WooCommerce vs Shopify vs Custom: Which Should You Use?

Most comparisons of these three answer the wrong question. They line up features, declare a winner, and skip the two facts that actually decide the outcome.

The first is that only one of these three has a knowable price. The second is that a fee almost every comparison omits becomes permanent for a large share of the world — including anyone selling from Türkiye.

Key Takeaways

• Shopify's plans run from "$19/mo" on annual billing to "$399 USD/mo" monthly on Advanced, plus "from $2,300/mo" for Plus (Shopify).
• Shopify charges a third-party transaction fee when you do not use Shopify Payments: 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced, 0.2% on Plus.
• Türkiye is not on Shopify's list of supported countries for Shopify Payments (Shopify), so that fee is not avoidable there.
• WooCommerce's core is a free download; the cost is hosting, maintenance and extensions, which is why nobody can quote it from a pricing page.
• Custom is the right answer only when what makes your business work is not a standard shop.

The fee that decides this for a lot of people

Start here, because for many readers it settles the question before any feature comparison begins.

Shopify's pricing page lists a third-party transaction fee — a charge applied when you take payment through a provider other than Shopify Payments. The published rates are 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced and 0.2% on Plus. Shopify states: "Third-party transaction fees may apply when you use a third-party payment provider (instead of Shopify Payments)."

For a merchant in a country where Shopify Payments is available, this is easy to avoid: use Shopify Payments, pay no third-party fee.

For everyone else it is not avoidable at all. And Türkiye does not appear on Shopify's list of supported countries for Shopify Payments. Neither do most countries — the published list runs to about forty.

What that means concretely for a Turkish store on the Basic plan: 2% of revenue goes to Shopify as a transaction fee, on top of whatever the local payment provider charges for processing the card. Not once — on every order, permanently, as a percentage of sales rather than a fixed cost.

Run the arithmetic on your own numbers before you do anything else. At ₺500,000 of monthly sales, that 2% is ₺10,000 a month in fees that exist purely because of where you are registered — roughly ₺120,000 a year, before any card processing cost. Moving up a plan reduces the rate, which means the fee structure quietly pushes you toward Shopify's more expensive tiers as you grow.

None of this makes Shopify the wrong choice. It makes the comparison different from the one in the articles, and it is a number you should have before you sign rather than after.

Only one of these has a price

Shopify's cost is published and predictable. Plan fee, transaction fee, card rate, plus whatever apps you install. You can build a spreadsheet before you commit, and it will be roughly right.

WooCommerce's cost cannot be quoted, and that is not evasion — it is the nature of the thing. The core plugin is a free download. Everything that makes it a working store is a decision you have not made yet: hosting that can handle your traffic, a payment gateway extension, whichever extensions cover shipping, tax and subscriptions, and the ongoing work of updates, backups and security. Free software with an operating cost is not the same as cheap.

The honest way to compare them is not plugin-versus-plan. It is: how much of the operational work can you absorb? WooCommerce gives you control and hands you the responsibility that comes with it. Shopify takes both.

Custom is priced per project, which is why we publish ours rather than describing a range — our web development page lists what a WooCommerce build and a platform build each cost with us. A comparison article that gives you a market range for custom work is guessing.

Which one, honestly

Shopify if your store is a store. Products, variants, cart, checkout, shipping. It will do those things better than a custom build will, it will keep doing them while you do something else, and the operational burden is not yours. Cost it including the transaction fee for your country before you decide.

WooCommerce if you want to own the whole thing, already run WordPress, or need behaviour a hosted platform will not allow. It is the right answer more often than the Shopify-first crowd admits — and it costs more attention than the WooCommerce-first crowd admits. Somebody has to keep it patched.

Custom only when the thing that makes your business work is not a standard shop. Unusual pricing rules, a real configurator, deep integration with systems you already run, a catalogue that does not behave like a product list. If a platform can express your business, use the platform. Building a worse Shopify is a common and expensive mistake, and we will say so before quoting.

The question worth asking is not "which platform is best" but "which of these is my store actually strange enough to need". Most stores are not strange. That is not an insult; it is the reason platforms exist.

The parts that are not about the platform

Two things people attribute to the platform that are actually theirs.

SEO. Neither platform is inherently better. Both can produce fast, crawlable, sensibly structured stores; both can produce slow ones generating thousands of near-duplicate filter URLs — which is why the category page, not the product page, is where store SEO is won or lost. What decides it is how the catalogue is organised, how facets generate URLs, and how quickly pages render — and those are your decisions on either platform. What SEO actually consists of covers the layers involved, and category pages are usually where the money is.

Speed. Shopify's hosting is fast; a Shopify store with eleven apps injecting scripts is not. WooCommerce on good hosting is fast; on the cheapest shared plan it is not. In both cases the platform sets a ceiling and your decisions set the actual number. Core Web Vitals covers how to tell which one you are dealing with.

Before you decide

1. Calculate the transaction fee for your country, at your volume. If Shopify Payments is not available where you are, this is a permanent percentage of revenue.
2. List what you actually need beyond products and checkout. Then check whether it is a setting, an app, or a build.
3. Decide who maintains it. WooCommerce needs an owner for updates and security. If nobody is named, that is the answer.
4. Assume you are not moving. Products and orders migrate. Themes, apps, automations and integrations do not.
5. Price all three properly, including the recurring costs, over three years rather than one.

In short

Shopify sells predictability and charges for it — including a transaction fee that is unavoidable if you sell from a country its payment product does not cover, which includes Türkiye. WooCommerce is free to install and not free to run. Custom is right only when your business is genuinely not a standard shop.

If you would like someone to run those three numbers against your actual volume rather than a generic table, tell us what you sell — and if the answer is "use Shopify", we will say that too.