Shopify vs WooCommerce in 2026: three-year cost for a US store at two sizes, sales tax, speed and migration

The short answer

For most US stores, Shopify and WooCommerce cost about the same to run, because card fees are roughly nine-tenths of the bill on both. WooCommerce only comes out cheaper when you maintain it yourself: a store selling USD 15,000 a month saves about USD 600 over three years that way, and loses about USD 8,000 once it pays a WordPress care plan. As sales grow, Shopify's lower card rate on its Grow plan tips the math its way: at USD 100,000 a month, it's about USD 10,000 cheaper over three years than WooCommerce with a tax service, and real shoppers' Core Web Vitals pass rate on Shopify stores is 85.5% against WooCommerce's 54.7%.

Choose WooCommerce when you need to own the code and data, sell something Shopify's checkout or catalog can't model, or already run a WordPress site with a team that maintains it. Choose Shopify when you'd rather pay a platform than run one. Prices below are US prices from each vendor's own pages, read on 21 October 2026 unless a date says otherwise.

The prices behind the comparison

Shopify shows prices by the visitor's country, and on 21 October our connection was outside the US, so Shopify's US plan prices and card rates come from the Internet Archive's copy of its US pricing page, as published on 17 October 2026.

Sources: Shopify pricing (US page as published on 17 October 2026), WooCommerce pricing and WooPayments fees for the United States.

Two rows decide most comparisons. Card rates are identical on Basic and WooPayments, and Shopify's get lower as the plan gets more expensive. And Shopify charges its own transaction fee when you use a provider other than Shopify Payments: on Grow, a store taking USD 100,000 a month through Stripe or PayPal would pay Shopify an extra USD 1,000 a month, before the provider's own fee.

Three years, two US stores

We priced two stores from published rates only, billed yearly:

• Store A: USD 15,000 a month in sales, 200 orders at USD 75, about 20,000 visits a month. Collects sales tax in its home state only, where 20% of orders ship.
• Store B: USD 100,000 a month, 1,000 orders at USD 100, about 100,000 visits a month. Collects tax in five states, which account for 60% of orders, and sells subscriptions and bundles.

Both take cards through the platform's own processor at the standard online rate. Left out because they cost the same on either platform: the domain, email marketing, shipping, marketing and the cost of designing and building the store, which our guide to ecommerce website costs covers.

How each line is calculated:

• Platform or hosting. Shopify Basic USD 29 × 36 and Grow USD 89 × 36. For WooCommerce, Pressable, a managed WordPress host that says it was built by the team that built WooCommerce: Signature 1 at USD 250 a year (up to 30,000 visits) for Store A and Signature 4 at USD 900 a year (up to 150,000 visits) for Store B, × 3.
• Card processing. A: 2.9% of USD 15,000 plus 30¢ on 200 orders = USD 495 a month, on either platform. B: on Grow, 2.7% of USD 100,000 plus USD 300 = USD 3,000 a month; on WooPayments, 2.9% plus USD 300 = USD 3,200 a month.
• Subscriptions and bundles. Shopify's own Subscriptions and Bundles apps are free. On WooCommerce, WooCommerce Subscriptions is USD 279 a year and Product Bundles USD 79 a year: USD 358 × 3.
• Sales tax. Explained in the next section.
• Care plan. WP Buffs Perform, the tier that includes e-commerce plugin management, at USD 239 a month × 36.

The pattern holds beyond these two stores. Card processing is 93% of Store A's Shopify bill and 91% of Store B's, so the platform choice moves the total by single-digit percentages, while the processor choice can move it far more: if Store B kept Shopify but processed cards through another provider, Shopify's 1% fee alone would add USD 36,000 over three years.

Sales tax: who calculates, and who files

Where you must collect sales tax depends on each state's rules, so this section compares tools, not obligations; ask an accountant which states apply to you.

