Set up an online store in Australia and two names dominate the shortlist: Shopify and WooCommerce. Most articles comparing them turn it into a technical debate, hosted platform versus self-hosted plugin, and leave you no closer to actually deciding.
It isn't really a technical question. It's a question about how much of the day-to-day running of your store you want handed to someone else, and how much you want to control yourself. Get that wrong and you'll spend a year fighting your own platform instead of selling.
Australians spent $82.6 billion online in 2025, up 14 per cent on the year before, and 9.8 million households, 82 per cent of the country, shopped online at least once (Australia Post, 2026). That's the market you're building a store to compete in, so the platform underneath it is worth getting right the first time, not the third.
- Choose Shopify if you want a store that works on day one, with hosting, security and updates handled for you, and you're happy to pay a fixed monthly fee for that.
- Choose WooCommerce if you already run on WordPress, want full control over hosting and plugins, and don't mind doing more of the setup and maintenance yourself.
- The one thing that usually decides it: how much time and technical comfort you have to manage your own hosting, security and updates, versus paying a fixed fee to have that handled.
What Shopify actually is, and who it suits
Shopify is a hosted platform. You pay a monthly subscription and it comes with hosting, security patching, an SSL certificate, a checkout, and an app store for almost anything you'd otherwise have to build. You pick a theme, load products, and you're trading, usually within a day or two. There's no server to choose, no plugin conflicts to debug at 11pm, and no separate bill for hosting.
That suits business owners who want to spend their time on products, photography and marketing rather than technical admin. It's the approach we take on every Shopify build we hand over, including KAWAIIGLOW, a Sydney skincare store where the brief was to keep a playful, brand-led design from ever slowing down the checkout that pays for it.
What WooCommerce actually is, and who it suits
WooCommerce is a free, open-source plugin that turns a WordPress website into a store. WordPress itself is also free, but you supply everything Shopify bundles in: your own hosting, your own SSL, your own payment gateway integration, and your own backups and security updates, either yourself or through a managed host.
That suits businesses that already have a WordPress site and don't want to run two separate systems, or that want a store woven into a content-heavy site, blog posts, resources, service pages, all in one place with full control over the code. It also suits anyone who wants to avoid a subscription fee that never stops, in exchange for taking on more of the maintenance themselves.
Shopify vs WooCommerce, side by side
| Factor | Shopify | WooCommerce |
|---|---|---|
| Upfront cost | $0, subscription starts straight away | $0 for the plugin, but budget for hosting and a theme |
| Monthly cost (AUD) | From $42/mo (Basic, billed annually) | Roughly $30 to $100/mo for managed hosting |
| Payment fees | 1.75% + 30c with Shopify Payments | Set by whichever gateway you choose |
| Hosting & security | Fully managed for you | You (or your host) are responsible |
| Ease of editing | Drag-and-drop theme editor | WordPress editor, more moving parts |
| Design freedom | Wide, within the app and theme ecosystem | Effectively unlimited, if you have the budget |
| SEO control | Solid, with some technical limits | Full technical control via WordPress |
| Who owns the store | You own your content, Shopify owns the platform | Fully yours, self-hosted |
| Outgrowing it | Upgrade plans or move to Shopify Plus | Scale your hosting, but watch plugin bloat |
What it really costs in Australia
Shopify's Basic plan runs $56 a month billed monthly, or $42 a month billed annually, plus GST unless you've added an ABN to your account. Add Shopify Payments and you're paying 1.75 per cent plus 30 cents per order on top (Shopify, accessed September 2026). Step up to Grow at $114/mo annually or Advanced at $431/mo annually and the payment fee drops slightly, to 1.6 per cent and 1.4 per cent respectively. Skip Shopify Payments for a gateway like PayPal or Stripe and Shopify adds its own surcharge on top of your gateway's fee, so most Australian merchants stick with Shopify Payments.
WooCommerce's software costs nothing, but a managed WordPress host suited to running a store in Australia typically runs $30 to $100 a month, or less on budget shared hosting (Hostinger, accessed September 2026). Add a domain, a payment gateway such as WooPayments or Stripe, and probably a premium theme or a couple of paid extensions for tax and shipping, and your all-in monthly cost can land anywhere from cheaper than Shopify to considerably more, depending entirely on choices Shopify makes for you by default.
A worked example
Say your store does 100 orders a month averaging $50, or $5,000 in revenue. On Shopify's Basic annual plan, that's $42 subscription, plus $87.50 in Shopify Payments fees (1.75 per cent of $5,000), plus $30 in per-order fees (30 cents times 100), for $159.50 a month all-in and fully predictable. On WooCommerce, you'd pay roughly $50 a month for solid managed hosting plus a few dollars for your domain, then whatever your chosen gateway charges per transaction on top, a number that isn't fixed the way Shopify's is, because it depends entirely on the provider you pick.
GST is worth planning for regardless of platform. Once your turnover passes $75,000 a year, the Australian Taxation Office requires you to register and start charging it (ATO, 2026). Shopify makes this a toggle: add your ABN, turn on GST collection for your regions, done. WooCommerce doesn't ship with an Australian tax preset, so you'll build your own tax rate table or install a dedicated tax plugin, a genuine setup difference that most generic comparisons skip entirely.
Buy now, pay later is another gap worth naming. Afterpay is installed on 26.3 per cent of Australian Shopify stores, making Australia the most Afterpay-saturated Shopify market anywhere in the world (Eightx, 2026). On Shopify it's an app you switch on. On WooCommerce, Afterpay and Zip are both available as free plugins, but you're installing, configuring and testing them yourself rather than flicking a switch.
Where each one wins, and where it doesn't
Shopify wins on reliability and speed to launch. Uptime, patching and PCI compliance are handled, the app ecosystem covers almost every feature you'll want, and costs are predictable to the dollar. It loses on the subscription that never stops, on the extra surcharge if you use a gateway other than Shopify Payments, and on a design and feature ceiling that's set by whatever the app store offers.
WooCommerce wins on ownership and flexibility. There's no forced monthly platform fee, no surcharge for choosing your own gateway, and no ceiling on what you can build if you have the budget or the skill. It loses on responsibility: you or your host are on the hook for uptime, security patches and backups, and a badly chosen theme or a pile of conflicting plugins can slow a store down fast. Checkout speed matters more than most owners realise. The average cart abandonment rate across industries sits at 70.22 per cent (Baymard Institute, 2026), and a slow or clunky checkout is one of the few causes of that figure you can actually control. Shopify's checkout is fast and consistent by default. WooCommerce's checkout speed depends entirely on your host, your theme and how many plugins you've bolted on, so it can be excellent or genuinely poor, and that's on you to get right.
Our verdict: which should you pick
For most Australian small businesses selling physical or digital products who want to launch quickly and spend their energy on the product and the marketing rather than server admin, we'd point you to Shopify. It's the platform we reach for on our own Shopify builds, and the predictable, all-in cost makes budgeting simple for an owner who isn't going to be the one troubleshooting a broken plugin.
We'd point you to WooCommerce instead if you already run a WordPress site you don't want to duplicate, if content and SEO through blogging matter as much as the store itself, or if you have a developer or agency on retainer who can own the hosting and maintenance side properly. It rewards technical comfort and punishes neglect, so it's a poor choice if nobody involved wants to own that responsibility.
If you haven't validated the product yet, don't over-invest in either. Test the idea somewhere simpler first, and come back to this decision once you actually have customers to build a proper store around. And if a fully custom build rather than either platform is on the table, our Wix and Squarespace vs custom website comparison and our guide to what a website costs in Sydney cover that ground.
