WooCommerce is the most widely used eCommerce solution in the world. They are powered by the WordPress platform and the base software is free. Woocommerce is made easier when you have a knowledgeable person setting it up for you and showing you how to maintain it.

Shopify is easier to use out of the box (so to speak) if you are doing it on your own and have monthly fees to run.

Both options are large and successful, meaning they both have a lot of support (add-ons) to extend the usefulness of the store.

Woocommerce comes with the ability to use Stripe or Paypal as a gateway to be paid by your customers. If you would like to use a more robust merchant solution, there will be costs involved to extend the WooCommerce software to be able to take advantage of that.

Shopify offers its gateway and charges you the merchant fees directly.

Though Shopify has more sales features, the support and control of WooCommerce make it a preferred choice for us. With Shopify, you have layout options and you can customize the site. It is a hosted solution, as their software has to be on their servers and you point your domain name to them. It will function as your website, but you don’t have full control. Their customizations are more time-consuming to perform, as opposed to WooCommerce integrating with WordPress and your theme. WooCommerce is easier for the developer to be able to offer anything you want with custom features and fully integrate into your site without having to leave an idea or two behind for the sake of Shopify’s control on using their paid service.