If you are starting an online store in South Africa, the choice usually comes down to two platforms: Shopify and WooCommerce. Both are proven, both run thousands of South African stores, and both can be the right answer. The differences show up in how you pay for them, how they handle local payments, and how much control you keep.
The basic difference
Shopify is a hosted service. You pay a monthly subscription and Shopify runs everything: hosting, security, updates. You rent the store.
WooCommerce is a free plugin that turns a WordPress website into a store. You host it yourself (or your developer does) and you own every file. You own the store, and you are responsible for looking after it.
What it costs in South Africa
Shopify
- The monthly plan is billed in US dollars, so your rand cost changes with the exchange rate.
- Shopify Payments is not available in South Africa. You need a third-party gateway such as PayFast, Yoco or Peach Payments, and Shopify charges an extra transaction fee on top of the gateway's own fee when you do. The percentage drops on the higher plans.
- Many features come from paid apps, also mostly billed monthly in dollars. A few apps can quietly double what you thought the store would cost.
WooCommerce
- The plugin is free, and there is no platform fee on your sales. You pay your gateway's fees and nothing to WooCommerce.
- You pay for hosting, which can be billed in rands with a local provider, plus maintenance.
- Some extensions are paid, often as yearly licences.
- The real cost is upkeep. WordPress, WooCommerce and plugins need regular updates and backups. Skip them and the store becomes a security risk.
As a rough rule: on low sales volumes Shopify is often simpler and comparable in cost. As turnover grows, Shopify's percentage on every sale adds up, and WooCommerce's fixed costs start to look better.
South African payment gateways
Both platforms connect to the main local gateways: PayFast, Yoco, Peach Payments, Ozow and others. The difference is in the details. Check that the gateway you want supports instant EFT, which many South African shoppers prefer over cards, and that refunds work from inside your store rather than through a separate dashboard. We compare the gateways themselves in our guide to taking payments online in South Africa.
Shipping and couriers
South African delivery is its own problem: remote areas, couriers with different rate structures, collection points and the occasional parcel that goes missing. Both platforms can connect to local courier aggregators and calculate rates at checkout, usually through an app or plugin. Ask early which couriers you want to use, because it affects which integrations you need and what checkout looks like.
Speed and SEO
Both can rank well on Google. Shopify is consistently quick out of the box but limits some technical SEO settings, such as fixed URL structures. WooCommerce gives full control over URLs, page structure and content, but its speed depends heavily on hosting and how many plugins are installed. A slow, overloaded WooCommerce store will lose to a lean Shopify one every time, and the reverse is also true.
Control and ownership
With WooCommerce you own the code, the database and the customer data on your own hosting. You can move host, change developer or customise anything. With Shopify you can export your products, customers and orders, but the store itself, its theme and its apps live on Shopify's platform and on its terms.
Which one should you choose?
Choose Shopify if you want to launch quickly, do not want to think about hosting or updates, have a fairly standard product catalogue, and are comfortable with dollar billing and transaction fees.
Choose WooCommerce if you already have a WordPress site, want rand-based costs and no fee on every sale, need unusual features or integrations, or want full ownership of the store and its data — and you have someone to maintain it.
Choose neither if you sell one product, one event or a short campaign. A full online store is overkill there. A single, well-built checkout page does the job at a fraction of the cost and effort.
And if your catalogue needs to sync with stock, quoting or an accounting system, the platform matters less than how it connects to the rest of your business. That is worth scoping before you choose either.