Clients ask "Shopify or WooCommerce?" as if one of them is simply better. They solve the same problem in opposite ways: Shopify is a hosted service you rent, WooCommerce is free software you install on a WordPress site you host and maintain. Almost every other difference follows from that.
Here are the numbers worth bringing to that conversation, as of 3 November 2026.
What Shopify costs
Shopify's pricing page for Pakistan listed (prices vary by country):
| Plan | Billed monthly | Billed yearly |
|---|---|---|
| Basic | US$25 | US$22/mo |
| Grow | US$65 | US$58/mo |
| Advanced | US$399 | US$359/mo |
| Plus | from US$2,300 |
Hosting, SSL and bandwidth are included. On top: apps, and a third-party transaction fee if you take payments through anything other than Shopify Payments. The Pakistan pricing page listed that fee on 30 October as 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow and 0.6% on Advanced.
What WooCommerce costs
The plugin is free. You pay for hosting, a domain, usually a premium theme and paid extensions, and someone's time to keep WordPress, plugins and PHP updated. WooCommerce adds no transaction fee of its own. Its gateway, WooPayments, has no monthly fee and charged 2.90% + US$0.30 per US card payment on 3 November 2026. It's available in 38 countries.
The fee maths that decides it in some markets
Shopify Payments isn't available to merchants in Pakistan, so every card payment on a Pakistani Shopify store pays the gateway plus Shopify's fee. On Basic, PKR 1,000,000 a month in card sales means PKR 20,000 a month to Shopify before the gateway's cut. WooCommerce has no equivalent.
Two things narrow the gap: cash on delivery (still most first orders in Pakistan) carries no Shopify fee, and moving from Basic to Grow halves the rate.
SEO, from a developer's side
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Shopify gives you a sitemap, canonical tags and fast hosting without effort. URLs are fixed: products under
/products/, categories under/collections/. Apps are the main speed risk, since each can inject scripts on every page. - WooCommerce gives you full control of URLs, templates and the server. That control cuts both ways: speed depends on your host and plugin hygiene, and one careless plugin can create duplicate URLs across the site.
Neither ranks a store on its own. Category pages and content do.
The honest rule of thumb
Pick WooCommerce when the client already runs a content-heavy WordPress site, has a developer on retainer, or sells at high card volume where Shopify Payments isn't available. Pick Shopify when the client wants to sell, not maintain servers, and nobody wants to own security patches.
If they switch later, the risk is search traffic. Build the 301 redirect map before launch, not after.
Full article: Shopify vs WooCommerce in 2026: Costs, Fees and Which to Choose
I'm Asad, I run Loop2Tech, a technology studio in Karachi building Shopify stores and custom software. We build on Shopify, so weigh my view accordingly, and tell me where you'd disagree.
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