You have three options when you build an online store. A hosted platform like Shopify, where the company runs everything. WooCommerce, where you run WordPress and control it yourself. Or a custom build, where developers code the store for you.
Most people start with Shopify vs WooCommerce, then wonder if a custom build is worth it. There is no best ecommerce platform. The right one depends on what you sell, and on who fixes the site when it breaks at 2am.
Every price below comes from the vendor's own pricing page, read on 8 September 2026. Where a company does not publish a price, we say so instead of guessing. Five of the payment providers in this guide publish no prices at all.
The three options at a glance
| What matters | Shopify | WooCommerce | Custom build |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who runs the servers | Shopify | You or your host | You |
| Who applies security updates | Shopify | You | You |
| Monthly platform fee | From 29 dollars | None for the plugin | None |
| Time to a working store | Days | Weeks | Months |
| Ceiling on what it can do | Real, but higher since 2025 | Very high | None |
| Who to blame at 2am | Shopify | You | You |
All three work. The mistake is picking one that does not fit your store. Most stores that regret their platform did not pick badly. They picked without knowing what the second year costs.
The cost of each option
Ecommerce website cost is where most comparisons go wrong. They quote the subscription and stop. The subscription is rarely the biggest cost.
Shopify
Shopify pricing has four paid tiers. The number you see depends on whether you pay monthly or yearly. Paying yearly cuts the price by about a quarter.
These are from Shopify's own pricing page, read on 8 September 2026.
| Plan | Paid monthly | Paid yearly |
|---|---|---|
| Basic | 39 dollars a month | 29 dollars a month |
| Grow | 105 dollars a month | 79 dollars a month |
| Advanced | 399 dollars a month | 299 dollars a month |
| Plus | From 2,300 dollars a month | Not published |
There is also a free Agentic plan at 0 dollars a month. It is for selling through AI channels only. You pay transaction fees instead of a subscription.
The Plus price depends on the length of the contract. Most write-ups quote 2,300 dollars. Shopify's own help page shows that rate applies to a three year term. A one year term is 2,500 dollars a month. So the figure most people quote locks you in for three years. The one year rate is 200 dollars more a month, which is 2,400 dollars more a year.
Card fees are not one number either. On Basic, Shopify Payments charges 2.9% plus 30 cents on a standard card. On a premium card, which Shopify says includes all domestic Amex and business cards, it is 3.5% plus 30 cents. Cards from abroad add another 1%. So 2.9% is the best case, not the average.
WooCommerce
The WooCommerce plugin is free. Its own pricing page confirms the core platform is free to use, including no revenue share on your sales.
That is true, but it is not the full cost. A WooCommerce store still needs hosting, a payment gateway and someone to maintain it. WooCommerce says so on its own pricing page, which gives a range instead of one number. 25 to 350 dollars a month for most stores, rising with traffic.
Two hosting traps to know, both from the hosts' own pages:
- SiteGround publishes its intro price and its renewal price. The renewal is roughly six times the intro rate.
- Hostinger advertises from 3.99 dollars a month, but its page states plans are paid upfront. That rate requires paying for 48 months upfront.
The free Storefront theme is official, so a paid theme is not a required cost.
Custom and headless commerce
Headless commerce means keeping a platform for the back end while you build your own shop front. Custom does not have to cost more. Some tools are free.
- Shopify Hydrogen is free and MIT licensed. Oxygen, the hosting for Hydrogen, is included on paid Shopify plans, though Oxygen enforces hard runtime limits.
- Medusa is MIT licensed and free to self host. Its managed Cloud publishes real prices: 29, 99 and 299 dollars a month.
- Saleor is BSD licensed. Its Cloud starts at 1,599 dollars a month, which includes up to 200,000 dollars of monthly sales, then charges 0.8% above that.
What you pay for with custom is not the licence. It is the servers, and the person who keeps them running. Medusa's own deployment guide lists the pieces you must run and keep running. Those are the costs of going custom.
One 2025 change removed a common reason to go custom. Shopify raised its product variant limit from 100 to 2,048 for every merchant. So "we have too many variants" is rarely a real reason now.
Who fixes it when it breaks
People regret who maintains the store more often than they regret the price.
