Is WooCommerce actually cheaper than Shopify?

Cheaper, yes. As cheap as people think, no. The plugin is free and WordPress is free, but you still pay for decent hosting, usually a theme, usually two or three paid extensions for shipping or payments, and backup and security. Add those up over a year and the monthly figure lands closer to a Shopify plan than the free-plugin framing suggests. What you genuinely save is transaction margin and the freedom to change anything.

What happens when a plugin update breaks the site?

On WooCommerce that is your problem rather than the platform's, which is the real difference between the two systems. Updates get applied on a staging copy first, checked, then pushed live. That is what a maintenance arrangement buys and it is why we ask you to decide about one on day one rather than after the first outage.

Can you build on my existing WordPress site instead of starting fresh?

Usually yes, and it is worth knowing that this is almost always the slower option, not the faster one. An established site arrives with a thicket of plugins, a theme somebody customised three years ago, and page builders fighting each other. We audit before quoting so the estimate reflects what is actually there.

Do I need a maintenance plan?

If nobody is updating WordPress, WooCommerce, the theme and the plugins, the store will break and it will probably break during a sale. We would rather write that into the arrangement on day one than have the conversation after it happens. If someone on your own team already handles updates and backups, that is a perfectly good answer too — we just need to know who it is before handover.

Which payment gateway will I be on?

That depends on where your business is registered and where your buyers are, and it is a decision we make with you rather than for you. Stripe and PayPal cover most Western markets. Other markets run on local gateways and often on cash on delivery, which is a different build with its own reconciliation problems. We choose after we know your country, your product category and your average order value.

Can I move to Shopify later if I outgrow this?

Yes, and it is a normal thing to do. Build the catalogue cleanly now — consistent SKUs, sane attributes, real product data rather than descriptions pasted into images — and a future migration is straightforward. Build it carelessly and the migration bill will be larger than this one.

E-commerce

WooCommerce store

A WordPress commerce build with payments, tax and shipping set up properly — and an honest account of what it costs to keep running.

From: $600–$3,500
Typical time: 2–5 weeks
Usually bought by: SMEs, local retail

The problem behind the request

People come to WooCommerce for three different reasons and it is worth knowing which one is yours, because it changes the build.

The first is that a WordPress site already exists and works. There is content, there is traffic, there is a blog that took years to build. Replacing all of that to add a shop is an expensive answer to a small question. WooCommerce turns what is already there into a store instead.

The second is running cost. A hosted platform charges every month and takes a slice of every transaction. On a store with thin margins and steady volume, that arithmetic starts to matter, and self-hosting becomes a deliberate financial decision rather than a technical preference.

The third is the one nobody talks about until it bites. Hosted platforms do not let you touch the checkout on ordinary plans. If your business needs a field at checkout that does not exist, or an unusual delivery arrangement, or a connection into a local system that no app supports, then you are not choosing WooCommerce because it is cheaper. You are choosing it because it is the only one that will let you.

What all three buyers actually need is the same thing — a shop that takes money and keeps count without a person behind it. Products, stock and variants in one place. A payment route where money lands in the right account and refunds travel back. Shipping zones that charge what delivery actually costs rather than quietly losing a few dollars on every order. And a customer record that makes a second sale cheaper than the first. WooCommerce will do all of that well. It will also let you do all of it wrong, which is the honest difference between it and a closed platform.

How the build runs

Hosting, staging and a local copy. Hosting is chosen for what a shop actually needs rather than the cheapest shared plan, WordPress and WooCommerce go on, and a staging copy is created straight away. Nothing after this point gets built directly on the live site. Two to three days.
Catalogue architecture, decided before anything is loaded. Which products are simple and which are variable, what the attributes are, how variations map. This decision is not cosmetic — a catalogue of forty products with five sizes and four colours is eight hundred variations, and that number has a direct effect on how fast the admin and the front end run. Then the data goes in from a spreadsheet you have approved. Three to five days.
Money and delivery. Gateway plugin installed and connected on your account with you at the keyboard, tax settings, and shipping zones. Woo's shipping is more flexible than the hosted platforms and correspondingly easier to tangle, so the zones get tested against real postcodes rather than assumed. Three to four days.
Emails, speed and safety. Woo's default transactional emails are poor enough to damage trust, so they are rebuilt — order confirmation, processing, completed, each carrying tracking, a support route and a link to the returns policy. Then caching and image handling, then the plugins that are not earning their weight come off. Then backups and security hardening. Three to five days.
The test matrix, then handover. A successful card, a declined card, a 3D Secure card, a full refund, a partial refund, and a double-clicked submit button. Each one checked for the order, the stock, the email and the gateway record. Then a walkthrough video, a short written guide, and a decision about who is updating this site from now on. Two to three days.

