Shopify vs WordPress: Who Owns Your Store?

Name: Web60
Address: Block B, Maynooth Business Campus, Straffan Rd, Maynooth, Co. Kildare, W23 W5X7, IE
Price range: €60/year

Shopify does not sell you a shop. It rents you a shopfront they own, on a street they control, under rules they change whenever it suits them.

I have been running WordPress hosting infrastructure for more than twenty years, and I spent a good chunk of last month on calls with Irish retailers who are five figures deep into Shopify bills and starting to ask themselves an uncomfortable question: have they actually built anything? The honest answer is no. They have built a storefront inside Shopify's estate. They do not own the building. They do not hold the keys. Their customer data sits on Shopify's servers, behind Shopify's API, bounded by Shopify's export limits. The day they decide to leave, most of what they built leaves with them as a 15MB CSV and a long apology to their marketing team.

That is not a website. That is a subscription to someone else's platform.

This is not a takedown. Shopify is a well-engineered product, and for a specific shape of business it is genuinely the right call. I will come back to that. But too many Irish retailers are paying premium rent for a shop they believe is theirs, and I want to explain, in plain numbers, what that rental arrangement actually looks like at month twelve.

The Sticker Price Is the Start, Not the Total

Shopify's Basic plan is listed at $39 per month on monthly billing, or $29 per month on the annual pre-pay, according to Shopify's own pricing page. Call that roughly €27-36 a month at current exchange rates, so somewhere around €325 to €430 a year for the platform alone.

That number is the hook. It is not the total.

The Basic plan does not include a domain. It does not include Shopify's richer analytics, it does not include email marketing beyond a modest allowance, and it does not include inventory across multiple locations, advanced reports, or most of the B2B functionality. Every one of those capabilities exists inside Shopify, but as an upgrade, an add-on, or an app. Shopify's commercial model is a freemium ladder: the published price gets you through the door, and the apps keep the lights on once you are inside.

Imagine the alternative. You take the sticker price at face value. You plan your business around €30 a month. Six weeks after launch you are staring at a card statement with four app subscriptions on it, trying to remember which one is for abandoned-cart emails and which one is for the loyalty badge you never finished configuring.

Ownership starts with holding the keys.

The Payment Tax Most Owners Miss Until the Accounts Come In

This is the quiet one.

Shopify charges a transaction fee on every order: 2.9 percent plus 30 cent for cards processed online when you use Shopify Payments, per Shopify's own help documentation. That is roughly in line with what most European card processors charge directly, so by itself it is not scandalous.

The tax starts when you use anyone else.

If you want to use a third-party payment provider, one of the Irish-friendly options such as Stripe direct or a local bank gateway, Shopify adds a surcharge on top of that processor's own fee. On the Basic plan, that surcharge is 2 percent per transaction. Grow is 1 percent. Advanced is 0.6 percent. These figures come straight from Shopify's help centre.

Put that into real money. A modest Irish retailer turning over €120,000 a year online, who chose a local processor because their accountant prefers the reporting, is paying Shopify somewhere in the region of €2,400 a year on top of their subscription and on top of the processor's own fees. No additional service delivered. No risk shouldered. A platform tax for choosing a processor Shopify does not own.

You could switch to Shopify Payments and the surcharge disappears. That is the design. Once you do, one more piece of your business lives inside Shopify's walls, and moving becomes a little bit harder.

The App Store Creep

The app store is the real pricing layer.

According to industry data compiled in Nudgify's 2026 Shopify cost of ownership guide, the typical Shopify store spends somewhere between $50 and $300 a month on apps, with averages sitting near the $120 mark. Merchants install an average of around six apps; plenty of real stores run well above that. This is not the outlier. This is the median.

So the honest monthly cost of a Shopify Basic store, accounting for what a typical retailer actually installs, is closer to $150-$250 a month once you add the handful of apps most real shops end up needing: reviews, abandoned cart recovery, better shipping rules, better reporting, better email. The €325 headline becomes €2,000-€3,000 a year before transaction fees, before a domain, before any design cost.

