Shopify vs WooCommerce for Australian Stores (2026)

WooCommerce is free and Shopify starts at $56 a month AUD, and neither of those facts tells you anything useful about what a store costs to run. Once you put a real trading business on either one, the gap between them narrows to something like a few thousand dollars a year, and the decision stops being about price at all. It becomes a question about who is going to be responsible when something breaks at 11pm on a Thursday during a sale.

That's the honest framing, and it's not the one either platform's marketing leads with. Shopify sells the plan fee. WooCommerce sells the word "free". Both are technically true and both are close to useless as a basis for a decision.

What Shopify actually charges in Australia

Shopify's Australian pricing page quotes in AUD, which is a genuine convenience and worth noting up front. Basic is $56 a month billed monthly, Grow is $149, Advanced is $575, and Plus starts at $3,700. Commit to annual billing and the first three drop to $42, $114 and $431 respectively.

That figure buys more than it looks like it does. Hosting, the SSL certificate, PCI compliance, security patching, uptime, and the checkout itself are all inside the price. You do not think about any of them again. For a lot of store owners that's the entire value proposition, and dismissing it as "just a website builder" misses what's actually being purchased.

The card rate is where the plan tiers do their real work. Shopify Payments charges 1.75% + 30c on Basic for a standard domestic online transaction, 1.6% + 30c on Grow, and 1.4% + 30c on Advanced. Use a different processor and Shopify adds a third-party transaction fee on top — 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced — which is a charge for using someone else's gateway, not a card fee.

Then there are the apps, which is where most Shopify invoices actually get decided. We've broken that down line by line in our piece on Shopify's real monthly cost in Australia; the short version is that a modest, defensible app stack lands a mid-size store somewhere north of $400 a month AUD in recurring platform cost, and most of those apps bill in USD.

What "free" costs on WooCommerce

WooCommerce's own pricing page is refreshingly upfront about the fact that free means free-of-licence, not free-of-cost. It states the platform fee as $0 and then immediately lists hosting at $25 to $350 a month, extensions at $29 to $299 a year each, and payment processing at roughly 2.5–2.9% plus 30c. Those numbers read as US-shaped, and the Australian reality is a little different in both directions.

Hosting first. You genuinely cannot run a trading store on the $5-a-month shared hosting tier that WordPress blogs live on — a store runs uncached, database-heavy requests on every cart and checkout hit, and shared hosting falls over under exactly that load. WP Engine quotes Australian customers directly in AUD: A$42 a month for Startup, A$76 for Professional, A$155 for Growth. Kinsta prices in USD and marks its $50-a-month single-site plan as the first tier it recommends for ecommerce, which is about $70.50 AUD a month converting at 1.41 USD to AUD. Call it $900 to $1,900 AUD a year for hosting a store you'd be comfortable running a Black Friday campaign on.

Extensions are the pleasant surprise. WooCommerce.com prices in AUD for Australian visitors, which the Shopify App Store largely does not. WooCommerce Subscriptions is $402 AUD a year on the annual plan. AutomateWoo, the marketing-automation extension, is $229 AUD a year. Those are annual licences rather than monthly subscriptions, they include updates and support, and they don't drift with the exchange rate every month the way a USD-billed Shopify app does. Two or three serious extensions is a manageable annual number, and it's a genuinely better deal than the equivalent app stack.

The payment processing surprise

Here's the part that upends most of the comparison articles you'll find on this.

WooCommerce's own fee documentation lists WooPayments in Australia at 1.75% + 30c for a domestic card, with an extra 1.5% if the card was issued overseas and 2% on top of that if the customer pays in another currency. GST applies to the fees, though GST-registered merchants with a valid ID can be zero-rated.

Compare that to Shopify. WooPayments at 1.75% + 30c is exactly the same rate as Shopify Basic. On Shopify Grow it's 1.6% + 30c, which is cheaper than WooCommerce. On Advanced it's 1.4% + 30c, cheaper again.

So the received wisdom — that WooCommerce saves you money because there are no platform transaction fees — is only half right. There's no Shopify-style surcharge, true. But the underlying card rate on WooCommerce's own processor is no better than Shopify's entry tier, and worse than its middle one. On a store turning over $480,000 AUD a year, the difference between 1.6% and 1.75% is about $720 a year, and it runs in Shopify's favour.

The line item that isn't on either pricing page

WordPress core is remarkably solid. The plugins around it are the problem. Patchstack's State of WordPress Security whitepaper recorded 11,334 new vulnerabilities across the WordPress ecosystem in 2025, a 42% increase on the year before, with 91% of them in plugins and only six in core itself.

That statistic is not an argument against WordPress. It's an argument about who does the updating. A WooCommerce store is a stack of independently-maintained software that needs someone to apply patches, test that the patch didn't break the checkout, and keep backups that have actually been restored at least once. On Shopify, that work is inside the $56. On WooCommerce, it is either a line in someone's job description or a monthly retainer, and it is never zero. We've written about how that cost accumulates in the real cost of WordPress maintenance in Australia.

Budget it honestly and the two platforms converge. Ignore it and WooCommerce looks cheap right up until the month it isn't.

A year of running costs, side by side

Take a hypothetical Australian store: $480,000 AUD a year in sales, average order value $120, so roughly 4,000 orders. One sales channel, needs reviews, email automation and subscriptions. Annual billing on everything available. This is a made-up store, not a client, and your numbers will differ — but the shape holds.

Shopify comes to roughly $12,050 AUD. WooCommerce comes to roughly $11,150 AUD before maintenance. A $900-a-year gap on a store turning over nearly half a million, which is close enough to a rounding error that it shouldn't drive the decision either way. Assume any serious maintenance figure and WooCommerce is the more expensive of the two.

Who each one genuinely suits

Shopify suits a business where nobody wants to think about infrastructure. If you're selling across a physical shop and an online store, Shopify's point-of-sale sync and multi-location inventory replace a large and expensive piece of custom engineering. If you're selling on Instagram, a marketplace and your own site at once, the channel integrations are mature. If your team isn't technical and the answer to a new requirement needs to be "install something" rather than "raise a ticket", that's a real trade and worth paying for. A non-technical founder who needs to be live in six weeks should stop reading comparison articles and open a Shopify account.

WooCommerce suits a business with unusual requirements and someone competent to maintain it. Complex pricing rules, trade accounts with different rates, product configurators, deep integration with an existing ERP or accounting system, or a content-heavy site where the shop is one part of a much larger publication. It also suits anyone who wants the data and the code to be genuinely theirs, on hosting they chose, with no possibility of a platform changing its terms underneath them. That last one matters more than it sounds like it does — we've tracked what website builder pricing has done since 2024, and the direction has only ever been one way.

What neither platform is, is a performance strategy. A Shopify theme loaded with six app scripts and a WooCommerce store running twenty plugins both end up slow in the same way, for the same reason, and slow storefronts lose conversions and search visibility regardless of which logo is on the invoice.

The decision underneath the decision

If the two platforms cost roughly the same to run, the question isn't which is cheaper. It's whether you want to rent a solved problem or own an unsolved one. Both are defensible. What isn't defensible is picking WooCommerce because it's free, discovering the maintenance burden eighteen months in, and then paying to move — replatforming is a real project with a real timeline, and we've written about what moving an Australian store actually involves.

If you're weighing this up for a store that's already trading, book a 20-minute call and we'll go through your actual order volume, processing rate and app or plugin stack and tell you which way the numbers point. Sometimes the answer is stay where you are, and we'll say so. Call us on 0421 933 907 if it's easier to talk it through.