There are three common ways a small business starts to sell online: add a store to the website it already has, rent a hosted store from a platform, or turn on ecommerce inside the point-of-sale system it already uses at the counter. WooCommerce, Shopify, and Square are the usual names attached to those three paths. The feature lists overlap more than the sales pages admit, so the decision almost never comes down to features. It comes down to how many products you have, how much you sell each month, and whether the store needs to live inside your own site or can live somewhere else.
Here is how to work through it without a spreadsheet war.
Start with the catalog, not the platform
Two questions sort most businesses in about a minute.
How many things are you selling, and how often do they change? Six products that change twice a year is a different problem than six hundred products with sizes, colors, and weekly inventory swings. The first is barely an ecommerce problem at all. The second needs real inventory tooling, and that is where hosted platforms earn their monthly fee.
Do you also sell in person? If you take cards at a counter, a market stall, or a booth, the store that shares a catalog with your card reader will save you more hours than any theme. Keeping two inventories in sync by hand is the kind of task that quietly eats a Sunday every month.
What it actually costs to sell online
Every one of these platforms has a headline price that is not the real price. The real price is the monthly fee plus the cut of every sale.
- Shopify Basic runs $39 a month billed monthly, or about $29 a month billed annually. Online card payments through Shopify Payments are 2.9% plus 30 cents. Use a different payment processor and Shopify adds its own transaction fee on top, roughly 0.6% to 2% depending on the plan.
- Square still has a genuinely free plan, but the online rate on it went up on January 13, 2026, from 2.9% plus 30 cents to 3.3% plus 30 cents. The old rate now belongs to the Plus plan at $49 a month. In-person card payments on the free plan are 2.6% plus 15 cents.
- WooCommerce is a free plugin, and that is the number everyone repeats. The honest figure is the whole stack: hosting, a payment gateway at 2.9% plus 30 cents through Stripe or WooCommerce’s own payments, and any paid extensions at roughly $29 to $299 per year each. For a small store, budget $500 to $3,000 a year all in, with the low end reachable on modest hosting and a short product list.
Run your own numbers before you pick. At $2,000 a month in online sales, the gap between 2.9% and 3.3% is about $8 — noise. At $20,000 a month it is $80 a month, which is a Shopify plan and a hosting bill. Fee percentages matter in proportion to volume, and most businesses pick their platform at the volume they wish they had rather than the one they have.
Square: better than its reputation for small, mixed sellers
Square gets treated as the beginner option, which undersells it. If you already run your register on Square, the online store reads from the same catalog, the same inventory counts, and the same reporting. For a shop, a studio, a farm stand, or anyone who sells at an event and then ships the leftovers, that single catalog is worth more than a prettier checkout.
The limits are real, though. Design control is shallow, the site structure is rigid, and you will outgrow it the moment the store needs to sit alongside substantial content — a service catalog, a project portfolio, a referral-driven about section. Square is a storefront that can have a few pages. It is not a website that can have a store.
Shopify: pay rent, skip the maintenance
Shopify is the strongest choice when selling is the business. Large or fast-moving catalogs, variants, shipping rules, abandoned-cart recovery, tax handling, apps for anything missing — it is built for stores first and everything else second. Nobody calls you at 11 p.m. about a security update, and the checkout is the most tested one in the industry.
The tradeoffs are a monthly fee you pay forever, a content side that is thinner than a real CMS, and an app habit that creeps. A store with eight apps at $15 each is paying more in subscriptions than in platform fees, and each one is a dependency you do not control. Audit them annually.
WooCommerce: when the store is one part of a larger site
WooCommerce makes sense when the store is a section of the site rather than the whole thing. It is the most widely used ecommerce system on the web — W3Techs puts it at 49% of sites running a known ecommerce system, and 8.3% of all websites — mostly because so many WordPress sites add selling later rather than starting there.
Two Baroque Girls, a luxury floral and wedding studio in Santa Fe, is a fair example of the shape. The WooCommerce storefront is one part of a custom WordPress site that also carries a deep project portfolio, a journal, and a members area with its own login. No hosted store would have held all of that, and splitting it across two platforms would have meant two brands, two logins, and a seam the visitor can feel.
The cost of that flexibility is responsibility. Updates, backups, and a staging copy are now yours to own or to pay someone to own. Build it carelessly — a stack of overlapping plugins, no update discipline — and you get the worst version of every option on this list.
Which ecommerce platform is cheapest for a small store?
For a store doing under about $3,000 a month in online sales, Square’s free plan is usually the cheapest real total, because there is no monthly fee and the higher 3.3% rate costs only a few dollars more at that volume. Between roughly $3,000 and $15,000 a month, Shopify Basic and a well-built WooCommerce store land close enough that fees should not decide it — pick on where the store needs to live. Above that, the lower processing rate and the absence of a platform fee start to make WooCommerce the cheaper option, provided someone is genuinely maintaining it. Cheapest and best are different questions, and the second one is usually worth more money than the first one saves.
The question that actually decides it
Ask what it would cost to leave. Product data exports from all three without much drama. What does not travel is everything around the products: the page structure, the URLs, the design, the reviews, the content you wrote. A hosted platform keeps that in a format only it reads, which is fine right up until the day it is not.
So the useful framing is not “which platform is best.” It is: is the store the business, or is the store a feature of the business? If selling is the business, rent the best selling machine you can and spend your attention on products and marketing. If the store is one of several things your site has to do, put it inside a site you control and accept the maintenance that comes with it. Picking the wrong side of that line is what produces a migration two years later, and migrations cost more than any monthly fee on this page.
Patrick Iverson is a brand strategist and custom WordPress developer in Santa Fe, New Mexico, who has run an independent practice here since 2001. If you are deciding whether the store belongs inside your current site or somewhere else entirely, that is a short conversation worth having before you start building either one.
