WooCommerce vs Shopify (UK, 2026): Total Cost & Ownership

Shopify is a shop you rent: everything works out of the box, and in exchange you pay monthly forever, pay a slice of every sale, and live by the platform's rules. WooCommerce is a shop you own: the software is free and yours, the data is yours, and in exchange the running of it — hosting, updates, plugins — is also yours.

Neither is wrong. The right choice depends on your revenue, your appetite for maintenance, and how much the word 'own' matters to you. This guide prices both honestly for a UK business as of July 2026, then covers a third path most comparisons miss.

Shopify is a hosted platform: you sign up, pick a theme, add products, and Shopify runs everything — servers, security, checkout, updates. UK Basic pricing is £25/month (as of July 2026), with card processing on top and higher tiers as you grow. The app store extends it in every direction, with most serious apps on their own monthly subscriptions.

WooCommerce is a free, open-source plugin that turns WordPress into a shop. There's no licence fee and no platform taking a percentage — your costs are hosting, your payment processor's card fees, and whichever premium plugins or themes you choose. You can host it anywhere, move it anywhere, and modify anything.

That hosting cost is the variable people fixate on, and it's smaller than assumed: managed WooCommerce hosting on G7Cloud's Business plan is £19/month fixed — dedicated container, own database, daily backups restore-tested nightly, and no visit metering, so a viral product doesn't change your bill.

Here are the recurring costs at a glance for a small UK store.

The monthly fee is what you compare on day one; the per-sale fees are what you actually pay at scale. Shopify's economics include a percentage of every transaction — via Shopify Payments' card rates, plus an additional platform fee (up to 2% on Basic) if you use a third-party gateway. WooCommerce has no platform fee at all: you pay only your processor's card rate.

Two fair footnotes. Shopify's number buys genuine convenience — much of the maintenance a WooCommerce store needs is simply absent. And a WooCommerce store with several premium plugin subscriptions can close some of the gap. Model your own basket before deciding on cost alone.

On Shopify, you own your brand and (exportable) customer data — but not the shop itself. The theme runs on Shopify's platform, the checkout is Shopify's, apps stop existing for you the day you stop paying, and if Shopify changes pricing or policy, your options are to accept it or replatform. Leaving means rebuilding: the CSV exports carry your products and customers, not your store.

On WooCommerce, the store is a pile of files and a database that belong to you. Move hosts, fork your theme, edit the checkout, keep running versions the vendor no longer sells — nobody can reprice or deprecate your shop from under you. The price of that freedom is stewardship: updates, backups and security are your responsibility, or your host's.

That last clause is where hosting choice matters: managed WooCommerce hosting exists precisely to keep the ownership while delegating the stewardship — on G7Cloud that means the platform handles isolation, daily restore-tested backups, TLS and edge protection with ScaleShield, while the code and data remain fully yours.

An honest comparison has to say this plainly: Shopify is the fastest route from nothing to taking money, and for some businesses that's decisive. The checkout is excellent and constantly optimised. Point-of-sale integration for physical retail is first-class. The app ecosystem means someone has already solved your niche problem. And there is no server, ever — for a founder whose time is the scarcest resource, that alone can justify the fees.

If you're validating an idea, selling at markets with a card reader, or you simply never want to think about the machinery, Shopify is a very good product and you should use it without guilt.

WooCommerce wins on economics at scale (no platform percentage), on flexibility (it's WordPress — content, SEO and commerce live in one system you can shape freely), and on ownership (the code and database are yours). For content-led shops — where articles, guides and search traffic drive sales — running the blog and the store in one system is a structural advantage Shopify can't match.

It also wins on exit rights. The ability to pick up your entire store — theme customisations, order history, everything — and move it to any host is not hypothetical; it's a Tuesday. That option value is worth real money, even if you never use it.

There's a newer option that most WooCommerce-vs-Shopify articles haven't caught up with: having AI build you a bespoke shop that you own outright — no WordPress, no Shopify.

G7Cloud's AI Website Builder ships a complete e-commerce application from a description: product variants, stock tracking, collections, discount codes, order management, image uploads, and Stripe checkout using your own Stripe keys — so, like WooCommerce and unlike Shopify, there is no platform percentage on your sales. It comes with an admin panel you log into to manage products and orders, a real database underneath, and a code browser: the code is yours to read and export.

You refine it by clicking on things and telling the AI what to change, with checkpoints to undo any step. It runs in its own dedicated container on the same UK infrastructure as our WooCommerce hosting, from £19/month on the Business plan — and you can try the builder on the free plan without a card.

Fair caveats: this is a young product next to two giants, and there is no third-party plugin ecosystem — the flip side of the AI building precisely what you ask for. If your needs map onto an app store, Shopify or WooCommerce remain the safer bets. If your needs are specific and ownership matters, this path gets you a shop neither of them can: one built for you, owned by you.

Choose Shopify when speed and hands-off operation are worth a monthly fee plus a share of every sale. Choose WooCommerce when ownership, content-led selling and better unit economics justify (managed) stewardship. And if you want the ownership without inheriting the WordPress stack, an AI-built shop on G7Cloud is the third path: own the code, own the data, pay a fixed monthly price, and keep every penny of every sale minus card fees.

Whatever you choose, do the transaction-fee arithmetic at the revenue you intend to reach — not the revenue you have today. It is the single most commonly skipped step in this decision, and the most expensive one to skip.