Shopify vs WooCommerce for Australian stores in 2026

If you are choosing between Shopify vs WooCommerce for an Australian store, almost every article you will find was written for an American one, with American card fees, American carriers and no GST. The maths is different here, and so is the shortlist of things that break. We build both, as our websites page says, and we run more than fifteen stores of our own on WooCommerce, so this is the comparison we make with our own money. Where Shopify is the better answer, we say so, because the alternative is a store owner paying us to build the wrong thing.

What we run, and why

Every Solkarra store runs on WooCommerce, on WordPress, on hosting we manage ourselves. Four of those stores sell from one shared stock count through Solkarra Stock Manager, and the stock hub behind them holds more than 4,500 products. We say this first because it colours everything below, and a comparison that hides which side the writer is on is not worth reading.

We chose WooCommerce for three reasons that apply to us and may not apply to you. We run many stores, so a per-store platform fee multiplies. We sell products that need long descriptions, comparison content and a great deal of custom structure, which is easier to build on WordPress. And we write software, so the parts Shopify sells as apps we would rather write once and run across the fleet. A single store, run by one person, with no developer on call, has none of those three reasons.

Three-year cost at three revenue steps

Year one is the wrong comparison. Shopify’s costs are mostly monthly and scale with sales; WooCommerce’s are mostly up front and then flat. Table 1 runs both over three years at three revenue levels. Every fee in it is read from the vendor’s own published pricing page on the date given, and it is wrong the day either vendor changes a price, which is why the date is printed.

Fees last checked: 22/09/2026

Cost line	Shopify	WooCommerce	Notes
Platform or software fee	A$42/mo Basic, A$114/mo Grow, A$431/mo Advanced (annual billing; A$56, A$149 and A$575 billed monthly)	A$0 (WordPress and WooCommerce are free software)	Shopify plan tier depends on features needed
Hosting	Included	A$25.95 - A$73.54 /mo (WordPress Hosting) With us: $A0.00 (Solkarra Hosting included in our annual fee)	WooCommerce hosting quality decides page speed
Payment processing	1.7% + A$0.30 (Basic) 1.55% + A$0.30 (Grow) 1.35% + A$0.30 (Adv.) (Shopify Payments, online)	1.75% + A$0.30 domestic cards (WooPayments)	Both add a per-transaction cent amount
Third-party gateway penalty	2% on Basic 1% on Grow 0.6% on Advanced 0.2% on Plus	A$0	Matters if you want a specific bank gateway
Apps and plugins	A$21 a month (Judge.me, US$15)	Custom plugins hold a variable cost. Free usage of existing Solkarra Plugins & features.	Shopify apps bill monthly; WooCommerce plugins yearly
Build	A$0 with Dawn, or A$702 one-off for a paid theme (Impulse, US$500)	Quoted after scoping (see /websites/)	WooCommerce build costs more up front
Maintenance and updates	Included	Maintenance & Management included in annual fee. ($199-499/yr)	The line WooCommerce owners forget
Three-year total at A$50,000 revenue a year	A$5,195	A$3,597	WooCommerce ahead by A$1,598
Three-year total at A$250,000 revenue a year	A$16,895	A$15,597	WooCommerce ahead by A$1,298
Three-year total at A$1,000,000 revenue a year	A$58,862	A$60,597	Shopify ahead by A$1,735

Every figure in Table 1 was read from the vendor’s own published pricing page on 22 September 2026, and it is wrong the day either vendor changes a price. Our own lines are our published prices.

• How the totals are built: an average order value of A$120, all payments taken on domestic cards online, and the cheapest Shopify plan that fits the revenue. Build is excluded from both columns, because one is a theme purchase and the other is quoted after scoping.
• Maintenance is in both columns. Shopify includes platform updates in the plan fee. The WooCommerce column carries our annual fee at A$499, the top of the A$199 to A$499 range, which covers Solkarra Hosting, maintenance and management. At A$199 the WooCommerce totals read A$3,597, A$15,597 and A$60,597.
• The Shopify plan that wins is not the one you expect. Basic is cheaper than Grow right up to about A$576,000 of revenue a year, because Grow’s extra A$864 a year in plan fees only pays for itself once 0.15% of revenue exceeds it. Basic caps staff accounts and inventory locations, and that is the reason to move up, not the card rate.
• The app and plugin lines are not symmetrical, because the platforms are not. Product reviews are built into WooCommerce and cost A$253 a year on Shopify through Judge.me. The WooCommerce column sits at A$0 because the plugins we install are free; a store that buys two or three premium extensions adds A$300 to A$800 a year, and the gap at A$250,000 closes.
• Costs that are identical on both platforms are left out of both columns. Klaviyo is the clearest one: US$20 a month at 500 contacts, US$45 at 1,500 and US$720 at 50,000, charged the same whichever platform sends the orders.
• GST is excluded on vendor fees, because a GST-registered business claims it back. WooPayments adds 10% GST to its fees for Australian merchants and zero-rates it once you supply a valid GST ID.
• US prices are converted at the RBA rate of 0.7124 US dollars to the Australian dollar, published 21 September 2026. Shopify’s introductory offer of $1 a month for three months is excluded from the totals; it saves about A$123 on Basic in year one.

