WooCommerce or Shopify: which one should you choose for your online shop in Spain?

If you sell fewer than 50 product lines and want to start tomorrow, Shopify. If you need control, content and no sales commission, WooCommerce. That is the short answer, and for most projects in Spain it is enough.

The long answer depends on three things: how much you are going to invoice, how much you want to rely on a supplier, and whether content SEO is part of your plan.

Direct comparison

Criterion	WooCommerce	Shopify
Licence fee	Free, you pay for hosting and plugins	Fixed monthly payment
Sales commission	Just the walkway	Gateway, plus commission if you don't use theirs
Commissioning	Slower	Very fast
Code control	Total	Limited
Content SEO	Brilliant, it's WordPress	Correct, but with structural limits
Maintenance	Yours or your firm's	Shopify runs it
Portability	You take everything	Migrating is expensive

When Shopify is the right choice

• You want to make sales this week and you don't have a tech team
• Bounded and stable catalogue
• The bulk of the traffic is going to come from social networks or advertising, not Google
• You prefer a predictable fee to managing servers

Shopify removes friction. That is its virtue, and it is no small thing. The price is that you play by their rules.

When WooCommerce is worth it

• The content is part of your strategy: guides, comparison articles, blog
• You need to integrate with an ERP, a CRM or a proprietary stock system
• You sell in multiple languages with URLs and metadata per language
• Volume makes commissions weigh heavier than maintenance
• You want to be able to switch providers without rebuilding the store

The calculation almost nobody makes

The comparison is not monthly fee versus hosting. It is total three-year cost, commissions included.

With low turnover, Shopify's fixed fee works out well because the maintenance of WooCommerce weighs proportionally heavily. Beyond a certain volume the equation reverses, because a percentage point on each sale grows with your turnover and maintenance does not.

Do the numbers with your realistic forecast, not the optimistic one. And add the cost of migrating if you're wrong, which on Shopify is high because templates and apps don't get along.

Common mistakes when choosing

• Choose based on what an acquaintance uses, without looking at the business model
• Installing WooCommerce on cheap shared hosting and then blaming the platform
• Install thirty plugins to replicate features that Shopify comes with as standard
• Forget about multilingual support until after the launch, by which time it already dictates the URLs
• Exclude VAT and Spanish invoicing from the integrations budget

Frequently asked questions

Can you migrate from Shopify to WooCommerce?

Yes, and it is done frequently. Products and customers migrate well. The design is redone and the apps have to be replaced one by one.

Is WooCommerce slow?

Poorly set up, yes. With suitable hosting, caching and optimised images, it performs perfectly. The slowness almost always comes from accumulating plugins.

Which ranks better on Google?

Because it is WordPress, WooCommerce gives more control over URL structure, content and structured data. Shopify ranks well, but you run into its limits sooner.

What if I sell in Spain and abroad?

Both work. The difference lies in how you manage languages, taxes and shipping. That is the part that eats up the most budget and the one that is most underestimated.

How shall we frame it

We don't have a favourite platform. We ask about projected turnover, catalogue, languages and integrations, and the recommendation comes from that. You can see the details at brand launch and e-commerce.

Before deciding on a platform, it is best to have your branding finalised, and that is what this is for this web pricing guide. Write to us and we can see it with your figures.