With Shopify, updates and safety patches are Shopify's job. With WooCommerce, they are yours. This is not a criticism of WooCommerce. You get control, and you do the work.
Two lines from WooCommerce's own documents:
- On security: "PCI DSS compliance is ultimately the responsibility of the store owner." The plugin itself is not PCI certified.
- On support: "We do not give general WordPress support." You are pointed to the WordPress.org forums instead.
So a WooCommerce store needs one named person in charge of updates. If nobody has that job, missed updates become the problem, not the platform.
How Shopify and WooCommerce compare on page speed
These numbers come from real visitors, not from a lab test.
Shopify stores pass Core Web Vitals more than twice as often as WooCommerce stores, according to the HTTP Archive Web Almanac 2025. The gap is the same size on mobile. WooCommerce stores fail on loading speed, not response speed.
Speed also affects search rankings. Google states plainly that Core Web Vitals feed its ranking systems. So platform choice is partly a search question.
The current pass marks:
| Metric | What it measures | Good |
|---|---|---|
| LCP | How fast the main content appears | Under 2.5 seconds |
| INP | How fast the page reacts to a tap | Under 200 milliseconds |
| CLS | How much the layout jumps | Under 0.1 |
The gap reflects how the average store on each platform is built, not a hard ceiling. A well built WooCommerce store can be faster than a badly built Shopify one. Lab tests also score differently from real visitors, so trust the real visitor data above. If speed is your problem, that is technical SEO work rather than a platform migration.
The same crawl found an ecommerce platform running on 19.9% of desktop sites and 19.2% of mobile sites. Shopify does not lead among the biggest sites either. Among the top 1,000 sites, the platforms that appear are Amazon Webstore, Magento and Pattern by Etsy. Shopify is absent.
Shopify does not publish a merchant count, so every "X million Shopify stores" number you read is an estimate.
If you sell in the UAE
Everything above applies anywhere. If you are looking at ecommerce website development in Dubai, these are the details that change the real bill.
Shopify is cheaper here, and billed in dollars
Shopify's UAE pricing page shows lower prices than its US one. Basic is 32 dollars a month, or 24 dollars paid yearly, against 39 and 29 in the US. Grow is 92 or 69, against 105 and 79. Advanced and Plus are the same worldwide.
But every plan price on that page is shown in US dollars. There is no dirham plan price. You pay whatever your card issuer charges to convert. A Plus contract runs three years, so that conversion cost applies the whole time.
Add 5% VAT to the subscription
UAE merchants are charged 5% VAT on top of the Shopify subscription. To be exempt, enter a valid 15 digit Tax ID in the admin. You also certify you are a VAT taxpayer. On Basic billed monthly, that turns 32 dollars into 33.60.
The expensive detail: Shopify Payments is still early access here
Shopify Payments is available in the UAE. But Shopify's own help page carries an early access banner. Its rules page says you must be on an Advanced or Plus plan. Access goes to selected merchants only.
So most UAE stores use a third party gateway. And Shopify charges a fee of its own. The third party transaction fee is 2%, 1%, 0.6% or 0.2%, depending on your plan. You pay it as well as whatever the gateway charges. On Basic that is 2%, charged on every order for as long as you stay on that plan.
Do that sum before you pick a plan. A store on Basic paying a gateway 2.5% and Shopify another 2% is paying 4.5% of revenue to take money. Moving to a higher plan cuts that fee, and the total cost can be lower.
When Shopify Payments is available, the UAE version accepts Visa, Mastercard and Maestro. Payouts default to dirhams, take a minimum of five business days, and anything under 20 AED is held.
Gateways: who publishes a price and who does not
We checked five providers' own sites.
| Provider | Publishes UAE pricing |
|---|---|
| Stripe | Yes, a full rate card in AED |
| Telr | Yes, a tiered rate card |
| WooPayments | Yes, its UAE card fee is published in dirhams |
| PayTabs | No |
| Checkout.com | No rate published. It does hold a UAE acquiring licence and states there are no setup fees |
One warning about Telr. Its pricing page serves two conflicting UAE rate cards from the same URL depending on screen size. So do not trust a quoted Telr figure, including ours. Ask them in writing.
And one WooCommerce specific limit: a UAE store cannot open a WooPayments Individual account. WooCommerce's documentation states that businesses in the UAE do not have that option, so you need a company entity.
