WooCommerce vs Shopify vs PrestaShop: which to build your online shop on

I don’t recommend a platform in the first meeting. Or the second. Never before I’ve seen your catalogue.

And it’s not me playing hard to get: the question ‘WooCommerce, PrestaShop or Shopify?’ has no answer until I know how many products you sell, where your prices come from and who’s going to touch the shop every day.

The reality is that all three platforms build a shop that works. Where they part ways is what they’ll cost you two years from now, and you don’t see that bill on the day you choose.

All three, in one sentence each

WooCommerce turns your WordPress into a shop. The core is free, the code is yours and nearly everything is solved with extensions. You gain control and inherit the job of maintaining it.

PrestaShop is a complete commerce application from day one, with its own admin built for large catalogues and European tax rules. More powerful out of the box, more rigid when you want to go off the beaten track.

Shopify rents you the shop. You don’t manage a server, you don’t update anything and you’re live in days. In return you pay every month, for every app and, depending on how you take payments, a percentage of every sale.

The five mistakes when choosing a platform for your online shop

Almost every bad decision I’ve seen fits into these five.

1. Choosing for today’s catalogue

Picking a platform for the products you have this week is like buying a fridge to fit Saturday’s food shop. It works until summer arrives.

A shop with 40 products fits in any of the three. One with 4,000, with variations, sizes and stock per warehouse, doesn’t. And that second shop is hardly ever born that way: it grows into it.

Ask yourself where you want to be in two years, not where you are.

2. Confusing ‘I’ll build it myself’ with ‘it’s free’

All three have a version that looks free and none of them is.

With WooCommerce and PrestaShop you don’t pay for the core, but you do pay for hosting that can cope with a catalogue, paid extensions and the hours of whoever maintains it. With Shopify you don’t pay for maintenance, you pay a subscription and apps, and that spend never goes down.

It’s the same reasoning I apply to what gets cut when the budget calls the shots: the cost doesn’t disappear, it moves.

3. Ignoring where the data comes from

This is the one that makes the most projects more expensive and the one that shows up least in comparisons.

If your prices and stock live in an ERP, in a spreadsheet one person updates or in a supplier’s catalogue, the platform matters less than the integration. A shop that doesn’t sync forces people to do the work twice every day, and that duplication has a labour cost nobody budgets for.

Before comparing admin panels, sketch the journey of a price from where it’s born to where the customer sees it.

4. Deciding on the shop window

All three let you have a pretty shop. None of them hands you one that sells.

What separates a shop that converts from one that doesn’t is the order of the product page, how clear delivery is and how many steps there are to payment. That’s decided by designing, not by installing, and I went into it in how someone trying to buy from you really moves around.

5. Not asking how you get out

The awkward question: if in three years you want to leave, what do you take with you?

From WooCommerce and PrestaShop you take the database and the code, because they’re yours. From Shopify you take an export of products and customers, and you leave behind the theme, the apps and the URLs if you don’t plan the redirects.

It’s not an argument against Shopify. It’s a fact worth having before, not after.

Total cost of ownership

The honest comparison isn’t the starting price. It’s what you pay per year, adding up everything that isn’t on the platform’s invoice.

The Shopify column looks the most comfortable, and it is. It’s also the only one where the spend grows with your sales and never stops.

When each one is the answer

No beating about the bush, and accepting there are exceptions.

WooCommerce when you already have WordPress with content that ranks, the catalogue is manageable and you want the shop to be part of the same site. It’s the option with the best balance between control and effort for most small businesses.

PrestaShop when the catalogue is genuinely big and complex: lots of variations, several warehouses, price rules per customer or several shops on the same base.

Shopify when the priority is launching fast, there’s no technical team and the margin can carry the subscription. To test an idea or for a brand with few products and high turnover, it’s a reasonable decision.

No choices made because they’re trendy.

What happens after choosing well is in the Muebles.com shop: catalogue reorganised, shorter checkout and 47% more conversions.

What shouldn’t decide your choice

Three arguments that always come up and shouldn’t carry any weight.

That your brother-in-law uses it. That it’s the one the supplier who rang you knows how to build. And that one gets mentioned more online, which measures popularity and not fit with your business.

What should carry weight: your catalogue, your integrations and who’s going to touch the shop on a Tuesday morning.

Before moving anything, if you already have a shop, measure. Migrating on a hunch is the most expensive way to find out the problem wasn’t the platform, and I cover that in a shop that stopped performing without warning. The diagnosis beforehand costs less than the migration, and the method is in what to check before touching the structure.

Two more things shape the result as much as the platform’s name: performance with real users, which you’ll find in measuring LCP, INP and CLS in WordPress, and the structural decisions that shape your rankings. A slow, badly structured shop sells little on any of the three.

If you want me to just name one, I’m not your supplier

There’s no winning platform. There’s one that fits your catalogue, your integrations and your ability to maintain it, and to know which one it is you have to look at those three things before opening any admin panel.

If what you want is a name on the first call so you can close the decision today, anyone will give you one. I’d rather lose that meeting than have you paying for a migration in two years that half an hour of questions could have avoided.

You can see shops that went through this decision and how they ended up.