In short: pick Shopify if you want to sell fast, worry-free and internationally, and accept a fixed monthly fee. Pick WooCommerce if you want full control over code, data and SEO and have someone to do maintenance. Above €2 million in revenue or with complex B2B requirements, headless custom development often wins. Over 3 years the costs are closer than you think.
The decision rule
Your platform choice sets how you sell, what you pay each month and how easily you integrate for the next 5 years. Yet in most cases 3 questions settle it:
- Do you have someone to do maintenance? No: Shopify. Yes, or you hire it in: WooCommerce stays on the table.
- Do you sell mainly in the Benelux, or worldwide? Worldwide with several currencies and markets: Shopify Markets handles that out of the box. Mainly Benelux: either.
- Are your requirements standard? Customer-specific pricing, tiered pricing, configurators, ERP integrations at order level: then you outgrow both and look at custom development.
The rest of this article is the reasoning, so you can explain the choice to your co-founder or your accountant.
Comparison table
| Criterion | Shopify | WooCommerce |
|---|---|---|
| Platform cost | €27 – 289 per month (annual plan), Plus from about €2,000 per month | Free plugin; hosting €20 – 100 per month, premium plugins €300 – 1,500 per year |
| Transaction fees | 0% with Shopify Payments, otherwise 0.6 – 2% extra per order | Only your payment provider's fees (Mollie, Adyen, Buckaroo) |
| Ownership and data | You rent the platform; theme and data export, checkout code does not | Everything is yours: code, database, hosting |
| SEO | Strong, but fixed URL structure (/products/, /collections/) | Full control over URLs, metadata and structure |
| Speed | Fast out of the box, CDN included | Depends on hosting and plugins; can be excellent, takes discipline |
| B2B | Shopify B2B on Plus (company profiles, price lists, net terms) | Through plugins (B2BKing, Wholesale Suite), flexible but stacked |
| Integrations | 8,000+ apps, strong API, webhooks | Unlimited through WordPress plugins and REST API; quality varies |
| iDEAL and Wero | Through Shopify Payments or Mollie, Wero follows automatically | Through Mollie, Adyen or Pay.nl, Wero via the same plugin |
| Accessibility (EAA) | Shopify's standard themes largely meet WCAG 2.1 AA | Entirely dependent on theme and plugins |
| Maintenance | Included | Updates for WordPress, WooCommerce, theme and plugins, backups, security |
Total cost of ownership over 3 years
Shopify's monthly fee looks expensive next to a free plugin. Run 3 years for a store with €500,000 in annual revenue and 8,000 orders, and the columns move toward each other.
Shopify (Shopify plan, €79 per month). Subscription €2,844. Apps for reviews, email, returns and a Bol.com connector at an average of €150 per month: €5,400. Theme and setup once, €7,500 to €15,000. Payment fees through Shopify Payments or Mollie roughly equal to Woo. Maintenance: next to nothing. Total over 3 years: €16,000 to €24,000 plus payment fees.
WooCommerce. Managed hosting at €50 per month: €1,800. Premium plugins (the payment plugin is free, but filters, reviews, subscriptions, B2B) €800 per year: €2,400. Build once, €7,500 to €15,000. Maintenance and security 3 to 5 hours a month, or a care plan of €95 to €250 per month: €3,400 to €9,000. Total over 3 years: €15,000 to €28,000 plus payment fees.
The difference is not the license, it is who does the maintenance and how many apps you need. What a store costs in the build phase is covered in online store development costs.
SEO: URL structure, speed and multilingual
URL structure. Shopify enforces /products/ and /collections/ and does not let you create true subfolders per category. For 95% of stores that changes nothing: Google ranks on content and authority, not folder depth. For a store with thousands of products in a deep category tree, WooCommerce's freedom is more comfortable.
Speed. Shopify ships a global CDN and an optimized checkout. WooCommerce can be just as fast, provided you choose good hosting, caching and a light theme. In practice we see slow Woo stores more often than slow Shopify stores, and the cause is plugins, not the platform.
Multilingual. Shopify Markets translates, shows local currencies and handles hreflang. WooCommerce uses WPML, Polylang or TranslatePress; more flexible, but every extra plugin is a risk to speed and updates.
Structured data and feeds. Both platforms output product schema; for Google Shopping and Bol.com you usually work through Channable, which talks to both equally well.
The Dutch market: market share, payments and marketplaces
Dutch consumers spent over €36 billion online in 2024 (Thuiswinkel Markt Monitor), and that keeps growing. Most Dutch online stores run on WooCommerce, followed by Shopify, which is growing fast among new brands and stores with international ambitions. Lightspeed, Magento and Shopware follow at a distance.