The shape the table takes, whatever the exact figures land on, is this. At low revenue Shopify is cheaper, because a WooCommerce build has to be paid for before a single order. As revenue grows the percentage fees on Shopify grow with it, and the flat costs on WooCommerce do not, so there is a crossover. Where the crossover sits depends most on the payment fee difference and the app bill, which is why those two rows matter more than the plan price everyone quotes. The ecommerce website cost in Australia is, over three years, mostly fees rather than build.

The Australian specifics

These are the things that decide it for an Australian store more often than the platform fee does.

• GST and price display. Australian consumer law expects the displayed price to be the price paid, GST included. Both platforms can do it. On Shopify it is a store setting to include tax in prices. On WooCommerce it is a tax option plus a check that every theme template shows the inclusive figure. Get it wrong on either and the first customer to notice will tell you.
• Australia Post and Sendle. Live rates and label printing for both exist on both platforms, as apps on Shopify and as plugins on WooCommerce. The difference is who pays the monthly fee for the connection and whether the free tier covers your volume.
• Payment gateways. Shopify Payments and WooPayments both take Australian cards and both let you settle to an Australian bank account. If you want a specific bank’s gateway or a specific processor, Shopify adds a percentage on top for not using its own; WooCommerce does not care which you use.
• Buy now pay later. Afterpay and Zip are available on both. On Shopify they are apps or built into Shopify Payments depending on the plan. On WooCommerce they are the provider’s own plugin. Fees are the provider’s, not the platform’s, either way.
• Click and collect. Both do local pickup. WooCommerce does it with the built-in shipping method; Shopify does it with a location setting. Neither needs an app.
• Market stalls and a counter. This one is real. Shopify POS is built in and works on an iPad with a Shopify card reader. WooCommerce has no first-party POS; you connect a separate terminal and either accept two stock counts or sync them. We built our own connection for exactly this reason, and it was not a small job.

Pick Shopify if

We would tell you to pick Shopify when most of these are true.

• One person runs the store. Nobody is on call for updates, backups or a plugin that broke checkout overnight. Shopify handles all of it and you never see a server.
• You sell at markets or from a counter as well as online. The built-in POS with one stock count is the single strongest reason to pick Shopify in Australia.
• You have under about a hundred products with simple options. Size and colour, not fifteen attributes and a configurator.
• You want to launch this month. A Shopify theme and a day of setup gets you selling. A WooCommerce build is quoted after scoping and can take weeks.
• Your margins can carry the fees. If a two to three percent difference on every sale is noise against your margin, the simplicity is worth it.
• You are not planning heavy content. A store that is mostly product pages, with a short blog, does not need WordPress’s publishing tools.

Pick WooCommerce if

We would tell you to pick WooCommerce when most of these are true, and we picked it for our own stores because all of them were.

• You run more than one store, or plan to. Per-store platform fees multiply; a WooCommerce build can be copied.
• Content is part of how you sell. Guides, comparisons, long product descriptions, categories with real copy on them. WordPress was built for publishing and it shows.
• Your catalogue is large or complicated. Hundreds of variable products, custom fields, bundles, wholesale pricing tiers. WooCommerce handles it without an app per feature.
• You want to own every part of it. Your database, your files, your theme, on a host you can leave. Nothing on the site belongs to a platform.
• You have, or are paying for, someone technical. A maintenance retainer, a developer or a habit of reading update notes. Without one, the flexibility becomes a liability.
• You are already on WordPress. A business site with a shop bolted on is the classic WooCommerce case, and it keeps one login and one design.

