You are not really choosing software. You are choosing whether the hard parts of selling online are your problem or someone else's — and paying a percentage for the answer.
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.
Affiliate disclosure: links to Shopify on this page are affiliate links — signing up through them may earn us a commission at no extra cost to you. It doesn’t change what we say here; the caveats stay in.
Most Shopify comparisons count features, which is close to useless because every serious platform has the features. The decision is structural: do you want to own the selling stack, or rent certainty about it? Everything else — themes, apps, the admin UI — is detail hanging off that one answer.
Selling online has a small number of genuinely hard problems, and none of them are the shop front. Payment security and compliance. Fraud. Tax in jurisdictions you have never visited. A checkout that does not quietly lose a fifth of your customers on mobile. Staying upright when a campaign lands and traffic multiplies overnight.
A platform subscription makes all of those someone else's operational problem, permanently. That is the product. Judged against that, the monthly fee is not the expensive part of the decision — and people who evaluate it as a website cost usually reach the wrong conclusion.
The cost curve is the thing to watch
Platform pricing is percentage-shaped: a subscription plus payment processing, with extra transaction fees if you bring your own payment provider. Current numbers belong on Shopify's pricing page, not in a review that will age. The structural point outlives any price change — your costs grow with your success rather than flattening, so re-run the comparison annually rather than once at launch.
The alternative is building the stack yourself — typically WooCommerce on managed hosting, where Liquid Web sits in this market. You take on updates, security and scaling, and in exchange you get no platform fees, complete control of the checkout, and a data model that is yours to define.
That trade pays off in three situations, and honestly not many others: when volume is high enough that percentage fees exceed real hosting-plus-maintenance costs; when the sale itself is unusual enough that a standard checkout cannot express it; or when owning the stack is strategic rather than incidental. If none of those describe you, assembly is usually a more expensive way to arrive at a worse checkout.
| If this is true | Lean |
|---|---|
| Nobody on the team wants to run infrastructure | Platform |
| Your checkout needs to do something unusual | Assembly |
| Fees have become a line item you audit | Reconsider assembly |
| You are testing whether the product sells at all | Platform |
| Owning the customer data model is strategic | Assembly |
Whatever you choose, own the front door
Register the domain in your own account and point it at the store with DNS. Platforms change, and the address customers know — plus the email attached to it — is what you carry out the door. This is the cheapest insurance in commerce and the most commonly skipped.
One more framing worth keeping: Shopify is also a hosting decision, because choosing it means choosing never to think about servers. We cover that angle separately in our hosting take on Shopify, alongside the rungs you would be skipping.
Usually yes, early on — precisely when you can least afford to spend attention on compliance, fraud and checkout optimisation. The calculation inverts as volume grows and percentage-shaped costs compound, which is why it is worth re-running once a year rather than treating launch-day maths as permanent.
Price WooCommerce honestly before comparing: hosting, premium plugins, and somebody's hours for updates and security. Costed that way, the platform usually wins at small volume and loses at large. There is no universal answer — only your volume in both models.
Products and customers export. Themes, apps and checkout configuration do not translate, so migrating is a rebuild that reuses your data rather than a transfer. Keeping the domain in your own account keeps the exit open — not free, but open. The same is true in the other direction.
Yes, in the only sense that matters to a store owner: there is no server in your job description. It will not host arbitrary sites or applications — it hosts exactly one thing, a store. See [our hosting take](/hosting/shopify/) for how that compares to the other rungs.
PaaS is a cloud layer where you hand over code and the platform does the rest — provisioning, runtimes, scaling and deployment — trading infrastructure control for development speed.
TLS (still widely called SSL) is the protocol that encrypts traffic between browser and server and proves, via certificates, that the server really speaks for its domain — the mechanism behind the padlock and the S in HTTPS.
A domain name is a rented address in the internet's namespace — registered through a registrar for annual fees, controlled entirely by whoever holds the registrar account, and independent of wherever the website behind it happens to be hosted.
A CDN is a network of servers spread across the world that keeps copies of your site's content close to visitors, so requests are answered from a nearby edge location instead of traveling to your origin server.
