Total cost of ownership (TCO) is high.

Even though I have 10 years experience working with WordPress, after trying to build a shop with Woo as a first time user over the last few months, and after a few updates that broke things consequently wasting days of my time, and with Woo ‘support’ basically shrugging their shoulders and offering a half hearted band-aid workaround, I looked into other options.

In short, Shopify looks cheaper to run in the long term, in both time and money spent. Out of the box Woo doesn’t actually do much, you need to add seemingly countless other 3rd party paid features to reach the same level of functionality as an entry level Shopify account.

But to be clear, I can see how Woo is great if you yourself are or you have a team of experienced coders on hand who really know what they’re doing. Woo offering 100% control and open source flexibility. There are some very big companies using Woo.

But, if you are just starting out with your first ever online shop and haven’t got time or money to spend fiddling, go for Shopify who will in turn take care of most of the heavy lifting for you such as hosting and updates, but particularly the handling of payment gateways. All Shopify stores being Level 1 PCI compliant by default. Hosting on Google Cloud Platform, all Shopify accounts also include unlimited products/bandwidth/storage and Fastly CDN. Your 1-stop….shop.

So what are the key differences between Woo and Shopify?

With Woo being just another WP plugin, you need to find the right hosting, install WordPress then Woo and a bunch of other plugins to make it really work. You then need to take the responsibility of maintaining it all. And when it breaks, and it will, who is accountable? Woo? WordPress? Your web host?

With Shopify being a full service platform, you sign up and pay your monthly fees, then you can just concentrate mostly on design, adding products and marketing. If you really need help, they are available 24/7 via live chat. One of the things you pay for. This is what makes them accountable. If they push an update that breaks your shop, they will fix it. You will not be asked, days later, to install yet another plugin to add some extraneous php code to your site.

I don’t actually care how many times Woo has been downloaded and how many sites are running it. I would instead be interested to know how many sites currently using Woo are successful. However, unless every Woo and Shopify store publicly and accurately declare their earnings, we will never know. So I take those kinds of stats with quite a big pinch of salt.

In summary: While Woo itself is free, it’s for coders who really know what they’re doing and want complete flexibility. The 2 stars is for wasting my time and making it look easy. Shopify is for folks who want to run online shops. Instead of stars, they get paid.

Being a snowboarder myself, maybe I relate better to Shopify because it was started by some snowboarders who just wanted to sell snowboards online.