I have recommended Shopify before to Irish operators who wanted to be selling within the week, including a craft brewery in Kilkenny of the kind I am thinking of here. They got there. The lesson that came back, consistently enough to change my advice, was that I had been quoting the sticker price without walking the client through what the cost curve actually looks like twelve months in. I do not make that pitch now without setting that expectation clearly, and a few of those conversations end with the client choosing WordPress from day one.

What You Cannot Take With You When You Leave

This is where ownership stops being philosophical.

Shopify lets you export your products and your orders. The CSV export files have documented size limits, 15MB for the main customer and product exports and 1MB for orders, per Shopify's own help documentation. If your store has any real history, you are exporting in batches. Inconvenient, not fatal.

What you cannot export is most of what actually made your store valuable. Shopify's export tools do not include your analytics history. They do not include attribution data, the record of which marketing channel brought which customer. They do not include abandoned cart timelines, customer browsing patterns, or most of the behavioural data that your marketing team spent two years compiling. These gaps are documented in independent analyses and confirmed by the scope of the Shopify Data Exporter itself.

If you decide to migrate to WordPress and WooCommerce, you can move your products, your customers, and your orders. Everything else, the years of understanding what your customers actually did inside your shop, stays with Shopify. You rebuild your analytics from launch. You lose the attribution. You lose the conversion funnels. You keep the plain facts; you lose the context.

That is not a technical limitation. That is a design choice. A platform that owns your data has every reason to make leaving expensive. For a deeper look at how migrations actually work when you control the stack, see my earlier piece on the myths that keep Irish businesses stuck with bad hosting, which applies directly to anyone looking to leave Shopify's walled garden.

Where Shopify Genuinely Wins

I promised to be fair, so here it is.

If you are running a pure drop-ship operation, a reseller funnel, or a first-time store where you want to be live tonight and you genuinely have no intention of ever owning your stack, Shopify Starter at $5 a month with a Basic upgrade when you scale is a perfectly sensible path. The onboarding is the best in the industry. The themes are solid. The payment integration is pre-built. If you were never going to run your own infrastructure, the rental makes sense.

The same applies to businesses whose entire commercial model depends on Shopify's app ecosystem, the ones selling through headless drop-ship funnels with one-click upsells and Shopify-native checkout extensions. For that workload, WooCommerce is not the right tool.

But that is not most Irish retailers. Most Irish retailers are building a business they intend to still be running in ten years, ideally in twenty. For that kind of business, rent is the wrong model.

The trajectories that diverge after month one.

What Ownership Actually Costs

The opposite end of the platform question looks different, and I want to be honest about what it involves.

WooCommerce itself is free. It is a plugin for WordPress, which W3Techs' April 2026 data puts at 43.3 percent of all websites globally, and which sits underneath a large share of the world's ecommerce stores depending on which methodology you trust. W3Techs tracks WooCommerce on 8.7 percent of all websites; StoreLeads tracks it on roughly a third of the active ecommerce stores they monitor. Both numbers are worth taking with a pinch of salt since they measure different things, but the direction of travel is clear: WooCommerce is not a niche choice.

Free does not mean no cost. Free means the cost is explicit. You pay for hosting. You pay for a payment gateway. You pay for whichever premium plugins you actually need. You are responsible for the decisions. That is both the upside and the honest tradeoff.

Here is how the numbers compare, side by side, for a small Irish retailer.