Payments. In 2026 iDEAL still accounts for the majority of Dutch online payments. Shopify Payments supports iDEAL and Bancontact with no extra transaction fee; on WooCommerce you connect Mollie, Adyen or Pay.nl, where an iDEAL transaction costs around €0.29. iDEAL has been acquired by the European Payments Initiative and is merging into Wero; the transition runs through 2026 and 2027 and comes through your payment provider automatically. Read iDEAL becomes Wero for what it means for your checkout.
Bol.com and Marktplaats. Both platforms connect to Bol.com and Marktplaats Zakelijk through Channable or a dedicated app. Stock, prices and orders then flow through 1 system.
Accounting. Exact Online, Moneybird and e-Boekhouden have standard connectors for both platforms. Exact with multiple warehouses or B2B price lists becomes custom work, see connecting Exact Online to your online store.
When to choose Shopify
- You are starting or growing fast and do not want to spend time on technology.
- You sell internationally in several currencies and languages.
- You want a checkout that Shopify itself keeps optimizing, with Shop Pay for returning customers.
- Your team changes and you want anyone to be able to work with it.
- You expect peaks (Black Friday, campaigns) and do not want to worry about server load.
Shopify's downsides, honestly: you pay monthly, apps pile up, the checkout is only lightly customizable outside Plus, and you cannot simply move away without rebuilding.
When to choose WooCommerce
- You already have a WordPress site with content and authority, and the store is an extension.
- You want full control over URLs, templates and data, for content-driven SEO for instance.
- You have unusual logic: configurators, member pricing, subscriptions with exceptions.
- You have someone, in-house or external, who takes maintenance seriously.
- You do not want a platform that charges you for revenue growth.
WooCommerce's downsides: your store is only as good as your worst plugin, updates can break things and security is your responsibility. Without maintenance it goes wrong within a year.
When to go headless or custom
Beyond a certain scale and complexity, both platforms pinch. Think €2 million in revenue with B2B and B2C in 1 environment, a PIM with 50,000 SKUs, customer-specific prices from the ERP, or a frontend that has to be faster and more distinctive than a theme allows.
Then you build headless: a Next.js frontend with the commerce engine behind it. That engine can be Shopify (through the Storefront API or Hydrogen), or an open-source engine such as Medusa or Saleor that you host yourself. You get full freedom in design, speed and integrations, and you pay for it: €25,000 to €100,000 for the first version and a team to maintain it. For 9 out of 10 SME stores that is too early. For the tenth it is the only way to keep growing.
RABZI estimate: an online store from RABZI starts at €7,500 excl. VAT (Launch: Shopify or WooCommerce, configured theme, payments, shipping, accounting integration), from €14,500 for Growth (custom theme, integrations, B2B) and from €29,500 for Flagship (headless, ERP or PIM, multi-store). Delivery in 6 to 12 weeks, fixed price, everything is yours. See online stores and e-commerce, our approach for retail and e-commerce or the full pricing.
Migrating without losing rankings
Switching platforms costs rankings if you do it carelessly, and nothing if you do it right.
- Inventory every URL that has traffic or links (Search Console, analytics, Ahrefs or Semrush).
- Build a redirect map from old to new URL, one to one, with 301 redirects. On Shopify almost every product URL changes, plan for it.
- Carry the content over: titles, descriptions, alt text, reviews, metadata. Having AI rewrite products without review is a classic mistake.
- Preserve structured data and internal links.
- Migrate outside peak season and monitor Search Console daily for the first 6 weeks.
The full checklist is in website redesign SEO migration checklist.
Frequently asked questions
Is Shopify more expensive than WooCommerce? On the license yes, over 3 years usually not. Shopify costs €27 to €289 per month plus apps; WooCommerce is free, but hosting, premium plugins and maintenance together cost €150 to €400 per month. For an SME store the total 3-year cost is close either way.
Does iDEAL work on Shopify? Yes. Shopify Payments supports iDEAL and Bancontact with no extra transaction fee, and Mollie is available as an alternative. The transition from iDEAL to Wero runs through your payment provider and requires no change to your store.
Is WooCommerce better for SEO than Shopify? WooCommerce gives more control over URLs and structure, Shopify is faster out of the box. For most stores the platform makes no difference: content, product data, speed and authority decide your rankings. With thousands of products in deep categories, WooCommerce's freedom is an advantage.
Can I switch from WooCommerce to Shopify or the other way later? Yes, products, customers and orders can be exported and imported with tools such as Matrixify or Cart2Cart. The theme and custom features are rebuilt. With a solid redirect map and preserved content, a migration costs no rankings.
Conclusion
In 2026 Shopify and WooCommerce are both mature platforms, and the wrong choice is rare. Shopify buys you peace of mind and scale for a fixed monthly fee, WooCommerce buys you control and ownership at the price of maintenance. If you outgrow both, headless custom development is the logical next step. Not sure which platform fits your store? Book an intro call, we will run the 3-year numbers for your situation and give you an estimate with a fixed price and date.