Shopify or WooCommerce for a small Australian online store

When a small business asks us to build an online store, the first question is nearly always the same: Shopify or WooCommerce? Both are mature, and both can be made fast, accessible and easy to run. One is usually the better answer for you.

This note is how we help clients choose. It comes down less to features than to who will look after the store once it’s live.

The basic difference

Shopify is a hosted platform. You pay a monthly subscription, and Shopify looks after the servers, security, updates and checkout. You add features with apps from its app store.

WooCommerce is a free, open-source plugin that turns a WordPress site into a store. You (or your developer) choose the hosting and keep WordPress, WooCommerce and any extensions up to date. You own the whole setup, including the database of products, customers and orders.

That’s the trade in one sentence: Shopify swaps some control for less responsibility, and WooCommerce swaps some responsibility for more control.

When Shopify is the better fit

Shopify suits stores where selling is the main point of the site and nobody on the team wants to think about servers.

• You want someone else responsible for hosting, security and checkout uptime.
• Your catalogue is fairly standard: physical products, variants, stock levels, shipping rules.
• You’d like a single place for online sales and, if you need it, selling in person.
• You’re comfortable with a monthly fee that grows as you add paid apps or move to a higher plan.

The things to watch are ongoing costs and lock-in. Many features that feel basic come from paid apps, and each one adds a monthly charge and, often, extra scripts on your pages. Moving away from Shopify later is possible, but it’s a project, not a button. Shopify also charges an extra fee on orders taken through third-party payment providers, so it’s worth deciding early whether Shopify Payments works for you.

When WooCommerce is the better fit

WooCommerce suits organisations that already have, or want, a content-rich WordPress site with a shop as one part of it.

• Your site is mostly content (articles, programs, resources) and the store sits alongside it.
• You need something unusual: memberships, bookings, donations next to products, or custom pricing rules.
• You want full ownership of your data and the freedom to move hosts.
• You have someone to keep it maintained, whether that’s your team or a care plan with a developer.

The thing to watch is maintenance. A WooCommerce store is a WordPress site with payments attached, so updates, backups and security monitoring aren’t optional. Plugin piles are the usual cause of slow, fragile stores. We’d rather use a handful of well-supported extensions than twenty that each do one small thing.

Payments and GST

Both platforms work well in Australia. Shopify has its own payment service, Shopify Payments, and also supports other providers. WooCommerce connects to payment gateways such as Stripe and PayPal through extensions, and you choose which one to use.

On GST, both can show prices including GST, which is what Australian shoppers expect, and both can be set up to calculate tax for the places you ship to. What neither can do is decide your tax obligations for you. Check with your accountant whether you need to be registered for GST, how to treat international orders, and what your invoices and receipts need to show. Then set the store up to match and test a few orders before launch.

Speed, accessibility and weight

A store’s weight comes mostly from what gets added to it, not the platform underneath. Heavy themes, widgets, pop-ups and tracking scripts add up quickly on either.

Whichever you choose, we keep to the same habits we use on every site: a lean theme, properly sized images, as few third-party scripts as possible, and a checkout that works with a keyboard and a screen reader. A lighter store loads faster on patchy mobile connections, uses less energy per visit, and tends to be easier for everyone to use. There’s more on this in our note on page-weight budgets.

Our rule of thumb

Before recommending a platform, we ask three questions:

• Who will keep the store updated and secure a year from now?
• Is the shop the whole site, or one part of a bigger site?
• Which feels better for your budget: a predictable monthly subscription, or hosting plus a maintenance plan?

If the shop is the main event and nobody wants to manage hosting, Shopify is usually the calmer choice. If the shop is part of a larger content site, or you need flexibility and ownership, WooCommerce is usually the better fit. If you’re still weighing up the site itself, our note on choosing a CMS covers the bigger picture.

Where to start

Write down what you sell, how you’ll ship, and who will run the store day to day. That short list often makes the choice obvious.

If you’d like help working it through, have a look at our online stores service, or tell us what you’re working on. We’ll give you a straight answer, even if it’s the less interesting one to build.