.

Google measures page experience with three numbers, the Core Web Vitals, and considers them good when the main content appears in under 2.5 seconds, the page responds to a tap in under 200 milliseconds, and it doesn't jump around while loading. It measures them from real visitors, mostly on phones. It is a ranking signal, but not the first one: you won't come top because you're fast. It decides between shops that are otherwise evenly matched — which in e-commerce happens constantly.

More immediate than Google, though, is something else: a visitor who waits, leaves. And if you paid for an ad to bring them, you paid for them too.

Shopify and WooCommerce can be made fast, with a good theme, few apps and proper hosting. You're just working against their default the whole time. On a custom shop the only thing that loads is what the page uses, because there is nothing else.

When to choose Shopify

• You sell few products without complicated variants.
• You want to be online in days and find out whether the idea sells.
• You don't want to think about servers, updates or security at all.
• A steady monthly cost suits you better than an up-front one.

It is the sensible choice for a first shop, and I have recommended it. If the idea doesn't take off you've lost little; if it does, you now know exactly what you need.

When to choose WooCommerce

• You already have a WordPress site with traffic and content you don't want to lose.
• Your catalogue is mid-sized and your needs are covered by well-known extensions.
• You have someone who will keep the updates in order.

When to choose custom

• The catalogue is large or complex: many categories, variants, filters you want to configure yourself.
• Products arrive from supplier XML feeds and have to update automatically.
• There is an ERP or a warehouse system that has to talk to the shop.
• The way you work doesn't fit an off-the-shelf plugin — your own product codes, your own pricing rules, your own per-customer discounts.
• Speed and appearance are a competitive advantage rather than a detail.

What those have in common: you aren't building a shop to find out whether it sells. You already know it sells.

Moving later: what changing your mind costs

The most expensive scenario isn't choosing wrong. It's choosing "for now" and staying there for three years.

When a shop succeeds on a platform, the limits start: the filter that isn't supported, the connection that isn't provided for, the app that does 80% of what you want. Moving at that point means migrating products and customers, keeping the old addresses alive so you don't lose your place in Google, and working on a shop that is already selling and isn't allowed to stop.

So the right question isn't "what do I need today" but "where do I want to be in two years". If the answer is "roughly here", take a platform. If it's "considerably further", custom works out cheaper even when it costs more today.

An honest footnote

An off-the-shelf theme used to have an unanswerable argument: custom code was very expensive. Today, with AI tooling, it's written considerably faster and the gap has narrowed. That is why custom is now on the table for shops that wouldn't have considered it a few years ago.

It didn't become free, though, and it didn't become the right answer for everyone. If you sell ten products, Shopify is still the right answer.

If you've landed on custom and want to see what each price includes, I break it down here: How much does an online shop cost?