WordPress vs Shopify: Which Actually Suits an Australian Online Shop?

We build on both, and we have migrated stores in each direction. In about a third of those jobs the migration solved nothing, because the platform was never the problem. Before you pick a side, understand what each actually costs in Australian dollars, including the fees that only appear on your third statement.

What you are actually choosing between

Shopify is a hosted product. You rent a shop. Shopify runs the servers, handles PCI compliance, patches security and takes a cut. You permanently lose control of some things, including checkout on lower plans and parts of your URL structure.

WooCommerce is software you install on hosting you rent. Nobody is responsible for it except you or whoever you pay. In exchange you own the database, the code, the URLs and the customer records. That one difference explains almost every trade off below.

Real total cost of ownership in AUD

Shopify

Australian plan pricing sits near AUD 51 a month for Basic, AUD 132 for Grow and AUD 535 for Advanced, before GST, with discounts for annual billing. Check current figures before you budget. Plus starts around AUD 3,500 a month and is not a small business decision.

Then the fees. Shopify Payments charges about 1.75 per cent plus 30 cents per domestic card transaction on Basic, roughly 1.6 per cent on Grow and 1.4 per cent on Advanced, plus about 2 per cent for international cards. Use any other gateway and Shopify has historically added up to 2 per cent on Basic. That fee alone talks most Australian merchants into Shopify Payments.

Then apps, where store owners get caught. A typical Australian store we inherit runs:

• A review app, roughly AUD 25 to 60 a month.
• Email and SMS such as Klaviyo, from about AUD 30 a month and rising fast with list size.
• Shipping and labels such as Starshipit or Shippit, roughly AUD 60 to 150 a month.
• Subscriptions or bundles, roughly AUD 30 to 100 a month.
• A page builder, roughly AUD 30 a month, usually bought because the theme could not do one section.

Add a paid theme at a one off USD 300, and a modest store lands between AUD 200 and 400 a month all in. That is normal, and invisible in every comparison that quotes only the plan price.

WordPress and WooCommerce

The plugin is free. Nothing else is. Realistic Australian numbers:

• Hosting that survives a real store, AUD 30 to 120 a month. Shared hosting at AUD 8 a month falls over at your first email campaign, because carts and accounts cannot be cached.
• Premium plugins, commonly AUD 400 to 1,200 a year once you add subscriptions, bookings, shipping rules and a decent product search.
• Security, backups and uptime monitoring, AUD 15 to 40 a month done properly.
• Maintenance. Someone must test updates before applying them. Two to four hours a month, or a retainer.

Payment fees on Woo are whatever your gateway charges, with no platform surcharge. Stripe in Australia is about 1.7 per cent plus 30 cents domestic. At AUD 40,000 a month in sales, dropping from a 2 per cent effective rate to 1.7 saves about AUD 1,440 a year. Real, but often less than the developer you now need on call.

Woo is cheaper in cash and dearer in attention. If nobody enjoys fixing websites, that trade is bad for you.

Ease of use, day to day

Shopify is genuinely easier. Adding a product, running a discount, refunding an order, checking which variant is out of stock: a few clicks each, and the admin has not changed shape in years. Staff learn it in an afternoon.

WooCommerce is fine once someone sets it up well and confusing when they do not, mostly because it sits inside WordPress. A staff member editing a product can also, with two wrong clicks, edit the homepage. We lock that down with roles on every build, but out of the box it is not tidy.

Blunt version: if the person managing the store is not technical, choose Shopify. That costs us work, because Woo builds bill more hours. Still the right advice.

Payments: Stripe, Afterpay, Zip and PayPal

Australian shoppers expect buy now pay later. Leaving Afterpay off a fashion or beauty store costs conversions, and you will see it in cart abandonment.

On Shopify, Afterpay, Zip, PayPal and the mobile wallets are all a few minutes of setup, and Shop Pay accelerates checkout for returning shoppers across the Shopify network. That last part is a real conversion advantage Woo cannot copy.

WooCommerce has the same options through official plugins, with Stripe covering cards, wallets and Afterpay in one integration. Setup is fiddlier and you own the testing. Afterpay and Zip set their own merchant fees, roughly 4 to 6 per cent plus a fixed amount, so nobody is undercutting anybody there.

