WooCommerce, Shopify or a custom build: which store to build
The decision usually arrives as one question: do we build the store on WooCommerce or on Shopify? And it arrives with two ready-made opinions from two shop owners you know. One stopped thinking about hosting the day he moved. The other refuses to pay anyone a monthly subscription. Each is describing his own store, not yours.
There are three options, and the third is a custom build. What separates them shows up in the shape of the cost more than in any feature list: when you pay, what the amount is calculated on, and what happens to it when sales double. All three can look identical to a buyer on a first visit. The difference turns up in the accounts two years later.
The difference starts at the payment gateway
Shopify collects in two places: a monthly subscription that is easy to work out, and a percentage of every payment. The second one applies specifically to sellers in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and it rarely appears in a comparison table.
Shopify Payments is not available in Egypt or Saudi Arabia. It is available in the UAE and in about forty other countries, most of them European. A seller outside that list has to use a local gateway, and Shopify then adds a fee on every transaction on top of whatever the gateway itself takes.
Run the arithmetic. A store doing EGP 500,000 a month on the Basic plan pays EGP 10,000 a month to Shopify alone, outside the subscription and outside what the Egyptian gateway charges. The line item appears in no comparison table, and it grows with every increase in sales.
Where the money goes in each option
WooCommerce itself is free, and the cost moves somewhere else: hosting that survives a rush of orders, paid extensions for shipping, payment and invoicing, monthly updates, backups that are actually tested, and someone responsible for the store on the day it stops. Whoever does not pay this monthly pays it later in one lump.
A custom build is the highest of the three at the start and the cheapest per order after that. No subscription, no percentage of sales, no third-party extension that breaks after an update. In exchange, everything that comes ready-made elsewhere is built from nothing, and some of it is not worth building at all.
A third line never gets asked about until it is too late: the cost of leaving. Product and customer data comes out of any platform as a file. The design, the extensions and the URL structure do not. Anyone who moves off a closed platform after three years rebuilds the storefront, resets every product link, and starts their search ranking again. That is what makes a first-year decision hard to reverse in year four.
The part no platform choice fixes
The biggest leak in an online store has nothing to do with the platform. The Baymard Institute pools fifty studies on cart abandonment and puts the average at 70.22%. When shoppers were asked why, the answers came out like this:
Two of those are technical: the shopper who did not trust the site with card details, and the shopper the site crashed on mid-payment. The rest are commercial decisions that belong to you rather than to the platform: shipping, the forced account, the number of steps to finish an order. All of them can be fixed on any of the three.
When Shopify is the right call
When margins are wide, the catalogue is small, and the priority is a store trading within weeks without a technical team. Also when you sell from the UAE, or to Europe and the United States, because the extra fee falls away. The subscription is fixed and known, and operations are somebody else's problem.
It gets expensive in the opposite case: thin margin, high sales volume, local payment gateway. The fee then turns into a six-figure annual line. What we build on the platform is set out on the Shopify stores page.
When WooCommerce fits better
When you already have a site, content and a search ranking and want to add selling to it, or when your shipping, payment and invoicing follow local rules no default setting covers. Ownership is complete, the data is yours, and nobody takes a percentage of sales.
The condition that gets skipped more often than it gets met: an annual maintenance budget that starts on handover day, not after the first outage. Our care plans are published for exactly that reason.
This is where most of the WooCommerce stores that reach us have gone wrong. Dozens of extensions installed over years, some doing the same job twice, some with no developer left to update them. The store works until the one update that takes the checkout down in peak season. What we install, and what we refuse to, is on the WooCommerce stores page.
When a custom build earns its price
When what you sell is not a product in an ordinary cart: subscriptions, bookings against a calendar, pricing that changes with quantity and customer, or a live link to stock and an accounting system already in use. And when order volume is high enough that any percentage of sales costs more than building the thing once.
It is the wrong choice for a store in its first year that does not yet know what it sells or to whom. What gets built, and how long it takes, is on the custom stores page.
Six questions that settle it
- How many orders a month do you expect a year from now, and what is the average order value?
- Which country will you take payment from, and through which gateway?
- Do your products fit an ordinary cart, or is there a subscription, a booking, or variable pricing?
- Which systems must the store connect to, and are they documented?
- Who runs the store day to day, and how technical are they?
- What have you set aside for year two, rather than for the build?
Add the build cost to three years of running cost before you compare two options. At EGP 500,000 a month in sales, the gap between the three routes in year three is larger than the entire difference in build price.
If two of the six are still unanswered, the decision is early and does not need a quote yet. If you have all six, four questions are enough to point at a route. They are at the bottom of this page, with our price for the route you land on, and they take two minutes. No email, no sign-up. Prices for all three are published on the e-commerce stores page if you would rather compare them side by side first.
