Three routes, three sets of trade-offs. The right answer depends far more on your products and your team than on the platforms themselves.
Shopify
A hosted platform. You pay monthly, they run everything, and you do not think about servers, updates or security patching.
Where it wins: Speed to launch. Reliability under traffic spikes. Payments, tax and shipping handled competently out of the box. A large ecosystem, so somebody can always help. Genuinely good at the standard job of listing products and taking money.
What it costs beyond the subscription: A transaction fee unless you use their own payment processing. And apps — this is the figure that surprises people. A typical shop runs half a dozen: reviews, subscriptions, shipping rules, accounting sync, upsells. Each is a monthly subscription and together they frequently exceed the platform fee.
Where it constrains: Checkout customisation is limited on lower plans. Complex pricing rules — customer-specific pricing, volume breaks, made-to-measure — are awkward or impossible. The product model assumes variants of a fixed set of options, which fits clothing well and configured products badly.
Choose it if: you sell a reasonably standard catalogue, you want to focus on selling rather than infrastructure, and your pricing is straightforward.
WooCommerce
Software that runs on your own WordPress hosting. Free to install, and everything after that is yours to arrange.
Where it wins: Control. No transaction fees beyond your payment provider. Deep customisation, because you can change anything. Strong content capability, which matters if your shop sits alongside substantial editorial or guides.
What it costs: Hosting suited to ecommerce, which is not the cheapest tier. Plugin licences, most sold annually. Maintenance, because you are responsible for updates and for testing that an update did not break checkout. And somebody accountable when it does.
Where it constrains: Performance requires attention as the catalogue grows. Security is your responsibility, and an ecommerce site handling payments is a more attractive target than a brochure site. Plugin interactions become the main source of problems past a certain count — the pattern we describe in WordPress versus custom.
Choose it if: you want control and lower ongoing platform fees, you have a maintenance arrangement you trust, and content is a significant part of how you sell.
Custom
Built for your business specifically.
Where it wins: Anything the platforms cannot express. Customer-specific pricing agreed by contract. Products configured from dozens of options with rules about which combinations are valid. Ordering against a credit account with approval workflows. Live stock from a warehouse system that determines what can even be added to a basket.
What it costs: Substantially more to build, and ongoing development rather than a subscription. You are also responsible for the things platforms give free — payment security, tax rules, fraud handling.
Where it constrains: You inherit everything. Every checkout improvement the platforms ship, you would have to build.
Choose it if: your commercial model genuinely cannot fit a platform, or the shop is a front end onto systems that must drive it.
Most businesses that ask for a custom shop need a platform with one custom piece attached. That combination is cheaper, faster and easier to live with than either extreme.
The middle route
Use a platform for the standard work — catalogue, basket, checkout, payments — and build only the part that is genuinely yours, connected to it.
A custom configurator that produces a priced item and hands it to the platform basket. A pricing service that returns contract rates for logged-in trade customers. A stock feed from your warehouse system.
This gets you the platform's reliability and the behaviour you need. The connecting work is covered in how systems talk to each other.
The questions that actually decide it
How complicated is your pricing?
One price per product, visible to all — any platform will do. Different prices for different customers, volume breaks, contract rates, price on application — you are heading towards custom, or a platform with a custom pricing layer.
How complicated are your products?
Fixed variants suit platforms. Products configured from many interdependent options do not, and forcing them in produces thousands of variant combinations that become unmanageable.
Where does stock live?
If your true stock position lives in a warehouse or accounting system, the shop must read from it. Check what the platform's integration actually syncs and how often — see connecting stock and orders.
Who sells to whom?
Consumer selling is well served everywhere. Trade selling with accounts, credit terms and approvals is a different problem, covered in selling B2B online.
Who will run it daily?
Somebody adds products, processes orders, handles returns. A platform they find manageable beats a technically superior system they avoid.
Comparing the real cost
Over three years, include: platform fees, transaction fees on your actual volume, app and plugin subscriptions, hosting, maintenance, the build, and the staff time to run it.
Transaction fees matter more than they look. Half a per cent on substantial turnover is a real number, and it is the figure that most often makes a custom build competitive at higher volumes.
Our ecommerce team builds on all three routes and will recommend the platform when the platform is right. Discuss your requirements.