The tools involved — LocalWP for building away from the live site, a commerce-grade host, Astra or Kadence as a theme base, WP Rocket or LiteSpeed for caching, UpdraftPlus or the host's own snapshots for backups, Wordfence for hardening, and the gateway's official plugin rather than a third-party wrapper.

What moves the price

The range is $600–$3,500 over 2–5 weeks.

New build or existing site. This is the largest factor, and it runs opposite to the intuition that working on an existing site must be the smaller job. A clean install is predictable. An existing site is an archaeology project — conflicting plugins, a customised theme with no documentation, and a database carrying five years of orphaned data. Working inside that always takes longer for the same visible result.

How many paid extensions the shop genuinely needs. WooCommerce's core is free and its edges are not. Advanced shipping rules, certain gateways, subscriptions, bookings and multi-currency are commercial extensions with their own licences and their own configuration time.

How much speed and hosting work is in scope. A store on a cheap shared plan with unoptimised images is a different job from one already on a decent host. Sometimes the honest finding is that hosting is the ceiling and no amount of caching work gets past it, and we say that early rather than billing around it.

Where these builds go wrong

Nobody agrees who maintains it. The store is built, it is handed over, and three months later a routine plugin update breaks the checkout. The owner calls whoever built it. Now there are two bad options — fix it free forever, or refuse and look like the bad guy. Both are avoidable with one sentence on day one saying that updates and backups are ongoing work, what they cost, and that if you would rather do it yourself, that is fine and it is in writing.

Everything gets made a variable product. It feels tidy to give every item every attribute. Then forty products with five sizes and four colours becomes eight hundred variations, the product edit screen takes half a minute to load, and the shop page slows down for customers. Some products should simply be separate products. That decision is made once, at the start, and it is very expensive to reverse after the catalogue is live.

The default emails are left alone. WooCommerce's stock order emails are plain, unbranded, and easy to mistake for a phishing attempt. The result is a support inbox full of people asking whether their order went through, and a measurable number of them who never ask and simply dispute the charge instead. Rewriting five emails takes an afternoon and removes an entire category of support load.

See where the site stands before you brief anyone.

If the site is already live, start from what it scores rather than from a guess. The audit reports what it checked, what it found, and — the part most tools leave out — what it could not check, and why.

See the website audit Talk about this work

Questions people ask before they commit.

Is WooCommerce actually cheaper than Shopify?: Cheaper, yes. As cheap as people think, no. The plugin is free and WordPress is free, but you still pay for decent hosting, usually a theme, usually two or three paid extensions for shipping or payments, and backup and security. Add those up over a year and the monthly figure lands closer to a Shopify plan than the free-plugin framing suggests. What you genuinely save is transaction margin and the freedom to change anything.
What happens when a plugin update breaks the site?: On WooCommerce that is your problem rather than the platform's, which is the real difference between the two systems. Updates get applied on a staging copy first, checked, then pushed live. That is what a maintenance arrangement buys and it is why we ask you to decide about one on day one rather than after the first outage.
Can you build on my existing WordPress site instead of starting fresh?: Usually yes, and it is worth knowing that this is almost always the slower option, not the faster one. An established site arrives with a thicket of plugins, a theme somebody customised three years ago, and page builders fighting each other. We audit before quoting so the estimate reflects what is actually there.
Do I need a maintenance plan?: If nobody is updating WordPress, WooCommerce, the theme and the plugins, the store will break and it will probably break during a sale. We would rather write that into the arrangement on day one than have the conversation after it happens. If someone on your own team already handles updates and backups, that is a perfectly good answer too — we just need to know who it is before handover.
Which payment gateway will I be on?: That depends on where your business is registered and where your buyers are, and it is a decision we make with you rather than for you. Stripe and PayPal cover most Western markets. Other markets run on local gateways and often on cash on delivery, which is a different build with its own reconciliation problems. We choose after we know your country, your product category and your average order value.
Can I move to Shopify later if I outgrow this?: Yes, and it is a normal thing to do. Build the catalogue cleanly now — consistent SKUs, sane attributes, real product data rather than descriptions pasted into images — and a future migration is straightforward. Build it carelessly and the migration bill will be larger than this one.

Often taken together.

Start with the brief, not the invoice.

Send what you are trying to achieve. You get a written scope, a price and a date — or an honest “this is not the right service for that”.

Talk about WooCommerce store All E-commerce services