Clients often arrive with a platform already chosen by a cousin or a YouTube video. My job is to sanity-check it against the catalogue, the team, and the acquisition plan.
WooCommerce wins when the rest of the business already lives in WordPress — blog, landing pages, Elementor funnels, multilingual service pages. I can keep SEO, content, and commerce in one admin. That matters for a pharmacy or a fragrance brand that needs editorial pages as much as SKUs. It also means I am responsible for hosting, updates, and the plugin diet.
Shopify wins when the client wants a store that is mostly a store. Checkout reliability, app ecosystem, and a buyer already trained on the Shopify pattern are real advantages. I have built and maintained Shopify sites for service-adjacent retail when the marketing site and the cart did not need to be the same CMS.
The questions I ask: How many SKUs, and how weird are the variants? Who fulfils — the client or a third party? Where will ads land — product URL or a campaign page? Who will edit the homepage next month, a marketer or nobody? Do we need custom checkout fields that a plugin war will punish?
Performance is not automatic on either platform. A heavy Shopify theme with six apps is as slow as a neglected WooCommerce stack. I still compress images, kill carousels, and keep the first viewport honest.
Migration is its own project. Redirects, reviews, customer accounts, and pixel continuity matter more than a pretty homepage on day one. I plan DNS and the cutover the way I plan any WordPress migration: backups, staging, and a morning when someone is awake to watch checkout.
There is no moral victory in WooCommerce or Shopify. There is a store that matches the way the business actually sells. I will recommend either, then I will build it so the ads have somewhere decent to land.