Instalments: Tabby and Tamara
Both work in the UAE. Both plug into Shopify.
- Tabby has an official Shopify app published by Tabby itself. Its payment app only accepts orders billed to the UAE and Saudi Arabia.
- Tamara has an official Shopify app and its own WooCommerce plugin. It received a restricted finance licence from the Central Bank of the UAE on 20 October 2025.
Tabby and Tamara do not publish their merchant fees. Tamara's merchant contract also lets Tamara raise those fees on ten days notice. Get your rate in writing and check that clause.
On the customer side Tamara does publish figures. Its Key Fact Statement lists a 0% processing fee on Split in 2 and Split in 3.
Cash on delivery and the number we could not verify
You will read that cash on delivery is 50 to 60 percent of UAE ecommerce. We could not trace that to a primary source. It appears in paid market reports that cite each other. Cash on delivery still matters here, and returns cost money.
Arabic is not a translation setting
If your store needs Arabic, this can decide which platform you pick.
Shopify puts Arabic layout on your theme, not on Shopify. Its Help Center says right to left support depends on the theme. Its Theme Store rules require a lang attribute but never ask for right to left support or a dir attribute.
So we checked Dawn, Shopify's own free reference theme. Dawn does not output dir=rtl, includes no right to left stylesheet, and has no Arabic locale file at all.
The bigger problem is the checkout. Shopify's checkout includes pre-translated content in 33 languages, and Arabic is not one of them. The admin can be switched to Arabic. It supports 36 languages, including Arabic and Hebrew. The checkout your customer sees cannot.
Two more Shopify limits worth knowing. Product tags cannot be translated at all, which its developer docs state outright. The marketing says up to 20 languages on standard plans and 30 on Plus. The API documentation states a flat 20 locale limit, with no plan exception.
WooCommerce is the other way round. WooCommerce handles right to left stylesheets in its own source code. But WordPress core is not multilingual, and says so. You add a plugin for the languages.
On both platforms, you have to handle hreflang yourself. Google's hreflang rules are strict. Each page must point back, point at itself, and use the right code format. A bilingual store easily gets all three wrong. On WordPress, hreflang never comes from core at all. It comes from a plugin or from theme code.
For an Arabic first store, Shopify needs a theme truly built for right to left, and the checkout stays in English. WooCommerce handles the layout in core and needs a plugin for the rest. Neither is automatic. If two languages matter to you, decide this before you pick, not after.
When custom is the right answer
Custom is right less often than agencies say and more often than platform vendors admit. Custom wins in three cases, each one documented by the platforms themselves.
- Unusual pricing rules. commercetools documents up to 50,000 standalone prices for one product variant. If you price per customer, per contract or per region at that scale, hosted platforms are a poor fit.
- Many countries or many brands at once. commercetools builds this in as standard.
- Deep links into your ERP. commercetools publishes a guide for ERP integration. It says to put a middle layer between the two systems, not to connect them directly.
One warning if you go headless on Shopify. Its API rate limits scale by plan, and they are a documented ceiling. Plan for those limits before you build, not after the store goes live.
This is the same decision as any custom software build. The question is never whether custom is better. It is whether your rules genuinely do not fit a platform.
How to choose, in order
Search for how to build an ecommerce website, and you get a tool list. The tool is the last decision, not the first. Answer these five questions in order instead. The first clear answer usually settles the choice.
- Who maintains the store? No named person means Shopify.
- How fast do you need to sell? Days means Shopify. Weeks means WooCommerce is fine.
- How will you take payment? In the UAE, check whether you qualify for Shopify Payments. If not, add Shopify's third party fee to your gateway rate and compare properly.
- Do you need Arabic? If yes, check the theme handles right to left before you buy it. And accept that Shopify's checkout will not be in Arabic.
- Are your pricing or stock rules too unusual for standard software? Only then consider a custom build.
If the answers point in different directions, follow the maintenance answer. A store nobody updates becomes a security problem, and that costs more than any subscription.
We build on all three, so we have no favourite. Want a second opinion on a platform you already chose? Our ecommerce website development and Shopify development pages set out how we work. If your store is built and simply not converting, that is a conversion problem rather than a platform one.
