E-commerce
Shopify vs Wix vs WooCommerce vs a custom build
Most platform comparisons argue about features. The decision is usually settled by a percentage, and by whether you can avoid it in the country you sell from.
7 min read
Every platform comparison you have read argues about features. Themes, apps, page builders, SEO controls. Those matter, but they are almost never what decides the answer, because all four options can build a decent shop.
What decides it is a percentage: the share of every order that leaves your business before you have paid for the product, the shipping or yourself. That number is easy to find, easy to compare, and almost never the thing these articles lead with.
First, ignore the market share arguments
They contradict each other, and both sides are telling the truth.
By number of stores, WooCommerce leads comfortably, sitting somewhere around a third of all shops depending on who is counting. By share of high-traffic sites, Shopify leads, taking close to twenty-nine per cent of the top million e-commerce sites against WooCommerce’s eighteen. Wix eCommerce sits near one and a half per cent of measurable origins (GravityKit’s 2026 compilation).
Those are not competing claims, they are different questions. WooCommerce wins on count because it is free to install and a great many of those installs are tiny. Shopify wins at the top because stores doing real volume tend to migrate to it. Neither tells you what your shop should run on.
Shopify
What it is good at: the checkout, which is the part nobody should be building from scratch, and the operational surface around it. Abandoned cart recovery, multi-currency, shipping rules, tax, Shop Pay. If you sell physical products and want to spend your time on the products, this is the default for good reason.
The number that matters: Shopify takes an additional cut if you use any payment gateway other than Shopify Payments. It is 2.0% on Basic, 1.0% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced and 0.2% on Plus, charged on top of whatever your gateway already charges (Shopify Help Centre).
Read that carefully, because it is the single most consequential line in this article. On Basic with a gateway charging 2.9% plus 30 cents, your real cost is 4.9% plus 30 cents per order. On a store turning over $40,000 a month, that surcharge alone is $800.
If you can use Shopify Payments, the surcharge disappears and none of this applies. Whether you can is not a preference. It depends on where you are.
Wix
What it is good at: getting a small catalogue online quickly, by someone who is not a developer, on a predictable bill. For a brand with twenty products and no technical staff, that is a real answer and dismissing it is snobbery.
The number that matters: Wix charges its own transaction fee on the lower tiers, around 4% on Core and 2% on Business, which only disappears on Business Elite (Wix pricing breakdown, 2026). The pattern is the same as Shopify’s: the cheap plan is not the cheap plan once you multiply it by volume.
Where it stops: as catalogue and order volume grow, you hit the edges of what the platform will let you change. That is not a bug, it is the trade you accepted for not having to maintain anything.
WooCommerce
What it is good at: control, and no platform cut. It is a WordPress plugin, it is free, and nobody takes a percentage of your orders.
The number that matters: the one nobody quotes. WooCommerce is free the way a puppy is free. A production-ready store runs roughly $50 to $150 a month once hosting, plugins and maintenance are counted, and the features that arrive built-in elsewhere, subscriptions, cart recovery, advanced checkout, are paid extensions bought one at a time (StackScale’s 2026 cost breakdown).
You are also now responsible for uptime, security patching and the plugin conflicts that arrive when six vendors update independently. If you have a developer, that is fine. If you do not, you have bought a job.
A custom build
What it is good at: everything the platforms refuse to do. A B2B portal with tiered pricing, a quote request flow instead of a cart, a configurator, a catalogue with product logic no theme anticipated. We have built exactly this where a storefront would not have fitted.
The number that matters: nobody takes a cut. You integrate a payment provider directly, pay their rate and nothing above it. Against Shopify Basic with a third-party gateway, that is a 2% swing on every order, permanently.
The honest counterweight: you pay for the build once and for maintenance forever, and you inherit responsibility for PCI scope, checkout edge cases, fraud handling and the tax rules of everywhere you sell. Platforms earn their percentage. The question is whether they earn yours.
Rough arithmetic. If a custom build costs somewhere in the tens of thousands and saves 2% of revenue, it pays for itself in the low hundreds of thousands of turnover, sooner if the platform could not do the job at all. Below that, you are paying to own a problem.
The part most comparisons skip entirely
Every article above assumes you can use Shopify Payments. A large number of merchants cannot, because it is not offered in their country.
Türkiye is one of them. Shopify Payments is not available there, on account of local banking regulation and BDDK licensing, so Turkish merchants have to run a local gateway such as iyzico, PayTR or Craftgate (Nodus Works, Shopify Türkiye guide). Those are good providers. The problem is what sits on top of them.
A Turkish merchant on Shopify Basic is not choosing to use a third-party gateway. They have no alternative, which means the 2% surcharge is not avoidable by switching processors. It is a permanent tax on selling from that country, and it does not appear in a single feature comparison table.
That inverts the usual advice. In a market where Shopify Payments is available, the surcharge is a footnote you route around. Where it is not, it is one of the strongest arguments for a custom build that exists, and it strengthens as you grow.
The short version
| Situation | Build on |
|---|---|
| Physical products, Shopify Payments available in your country | Shopify |
| Small catalogue, no technical staff, predictable bill | Wix |
| You have a developer and want no platform cut | WooCommerce |
| B2B, quoting, configurators, logic no theme allows | Custom |
| Shopify Payments unavailable where you sell, and volume is real | Custom, and run the numbers first |
| Under roughly $10k a month, whatever the country | A platform. Almost always |
The pattern underneath all of it: a platform charges you a percentage to avoid a problem, and a custom build charges you money to own it. At low volume the percentage is small and the problem is large, so platforms win. As volume rises the percentage grows and the problem stays the same size, and at some point they cross. Knowing roughly where that crossing sits for your numbers is most of the decision.
We build both, which is why this is not a pitch for one. Most of the stores we have shipped are on Shopify, because for most catalogues that is the right call. The ones we wrote from scratch were written because a storefront genuinely could not do the job, not because building was more interesting.
If you are weighing it up, tell us the numbers and we will tell you which one we think it is, including when the answer is the cheaper one.
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