WooCommerce, Shopify or custom in 2026: real costs and real criteria

Let me start at the end. If you sell fewer than 200 products with no complex pricing, Shopify will get you to market faster and WooCommerce will cost you less over three years. A custom build is worth it only when your business logic does not fit into plugins, and that is far rarer than the people asking for it believe.

Why do I insist? Because the comparison circulating on Greek blogs is usually wrong on two counts: it copies US prices, as if we all shopped in America, and it repeats a myth about Shopify’s fees in Greece that costs people real money. Not theoretical money, money that leaves the bank account every month. So let us go through the official numbers.

Three routes, and none of them wrong on its own

Three houses: one rented and furnished, one you own and maintain, one you build from the foundations.

The risk does not disappear in any column. It just changes address.

What Shopify actually costs here, in Greece

From the official Greek pricing page, not the American one. That alone is half the job:

American Express is charged at 2.9%, 2.8% and 2.7% respectively, non EEA cards at 2.9% plus 0.25 euro, and Klarna at 4.99% plus 0.35 euro. POS Pro for a physical location costs 79 euro per month per location.

And here is the point that costs money. Shopify applies an additional fee when you use a third party payment provider instead of its own: 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced, 0.2% on Plus. Many Greek articles present this as unavoidable, on the argument that Shopify Payments is not available in Greece.

It is available. The official list of supported countries includes Greece. I have heard the opposite many times, from people who repeated it with total confidence. So if you set up your store with a Greek bank through a third party provider because someone told you there was no alternative, you are paying 2% of your turnover for nothing. On a shop with 150,000 euro of annual turnover, that is 3,000 euro a year. Every year, over a fact you can verify in two minutes.

And now WooCommerce, the one everybody calls free

The plugin is free, licensed GPLv3, and counts more than 7 million active installations. Its own official pricing page states the real cost plainly:

• Hosting: 25 to 350 dollars per month for most stores.
• Extensions: 29 to 299 dollars per year per extension.
• Revenue share: 0%.

Practical experience with Greek stores: you almost always need an extension for Greek couriers, one for myDATA and invoicing, one for payments if your provider has no free plugin, and usually one for product filtering. That is four to six paid extensions, which at roughly 100 dollars each comes to 400 to 600 dollars a year, plus hosting. The software is free. The shop is not.

The critical issue is not the cost but the maintenance. A WooCommerce store with 25 plugins is a system with 25 independent update cycles that will eventually collide. It is a juggler with 25 balls in the air, and the question is not whether one drops but when. I have seen a store go down for three hours on Black Friday because of an automatic plugin update. Three hours. On Black Friday. You can imagine how the owner felt.

Who has the biggest share, and why I say it with a caveat

There are no official market share figures. There is the W3Techs survey, which is based on a third party crawl of websites and should be read as such, an indication rather than a census. As of 15 July 2026:

The most interesting number is not in the table: 83.1% of websites use none of these platforms. The market is smaller than it looks from inside the e-commerce bubble. Better now than in month three.

How big the Greek market really is

Two Eurostat figures give you the whole context.

In 2025, 68.0% of Greeks aged 16 to 74 had bought online, up from 64.94% in 2024. The EU27 average was 73.56%. We are behind, yes, but the gap is closing and the pace matters: more than three points in a single year.

On the other side, 24.74% of Greek enterprises with 10 or more employees had e-commerce sales in 2025, against an EU27 average of 23.59%. So on supply we are slightly above average while on demand we are below. Do you see where this is going? It means competition. Greek online shops are relatively numerous for the size of their market.

One observation about a figure you will see everywhere: no official source exists for the share of cash on delivery in Greek e-commerce. The figures in circulation come from courier or platform surveys with undisclosed methodology. The European Central Bank’s SPACE study structurally excludes cash on delivery from online payments, so it cannot be derived from there either. Design your checkout assuming cash on delivery will be asked for, without betting on a percentage. When you hear the confident “roughly this many percent”, ask where it came from.

Payments, where things break

Strong customer authentication is mandatory under Delegated Regulation (EU) 2018/389, which has applied since 14 September 2019, with migration completed by 31 December 2020 following an opinion of the European Banking Authority. In Greece PSD2 was transposed by law 4537/2018. Heavy going, I admit.

Technically the payment provider handles it, so on that front I step aside. In practice, though, a badly built checkout flow shows up in your statistics as failed transactions, and the customer leaves believing you do not accept their card. They do not message you to complain. They just leave.

For the record: PSD3 and the accompanying Regulation reached provisional political agreement on 27 November 2025 and were approved by the ECON committee on 22 May 2026. They have not been formally adopted and there is no application date. So if someone is selling you “PSD3 compliance” today, ask which text exactly they mean.

How to choose in practice, without regrets

Choose Shopify if you want to be selling this month, if you have no technical partner, if your product is simple, and if a predictable fixed cost suits you. And use Shopify Payments. Second time I say it, on purpose.

Choose WooCommerce if you already have a WordPress site with content that brings traffic, if you need Greek specifics that plugins cover, if you want zero revenue share, and if you have someone to maintain it. Without maintenance, do not choose it. Blunt, because this is where I have seen the most shipwrecks.

Choose custom only if you can write on one page the five functions no plugin covers, and those functions are the substance of your business: per customer pricing, ERP or warehouse integration, B2B ordering, product configuration rules. If your list is “I want it to look different”, you do not need custom, you need a theme. And I say that with all the affection of a man who makes his living writing custom software.

Why this matters in the end

I opened by saying the usual comparison gets it wrong. Let me close with something worse: the platform choice is not even the decision that will make or break your shop. The cost difference between Shopify and WooCommerce over three years runs to a few thousand euro; the difference between a good and a bad checkout runs to tens of thousands. Read that again.

Choose what you can maintain, set the payments up properly, and spend your energy where sales are actually lost. I covered that in the article on cart abandonment.

If you want a second opinion before committing to a platform, get in touch. I would rather we talk it through for an hour now than unpick it a year from now.