SEO differences that are real, and the ones that are not

Much of what is written about Shopify SEO in Australia and WooCommerce SEO is folklore. Google does not care which platform generated the HTML. What differs is how much control you have, and how fast the pages are.

The real differences on Shopify: URL structure is fixed, so products sit under /products/ and collections under /collections/ whether you like it or not; the robots.txt and the sitemap are generated for you with limited editing; and duplicate product URLs through collections are a known nuisance the canonical tag has to tidy. On the other side, Shopify hosting is fast by default and you cannot break it with a bad plugin.

The real differences on WooCommerce: you control every URL, every tag and every line of the sitemap, which is how we were able to fix the meta on all sixteen pages of our own site in one afternoon through our tooling. The cost is that speed is your problem. A WooCommerce store on cheap hosting with a page builder and thirty plugins will lose to a stock Shopify theme on Core Web Vitals, and no SEO plugin fixes that. We run our own stores with no page builder for this reason.

The differences that are not real: neither platform ranks better “because Google prefers it”, neither needs a specific SEO app to be indexed, and the blog on either is only as good as what you write on it. Track your own positions and stop reading claims. SolSEO does that from A$24.99 a month, with a free plan, and our own stores went from page two to the top three on Google for Asiatic Bows and other stores we own using it. Past tense, our stores, no promise attached.

What migrating each way costs, and what does not come with you

People move both ways, and both directions lose things.

• URLs. Shopify’s fixed structure means a WooCommerce store moving to Shopify changes every product and category address. Redirects are essential and Shopify lets you set them. Moving the other way you can often keep the old paths, which preserves rankings.
• Reviews. Product reviews live in whichever app or plugin collected them. Export and import is possible if both ends support it; check before you move, because rebuilding social proof from zero is the expensive part.
• Subscriptions. Recurring billing is tied to the payment gateway’s stored cards. Moving platforms usually means moving processors, and stored cards do not move. Every subscriber re-enters their card or churns.
• Customer passwords. Never migrate. Customers get a reset email on either platform. Tell them first.
• Discount codes, gift cards and store credit. Partial at best. Budget a day to rebuild them by hand and a week of support emails afterwards.
• The theme. Nothing about the design moves. A migration is a rebuild with the data carried across.

We have experience migrating stores from Shopify to self-hosted WooCommerce. Don’t hesitate to reach out for assistance or guidance.

The short version

One person, one store, a counter or a market stall, and margins that can carry the fees: Shopify, and we will say so if you ask us. More than one store, heavy content, a large or awkward catalogue, and someone technical on call: WooCommerce, which is what we run ourselves and what you can see live on our archery stores. If you want the Table 1 maths run on your own revenue and your own product count, tell us the numbers and we will send the comparison back with a written price, GST inclusive, for whichever side it lands on.

Frequently asked questions

Is Shopify or WooCommerce better in Australia?

Neither is better outright. Shopify suits a single store run by one person, especially one that also sells at a counter or a market. WooCommerce suits stores with heavy content, a large catalogue or more than one storefront, and someone technical to maintain it. The Australian fees and carriers work on both.

Is WooCommerce cheaper than Shopify?

Up front, no. A WooCommerce store has to be built and hosted before it sells anything, while Shopify starts on a monthly plan. Over three years the answer depends on revenue, because Shopify’s payment and app fees grow with sales and WooCommerce’s hosting and maintenance do not.

Does Shopify charge GST in Australia?

Shopify charges GST on its own subscription and fees for Australian merchants, and the store can be set to display customer prices GST inclusive, which Australian consumer law expects. Check the invoice line for the exact treatment on your plan, as the vendor’s published terms decide it.

Can I use Afterpay with WooCommerce?

Yes. Afterpay and Zip both publish their own WooCommerce plugins, and the merchant fees are set by the provider rather than by WooCommerce. Shopify offers the same providers as apps or through Shopify Payments, depending on plan. The customer experience is much the same on either platform.

Is Shopify good for SEO in Australia?

Shopify is fine for SEO. Its hosting is fast and its pages index normally. The limits are a fixed URL structure, limited control of robots.txt and the sitemap, and duplicate URLs through collections that the canonical tag has to manage. None of those stop a well-written store from ranking.

Can I move from Shopify to WooCommerce?

Yes, in either direction. Products, customers and orders can be exported and imported. What does not move is the theme, customer passwords, stored cards for subscriptions and often reviews and gift cards. Plan redirects for every URL, or the move costs you the rankings you had.