Selling online, without the feature-list theatre
Almost every comparison of ecommerce platforms counts features, which is close to useless: every serious platform has the features. The real decision is structural, and there is only one question in it: do you want to own the selling stack, or rent certainty about it?
The hard parts of selling are not the shop front
Payment security. Fraud. Tax in places you have never visited. A checkout that does not lose a fifth of its customers on mobile. Staying upright when a campaign lands overnight. A platform subscription makes every one of those someone else's permanent operational problem: that, and not the storefront, is what you are buying. Evaluate it as a website cost and you will reach the wrong answer.
The platform route
Shopify
Certainty instead of ownership: the whole selling stack as one subscription, with none of it the merchant's problem at 3 a.m.
Anyone whose job is selling rather than building: no technical team, no appetite for one, and a strong preference for a checkout that already converts.
- · Checkout, payments, tax and fraud handling arrive productized
- · Peak-season traffic is scaled by the platform, not by the merchant
- · Apps instead of plugins: a narrower catalogue, but a far smaller maintenance surface
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The assembly route
The alternative is building the stack yourself: typically WooCommerce on managed hosting. You take on updates, security and scaling; you get no platform fees, full control of the checkout, and a data model you define. It pays off at high volume, when the sale is unusual enough that a standard checkout cannot express it, or when owning the stack is strategic. Otherwise it is usually a more expensive route to a worse checkout.
If that is your direction, start with what e-commerce hosting needs and the managed side of that market.
Learn the parts a platform won't do for you
The platform handles checkout and compliance. It will not tell you what to sell, how to price it, or why your product pages don't convert, which is where the actual work is.
The infrastructure a store sits on
A platform hides all of this from you, which is precisely why it helps to know what is being hidden.
PaaS (Platform as a Service)
PaaS is a hosting layer that takes your source code and turns it into a running application for you, owning the machines, the runtime, the build, the routing, the certificates and the restarts, so that shipping becomes a push rather than a project.
SSL/TLS
SSL/TLS is the protocol that encrypts the connection between a browser and a server and, by way of a certificate signed by a certificate authority, proves the server is entitled to answer for the domain in the address bar.
Domain Name
A domain name is an address in the internet's public namespace that you rent through a registrar for a yearly fee, and it remains yours only while the registrar account holding it stays paid up and under your own control.
CDN (Content Delivery Network)
A CDN is a worldwide network of servers that answers requests for your site from a location near the person asking, instead of sending every request back to the single machine your site runs on.
Common questions
Platform or build it myself?
A platform rents you certainty about the hard parts: payments, fraud, tax, a checkout that converts. Building it yourself buys ownership and no platform fees, in exchange for updates, security and scaling becoming your job. Neither is the serious choice; they are different jobs to hold.
When do platform fees stop being worth it?
When they exceed what real hosting plus maintenance plus somebody's hours would cost you. That crossover moves as you grow, which is why the comparison is worth re-running yearly instead of settling it once at launch.
What is the part people most underestimate?
The checkout. It is the highest-leverage surface in the whole funnel and the easiest to get wrong unnoticed: a mobile checkout that loses a fifth of buyers costs far more than any subscription. Platforms win here mostly because their checkout has been tested against more traffic than yours ever will be.
Can I move my store later?
Products and customers export. Themes, apps and checkout configuration do not, so a migration is a rebuild that reuses your data. Register your domain in your own account and the exit stays open: not free, but open.
Last reviewed 3 October 2026 · Getting Digital