WooCommerce vs Shopify and WordPress.com: Own Your Store

Hosted store platforms are convenient, but two costs hide in the fine print: a per-sale platform fee, and feature gating that pushes you up the pricing tiers. A self-hosted WooCommerce store has neither. Here’s the real comparison in 2026.

Pricing verified June 2026 against shopify.com, wordpress.com, and AWS us-east-1 rates.

The platforms

Option	Monthly	Per-sale fees	Store owned by
Shopify Basic	$39 ($29 annual)	2.9% + 30¢ card, +2% if not Shopify Payments	Shopify
WordPress.com Commerce	$70	Card via your processor (0% platform)	WordPress.com
Self-hosted WooCommerce	~$46–61 all-in	Your gateway (0% platform)	Your AWS account

The per-sale platform tax

The line that adds up: Shopify charges an extra 2% on every sale unless you use Shopify Payments, on top of the normal card processing everyone pays. On a store doing $20,000/month through a third-party gateway, that’s about $400/month, roughly $4,800/year, scaling with every dollar of sales.

WooCommerce has no platform fee. You bring Stripe or PayPal at the same ~2.9% + 30¢ card rate everyone pays, and keep the difference.

What self-hosting costs

A production WooCommerce stack on AWS, with a Redis object cache and MariaDB:

Software: ~$28/month with a managed appliance (or free if you build it)
Compute: t3.small ~$15/month, t3.medium ~$30/month
Card processing: your gateway’s standard rate, same as anywhere

That’s roughly $46–61/month flat, with no platform cut and no per-product or per-staff limits.

Beyond price: ownership

Plugin and theme freedom. WordPress.com’s lower plans block third-party plugins and Shopify gates features behind higher tiers. Self-hosted WooCommerce runs any of the 60,000+ WordPress plugins, with full theme and checkout control.
Portability. Your store, theme, customer list, and order history live in your AWS account, exportable and portable, never on a platform that can reprice or restrict you.

When a hosted platform wins

Pick Shopify if you want zero server management, a polished checkout with built-in payments, and its app ecosystem, and you don’t mind the per-sale cut. WooCommerce wins when you want to own the store, avoid platform fees, and customize without limits, with the hardening, TLS, and database handled for you.