Shopify Tax is built in. For stores created on or after 13 May 2026, it's free until the store reaches USD 100,000 in lifetime sales; after that it charges 0.35% of each order on Basic, Grow and Advanced (0.25% on Plus), capped at USD 0.99 per order, and only on orders from states where you've turned on tax collection. In our table, Store A crosses the threshold after about 1,333 orders, and 20% of the remaining 5,867 orders pay USD 0.26 each: USD 308. Store B crosses it after 1,000 orders, and 60% of the remaining 35,000 pay USD 0.35: USD 7,350. Shopify Tax calculates; it doesn't file your returns.

WooCommerce Tax is a free extension that calculates rates automatically, but WooCommerce's documentation is explicit about its limits: it uses your store address as the primary tax location, "does not discover or maintain every state where your business may have a tax obligation", and doesn't file or remit. That's enough for Store A. For Store B's other four states you'd either maintain manual rates yourself or pay a tax service. The table uses Avalara's Core Compliance at USD 799 per state per year for four states (USD 9,588 over three years), which also files the returns. TaxJar starts at USD 39 a month for 200 orders a month, with 2 AutoFile credits a year included and more at USD 50 each.

So the tax line isn't like for like: Avalara includes filing that a Shopify store would also have to buy or do by hand. If you file yourself, Store B on WooCommerce with manual rates costs about USD 118,974, the same as on Shopify.

Speed: what real shoppers experience

The HTTP Archive's technology report measures, every month, how many stores on each platform pass Google's Core Web Vitals for real Chrome users. September 2026 was the latest month on 21 October:

Sources: HTTP Archive technology report, Core Web Vitals and page weight, Chrome UX Report data.

The gap is server response. Shopify stores ship heavier pages, more than twice the JavaScript, yet pass more often, because 88.9% of them answer fast enough for a "good" time to first byte, which Google's web.dev defines as 0.8 seconds or less. Only 17.8% of WooCommerce stores do. That's a hosting and caching problem, and it's fixable: a WooCommerce store on hosting with full-page caching for catalog pages can respond as quickly. Responsiveness (INP) is nearly identical. These are averages across every store on each platform, not a forecast for yours; our website platform speed report shows the latest month by country.

Apps and extensions

Shopify's App Store says it has "over 16,000 apps"; app listings state that charges are billed in USD every 30 days. WooCommerce stores can use WooCommerce.com's paid extensions, which WooCommerce prices at USD 29 to 299 a year each, and the WordPress plugin directory, which lists over 76,000 free plugins.

The pricing models differ. Shopify apps are monthly subscriptions. A WooCommerce.com extension is an annual subscription for updates and support; letting it lapse means no more updates, which on a checkout means no security fixes. Shopify's own apps cover a lot for free (subscriptions, bundles, the Store Migration importer), where WooCommerce often needs a paid extension. In the other direction, deep changes to checkout or catalog logic are a code change on WooCommerce, while on Shopify they depend on what apps and your plan allow.

Migrating in either direction

WooCommerce to Shopify. Shopify's free Store Migration app imports product and customer data from WooCommerce, either from CSV files or by connecting your account. Shopify's migration guide recommends importing products first, then customers, then historical orders, and warns that each imported order can trigger a new-order email to staff unless you turn notifications off first. The hard part is URLs: Shopify's product and collection pages live under fixed /products/ and /collections/ paths, and you can only redirect a URL that no longer loads a page (up to 100,000 redirects outside Plus). Map every old product URL before launch; our redirect map generator builds the list from your sitemaps.

Shopify to WooCommerce. WooCommerce.com sells a Migrate & Import Shopify to WooCommerce extension for USD 79 a year that imports products, categories, orders, coupons, blogs and pages through Shopify's API. WooCommerce's product URL base is configurable, so you can often keep /products/ paths and need fewer redirects. Customer passwords don't come across: the Shopify Data Migrator listing explains that Shopify's APIs don't provide them, so plan a password-reset email for returning customers.

Either way, the SEO risk is the same as any replatforming, and our website migration SEO checklist covers it step by step.

Which one fits

What to do next

Put your own monthly sales, average order and the states where you collect tax into the table above; the card line will tell you most of the answer. If you want Dardo to build or move the store, our ecommerce development service explains how we scope one, and our comparison of Wix vs WordPress covers the smaller-site end of the decision.