Shopify vs WooCommerce vs Custom: Which to Build OnShopify vs WooCommerce vs Custom: Which to Build On

The one question that decides it

Before any feature comparison, answer this: can the way you sell be described using the words "product", "variant" and "add to basket"?

If yes — you sell distinct things at set prices, perhaps in a few sizes or colours — then a hosted platform will serve you better and cost less to run than anything bespoke. Take Shopify, spend the money you saved on product photography and search, and get on with it.

If no, the calculation inverts, and it inverts hard. A platform that cannot express your business rule will fight you every single month: through an app that half-solves it, a manual workaround your staff perform daily, or an order type your accounts cannot reconcile. Building the piece that does not fit, once, is almost always cheaper than working around it for three years.

The comparison, without the affiliate link

Two rows deserve more than a cell. **Monthly cost** on Shopify is genuinely hard to predict, because the subscription is the smallest part: apps accumulate, and a store running eight or nine of them is common and adds up quickly. **Portability** is the row people discover late — a Shopify store is not straightforward to move, and the cost of leaving should be part of the decision to arrive.

What is not a real differentiator, whatever you read: SEO. All three can be made to rank and all three can be made invisible. On a large catalogue the deciding factor is product data quality and category structure, not the platform — which is set out at length in the e-commerce SEO page.

Does WooCommerce scale? Yes, and here is the evidence

This is the most repeated claim in the category and the one most worth testing, because it is usually asserted by people selling the alternative.

Beds.ie is a WooCommerce store carrying more than 17,000 products. Its homepage paints its first content in 0.42 seconds, measured in the browser on the live site on 4 September 2026. Between April and August 2026 it went from 672 to 7,781 organic clicks a month and from 5,189 to 24,054 distinct ranking queries, and its Merchant Centre feed sits at 94.5% approval — 16,281 of 17,233 items live.

None of that came from the platform and none of it was blocked by it. What breaks at scale is the data and the query patterns: uncached catalogue queries, unoptimised images, a category structure that is really a flat list. Buying a bigger server to cover for an uncached query is the most expensive mistake in this category and I have watched it happen more than once.

The honest counterweight: WooCommerce at that scale needs someone competent looking after it, and Shopify at that scale mostly does not. If nobody is going to maintain it, that is a genuine argument for the hosted platform and it should win.

What an e-commerce website actually costs in the UK

The question that usually sits underneath the platform question, so here it is with numbers.

Cybrial websites start at £500, and I will say plainly that a shop is not usually a £500 project — a catalogue or a custom buying journey is a bigger job and is quoted after a conversation. Hosting and care starts at £50 a month; a seventeen-thousand-product store costs more to host and look after than a forty-product one, and that figure is agreed in writing before anything moves.

The cost that surprises people is not the build. It is the product data: photography, descriptions, attributes, identifiers. On a large catalogue that is the majority of the real work and it is nobody's favourite line on a quote, which is exactly why it gets skipped and why so many stores are invisible.

Moving between them

Both directions are done routinely, and both go wrong the same way: somebody moves the products and nobody owns the URLs.

• Inventory every existing product and category URL before anything is built. Export from Search Console as well as the platform, because the two lists differ.
• Redirect one to one to the closest equivalent page. Not everything to the homepage, and not everything to a category — Google treats both as soft 404s and you lose exactly what you were protecting.
• Move the content, not just the products. Category descriptions and buying guides are usually why a category ranks, and they are the first thing dropped in a migration.
• Rebuild the shopping feed deliberately rather than exporting the default, and check items submitted against items active in the first week.
• Watch Search Console weekly for a month. A dip while Google re-crawls is normal; a sustained drop after a month is a redirect fault.

There is a fuller version of this in the migration guide, which is the piece of technical work with the most asymmetric payoff on any site: done properly it is invisible, skipped it can cost more than the entire rebuild.

What I would actually tell you

1. 01Selling forty to four hundred conventional products, no unusual rules, nobody in-house to maintain anything: Shopify. Spend the difference on photography and product data.
2. 02Already on WordPress, content matters to you, and you want to own the whole thing: WooCommerce. It is the cheaper long-run option and the more maintainable one, provided somebody maintains it.
3. 03Any rule the platform cannot express — sold by weight, configured, quoted, reserved, gifted, hired: WooCommerce or custom. Build the piece that does not fit and stop paying the workaround tax.
4. 04Thousands of products, feeds, and a real operational burden: either, and the decision is about who maintains it rather than about features. The catalogue work is identical on both.
5. 05It is not a shop — two audiences, a booking flow, a calculation, a portal: custom, quoted like software, and most businesses reading this do not need it.

And the meta-advice, which costs me work and is still correct: if a supplier recommends the same platform to every client regardless of what they sell, that is a statement about the supplier rather than about your business.