The trade off underneath: Shopify checkout is hosted, tested at enormous scale and impossible for you to break. Woo checkout is yours to change, which is what makes trade accounts, purchase orders and tiered pricing possible without begging an app developer.

Shipping and Australia Post

This is the real battleground for Australian stores. Freight here is brutal, and a flat rate that is wrong by five dollars per order quietly eats your margin.

Shopify supports live carrier calculated rates including Australia Post, though on lower plans that has historically required an annual plan or a paid add on. Most serious Australian stores end up on Starshipit or Shippit anyway for rates, labels and tracking. Budget for it from day one.

WooCommerce has an official Australia Post extension, and because you control the code you can build rules hosted platforms refuse to entertain: bulky item surcharges by postcode, free shipping only within metro Melbourne, separate wholesale rules, cubic weight on awkward products. On Shopify those mean another app or Functions work on a higher plan.

GST, invoicing and the accountant test

Australian consumers expect prices including GST. Both platforms handle it, and both need configuring deliberately.

Shopify lets you set Australia as a tax region, show prices inclusive of tax and mark GST free products such as most basic food. What annoys accountants is invoicing: the default order confirmation is not always a compliant tax invoice, so B2B sellers add an invoice app or connect Xero. WooCommerce needs the same setup done manually plus a PDF invoice plugin showing your ABN and the GST component.

Both connect to Xero and MYOB. Neither should be trusted without your bookkeeper checking one real order before launch. Do that test every time.

POS and selling in store

If you have a shop or sell at markets, this is close to decisive. Shopify POS is properly good. Lite is included, Pro costs around AUD 130 per location per month and adds what a real shop needs: staff permissions, stocktakes, exchanges, in store pickup and unified inventory across online and physical.

WooCommerce has POS options such as Oliver and FooSales. They work, but they are third party bolt ons rather than native. If retail is half your revenue, this is where I stop arguing and tell clients to use Shopify.

Content, blogging and SEO

Now the direction reverses. WordPress is the best content management system normal people can operate: taxonomies, custom post types, custom fields, and control of every URL on the site.

Shopify blogging is weak. No meaningful taxonomy beyond tags, a basic editor, and URLs locked into patterns like /products/, /collections/ and /blogs/news/. You cannot put a product at a clean root level URL, and collection and filter combinations generate near duplicate pages that need canonical tags handled properly in the theme. Shopify has improved a lot on technical SEO and speed, and its default output beats most badly built Woo sites, but it will not let you build the content architecture that ranks for informational queries.

If you buy traffic through Google Ads and social, the URL structure will never bother you. If you earn it through content marketing, WordPress gives you room Shopify does not.

Scaling, and where each one breaks

Shopify does not fall over. That is the whole pitch and it is true. It breaks differently: eventually you want something the platform will not permit, and your options are an app that half fits, an upgrade to Plus, or a workaround your staff perform manually forever.

WooCommerce breaks the boring way. Traffic spikes, the database slows, admin takes eight seconds to load, one plugin fights another. All solvable with proper hosting, object caching and discipline, and all requiring someone competent. A Woo store with 20,000 orders and no maintenance plan is a bad afternoon waiting to happen.

Migration difficulty

Woo to Shopify is the easier direction. Products, customers and order history migrate through tools such as Matrixify with a day or two of cleanup. Your URLs change, so you need a complete redirect map. We have watched more than half of a store's organic traffic disappear because redirects were an afterthought.

Shopify to WooCommerce is harder. Data comes across, but you rebuild theme logic, apps become plugins that behave differently, and customer passwords cannot transfer, so everyone resets on first login. Budget three to six weeks. See our recent projects or our ecommerce builds for how each behaves in practice.

The verdict, by business type

One note on that fifth card, because people ignore it. If you sell six products and turn over AUD 2,000 a month, a full store build plus AUD 300 a month in subscriptions is a bad investment. Our small business websites start at AUD 399 plus GST and moving up to a real store later is straightforward. Prove demand first, then spend.

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