WooCommerce or Shopify: Which Suits a Small UAE Online Store?

Sooner or later, everyone planning an online store lands on the same question: WooCommerce or Shopify? Ask a developer and you will usually hear whichever one they build on. So let's get our own bias out of the way. We build WooCommerce stores, which means we are not a neutral party. What follows is as fair as we can make it, and that includes the cases where Shopify is the better choice.

Shopify publishes four plans. At the time of writing, Basic is US$39 a month, or US$29 a month if you pay yearly, and the next plan up, Grow, is US$105 a month, or US$79 yearly. In dirhams, Basic works out at roughly AED 1,300 to 1,700 a year. WooCommerce itself costs nothing; what you pay for is the build, the hosting and the domain.

Shopify is a hosted service. You rent it by the month, and hosting, security and updates come with the plan. The trade-off is that you work within Shopify's rules, and the bill grows as your needs do.

WooCommerce is a free plugin that turns a WordPress site into a store. You choose the hosting, you own the site and its database, and you can change almost anything. The trade-off is that someone has to look after updates, backups and speed.

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All figures excluding 5% VAT. Shopify prices are in US dollars on its pricing page and converted at the AED peg of 3.6725.

The honest reading is this. If you build the store yourself, Shopify costs less on day one. If you want it built for you, someone has to do that work on either platform, and from then on WooCommerce is cheaper to run, because there is no monthly plan and no platform fee.

Shopify adds its own fee to every order paid through a gateway other than Shopify Payments: 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow and 0.6% on Advanced, on top of whatever your gateway charges. Shopify Payments is now listed for the UAE, but who can use it, and on which plan, has changed over time and depends on your documents, so ask what your own account is offered before you plan around it.

Here is what that fee looks like in practice. A shop taking AED 10,000 a month through a third-party gateway on the Basic plan pays an extra AED 200 a month, which is AED 2,400 a year, for nothing in return. WooCommerce adds no platform fee whichever gateway you use, though your gateway still charges its own rates on both platforms.

With WooCommerce the store is yours: the files, the database, the design. If you want to change host, you move it. With Shopify you can export your products, customers and orders, but the store itself stays on Shopify, and leaving means rebuilding the storefront somewhere else. Many businesses never leave and never mind. It is still worth knowing before you commit.

Shopify looks after updates and security for you. WooCommerce needs someone to keep the plugins current, take backups and keep an eye on speed. That is the real cost of the freedom. In our packages it is covered by three months of support and a training session at the start, and after that by Priority Support if you want someone to handle plugin updates, payment faults and order problems for you (AED 3,000 a year). If you would rather do none of it, that points towards Shopify.

Both platforms can show prices with 5% VAT and run in Arabic, but how well they do it depends on the theme and the plugins, not the feature list. Whichever you pick, ask for a live demo in Arabic and click through it on a phone. Right-to-left layouts are easy to get slightly wrong.

• You will build and run the store yourself and want hosting to be somebody else's problem.
• You need to be live within days.
• You would rather pay a monthly fee than a one-off build.
• You expect to use Shopify Payments and have confirmed it is available to you.

• You want someone to build the store and look after it.
• You want running costs to stay low as sales grow.
• You want to own the site and the data, and keep the option to move.
• You already have a WordPress site and want to add a shop to it.

• What will the platform and gateway fees come to on a normal month's sales?
• Which payment gateway can I actually open an account with, and what does it charge?
• Who does the updates and fixes, and what does that cost?
• If I want to leave in three years, what do I take with me?
• Can I see a live demo in Arabic?

There is no wrong answer here, only a better fit for how you plan to run the shop. If you are still unsure, tell us roughly what you sell and how many products you have, and we will give you a straight view on which way to go.

Sources: Shopify pricing | Shopify Payments supported countries