Shopify vs WooCommerce for a South African store

Shopify is a service. You pay a monthly fee, Shopify hosts the store, keeps it running and updated, and you work inside its admin. You do not need a developer to open a basic store, and you cannot change how it works beyond what Shopify and its app store allow.

WooCommerce is free software that runs on a WordPress site you host yourself. Nobody charges you for the store itself, you can change anything, and you (or someone you pay) are responsible for hosting, updates, backups and security. The store is yours in a way a Shopify store is not, and so is the upkeep.

Shopify’s South African pricing page quotes the plans in US dollars: Basic at US$25 a month (US$19 if you pay a year in advance), Grow at US$65 (US$49 yearly) and Advanced at US$399 (US$299 yearly). At 2026 exchange rates the Basic plan is in the region of R450 a month, and it moves with the rand. Your bank may also add a foreign transaction fee to the card payment.

Then there is the fee most people miss. Shopify charges a fee on every sale that goes through a third-party payment provider: 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow and 0.6% on Advanced. In countries where Shopify Payments is available, merchants avoid this by using Shopify Payments. It is not available in South Africa, so every South African Shopify store pays it, on top of what PayFast, Yoco or Peach charge for processing the payment. On a R100,000 sales month, Basic plan merchants hand Shopify R2,000 in transaction fees before the gateway has taken its share.

WooCommerce has no platform fee and no transaction fee. You pay for hosting, which for a small store is a shared package from a South African host like Xneelo at a few hundred rand a month, your domain, and the payment gateway’s processing fee, which is the same gateway fee the Shopify store pays. Paid themes and plugins are optional; our own store runs on none.

The honest way to compare is over twelve months, including the developer time a WooCommerce store needs. A Shopify Basic store doing R50,000 a month pays roughly R5,400 in plan fees for the year plus R12,000 in Shopify transaction fees, before gateway fees. A WooCommerce store doing the same turnover pays its hosting, perhaps R3,000 to R6,000 for the year, plus whatever maintenance it needs, which can be nothing if the owner is comfortable updating plugins or a monthly care plan if not. At that turnover the two are closer than people expect, and the deciding factor is who looks after the site, not the subscription.

At R300,000 a month the picture changes. The Shopify transaction fee alone is R72,000 a year on Basic, and moving to Advanced to cut it to 0.6% means US$399 a month. A WooCommerce store’s costs do not rise with turnover, only with traffic, and traffic is cheap to host. That is the point at which a store owner usually asks us about moving.

• Payment gateways. PayFast, Yoco, Peach Payments and Ozow all work with both platforms. On Shopify they count as third-party providers, which is what triggers the extra fee above. On WooCommerce they are plugins with no extra cut.
• VAT invoices. Shopify sells to you from abroad and its invoices are in dollars; ask your accountant how they want that treated. Your hosting and developer invoices for a WooCommerce store are ordinary South African VAT invoices.
• Shipping. The Courier Guy, Bob Go and Pudo have integrations for both. Shopify’s are apps, some with their own monthly fee; WooCommerce’s are free plugins.
• Speed for South African visitors. Shopify serves stores from its own network and is quick everywhere. A WooCommerce store on a cheap theme with twenty plugins is slow, and a WooCommerce store built properly is as fast or faster. The platform does not decide this; the build does.

We say this to clients when it is true. Shopify is the better choice if you sell a modest range, have nobody technical in the business, want to be trading this week, and would rather pay a subscription than think about hosting and updates. The transaction fee is the price of not having to look after anything, and for a small store that trade is reasonable. Shopify is also the safer choice if you expect to run the store yourself for years without a developer relationship.

WooCommerce wins when the catalogue is large, when the store needs something Shopify’s apps do not do (trade pricing, quote requests, stock from a spreadsheet, a design that is yours), when turnover is high enough that 2% matters, or when you want the store and its data to belong to you outright. It also wins if you already have a WordPress site and want the store on the same system your team knows.

Our own store, ROQ Gear, is WooCommerce with PayFast. We built the browsing side by hand so it loads quickly on a phone, and we left the cart, checkout and payment to WooCommerce because those parts work well and customers recognise them. The hosting is a South African shared package. There is no platform fee on any sale.

Can I move from Shopify to WooCommerce later?

Yes. Products, customers and orders export from Shopify as files and import into WooCommerce, and we keep the same product addresses where possible so Google rankings survive the move. The design has to be rebuilt, because Shopify themes do not transfer. Plan it the same way as any redesign: audit the addresses first.

Is WooCommerce secure enough for card payments?

Card details never touch a WooCommerce store when you use PayFast or Yoco; the customer pays on the gateway’s page and the store is told the result. What you are responsible for is keeping WordPress itself updated and backed up, which is the maintenance side of the decision above.

Which do you build?

WooCommerce, usually with a hand-built storefront in front of it, as on ROQ Gear. We do not build Shopify stores, so if Shopify is the right answer for you we will say so and point you at it. The WooCommerce work is described on our ecommerce page, and if you are not sure a store is what you need at all, read catalogue or online store first.