Cost Area	Shopify Basic	WordPress + WooCommerce on Web60
Platform and hosting	$39/mo ($29 on annual pre-pay)	€60/year, everything included
Transaction fees (native processor)	2.9% + 30¢	Whatever your processor charges, no platform surcharge
Third-party payment surcharge	2% on Basic plan	None
Typical app / plugin spend	$50-$300/mo, averaging near $120	Plugin-dependent, many essentials are free
Data on exit	CSV exports with size limits, no analytics	Full database export, you own everything

Web60 costs €60 per year, all-inclusive: managed WordPress hosting on the WordOps stack with Nginx and Redis object caching, nightly backups with one-click restore, one-click staging, SSL via Let's Encrypt, server-level security hardening, and Irish-based support. That is the whole bill. No platform surcharge on payments. No app tax. No renewal shock in Year Two.

WooCommerce on top of that stack gives you a full shop: products, orders, customers, payments, shipping, tax, reports. The stack matters here more than it looks. Redis object caching, in particular, is the difference between a checkout page that loads instantly and one that feels slow once you have a few hundred products and a bit of traffic, because WooCommerce hammers the database on every page load. For the full breakdown of how these caching layers compare head-to-head against the premium managed WordPress names, see our speed test results for WP Engine, Kinsta, and Web60.

The honest limitation: WooCommerce hands you ownership, but ownership includes the decisions. You pick the payment plugin. You choose the shipping integration. You decide which reviews app to install. A managed hosting platform takes the infrastructure decisions off your plate; it does not take the product decisions off your plate. If you want the platform to decide everything for you, Shopify is a better fit. If you want to decide, but not have to think about servers, SSL, or backup rotation, Web60's €60/year all-inclusive WordPress hosting is what the foundation looks like.

Conclusion

Shopify made ecommerce accessible. That is not a small thing. A whole generation of online businesses exists only because the barrier to opening a shop dropped from impossible to €29 a month. Credit where it is due.

Access, though, is not ownership. And the moment a business is serious about lasting more than a few years, the question shifts from "how fast can I launch" to "what am I actually building, and who owns it when I am done?" The answer on Shopify is clear: Shopify owns the platform, Shopify owns the data, Shopify writes the rules. The answer on WordPress is different. For Irish retailers building something they intend to still be running in a decade, that difference is the whole game, and it is worth making the choice with your eyes open.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I migrate my Shopify store to WordPress and WooCommerce without losing customers?

Yes, but with caveats. Products, customer records, and orders all migrate cleanly via CSV or through migration tools. What does not migrate is your analytics history, attribution data, and behavioural data. Expect to rebuild your reporting stack from launch. Budget time for the rebuild, not just the data move.

Is WooCommerce secure enough for a real Irish retail business?

WooCommerce runs some of the largest ecommerce stores in the world and a very large proportion of small stores internationally. Security depends primarily on the hosting layer and on plugin discipline, not on the platform itself. A managed WordPress host with server-level hardening and malware scanning removes most of the risk that bargain shared-hosting WooCommerce stores carry.

What is the real monthly cost of a small WooCommerce store on Web60?

Web60 hosting is €60 a year, all-inclusive. WooCommerce itself is free. Depending on which payment gateway you choose and whether you buy premium plugins for things such as subscriptions or advanced shipping, most small stores run between €60 and €300 a year in total software cost, plus transaction fees charged by your payment processor directly.

Does Shopify Payments save me money overall?

Only if you were already going to use Shopify. The 2 percent surcharge on the Basic plan for third-party processors disappears when you use Shopify Payments, which makes Shopify Payments the default choice once you are on the platform. The tradeoff is that it deepens your dependence on Shopify, which is the design.

Is WooCommerce harder to set up than Shopify?

Honestly, yes, if you are doing it yourself with no hosting platform in place. An AI-built WordPress site with WooCommerce pre-installed and a managed host handling updates and backups closes most of that gap. Shopify will still be faster to first order for a complete beginner. The tradeoff is the cost curve and the ownership question after that first month.

Do Irish customers care which platform I use?

No. They care whether the checkout works, whether delivery is clear, and whether the site loads quickly on their phone. The platform is invisible to them. It is visible to you, every month, in the bill.

Shopify vs WordPress: Your Shopify Store Is Not Your Shop