WooCommerce or Shopify for a growing store? The real costs at $1M a year.

Platform comparisons usually stop at the monthly subscription. That's the smallest number on the bill. For a store turning over around $1M a year, the real costs are payment fees, apps or plugins, hosting and — the line most comparisons leave out — developer time.

We've built and maintained 12 stores in this range across both platforms. Here's how the money actually moves, using published list prices at the time of writing and the ranges we've seen on our own projects. Both platforms change their pricing, so check the current numbers before you decide.

To compare like with like, we'll model a US store with $1M of online revenue a year, an $80 average order (12,500 orders) and standard domestic card payments. Your mix of international cards, wallets and refunds will move the numbers, but not the shape.

Shopify publishes four tiers: Basic at $39 a month, Grow at $105, Advanced at $399 and Plus from $2,300, with lower prices for annual billing. The standard online card rate with Shopify Payments falls as you move up: 2.9% + 30¢ on Basic, 2.7% + 30¢ on Grow and 2.5% + 30¢ on Advanced. Use a different payment provider and Shopify adds its own transaction fee on top — 2%, 1% and 0.6% respectively.

WooCommerce itself is free. You pay your payment provider directly; Stripe's and WooPayments' standard US rate is 2.9% + 30¢ per domestic card transaction.

Two things stand out. First, at this volume card fees dwarf the subscription, so the plan that lowers your card rate matters more than its sticker price. Second, Advanced doesn't pay for itself on fees alone at $1M. Its 0.2-point saving over Grow only covers the price difference at roughly $1.3M of revenue with annual billing, or $1.8M with monthly billing. Choose Advanced for its features, not its rate.

At $1M it's also worth asking for a quote. Stripe offers custom pricing for businesses with large payment volumes, and Shopify Plus pricing is negotiated. Neither is guaranteed, but this is the revenue level where those conversations start.

This is where the platforms diverge. On Shopify, hosting, security and checkout are included, and extra features arrive as monthly app subscriptions: reviews, subscriptions, search, loyalty, bundles. Across our Shopify builds at this size, apps typically added a few hundred dollars a month — and they're easy to accumulate without anyone noticing.

WooCommerce moves that spend to infrastructure and licences. A store handling 12,500 orders a year needs good managed hosting, not a cheap shared plan, plus annual licences for premium extensions. In our builds, hosting and licences together have landed in a similar range to a Shopify store's app bill — sometimes lower, rarely by enough to settle the question on its own.

WooCommerce is software you run. WordPress, WooCommerce and every plugin need updating, testing and occasionally fixing when one update breaks another. Security monitoring and backups are your responsibility, or your host's. In our experience, a well-built Woo store at this size needs a few hours of developer time every month just to stay healthy, before any new features.

Shopify removes most of that maintenance, but customisation costs more when you reach the platform's edges. Deep checkout customisation is largely reserved for Plus, complex pricing or B2B rules may need apps or custom development, and you work within Shopify's data model. When a client's requirements are unusual, we've seen Shopify builds need more developer time than Woo, not less.

• Choose Shopify if you sell mostly standard products, want the team focused on merchandising and marketing, and don't have — or want — a developer on call.
• Choose WooCommerce if content drives your sales, you need unusual product, pricing or checkout logic, or you want full ownership of your data and stack, and you have a technical partner for upkeep.
• Re-run the numbers at $2M and above. Plan tiers, negotiated payment rates and Shopify Plus change the maths at that point.

Either platform can run a $1M store well. The expensive mistake is choosing on subscription price and discovering the real costs a year later. If you'd like a costed comparison for your own catalogue, our web development team builds on both and has no reason to prefer either. Whichever you choose, keep it fast: our 1 MB page budget applies to stores too.

Written by

Arjun Kapoor

Founder · Strategy · Founded Performative Web in 2016

Arjun founded Performative Web in London in 2016 and still leads strategy on our largest engagements. He writes here about the commercial side of technology decisions — what things really cost, and when they pay back.

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