When it works: if the shop is just starting, if the range is manageable, if you need no bespoke ordering process, if what matters is that people order next month. The payment and courier integrations are ready, and you do not have to deal with the server.
When it does not: if there is bespoke business logic around the shop (rental, custom calculation, made to measure), if B2B price lists have to be handled, or if marketing needs full control over the HTML. In those cases the platform does not slow you down, it simply does not allow it.
Shopify. The packages scale by features and by the number of staff accounts: Basic is €29 net, Grow €79 and Advanced €299 a month, with roughly 25 per cent off on annual billing. The product count is effectively unlimited on every tier. Multiple currencies and Markets are available from Basic, while lower card rates, advanced reporting and the checkout extensibility that matters for larger shops come with the higher tiers. The trial period is 3 days, followed by a discounted first month.
The alternatives. BigCommerce, Squarespace Commerce and Wix Stores sit in the same €25 to €300 a month band, and in Hungary UNAS and Shoprenter play the same role from around €15 a month. The differences are in the app ecosystem, the local payment and courier integrations and how far the checkout can be shaped.
The choice between them is usually made by the local integrations and the app ecosystem: Shopify has by far the largest app market and the smoothest checkout, while a local platform often has the payment providers and couriers of your country built in. Before choosing, it is worth running one concrete example through two of them: enter the same ten products and see how far the admin lets you go where you want to go.
What is rarely said out loud about rented platforms
There are four things worth thinking through soberly before choosing a rented platform. None of them means the decision is wrong, only that it is worth knowing what you are buying.
- The features you need to grow sit in the most expensive package. Advanced reporting, checkout customisation and the better transaction rates sit on the top tiers. That is no accident: the customer moves up exactly when leaving has become hard.
- You rent the platform, you do not own it. The provider decides on pricing, on the fate of features and on the development direction. If they raise prices or retire a feature, you have to follow.
- Leaving costs more than it looks. The product data can be exported, but the customisation, the template changes and the platform-specific content cannot. That is the hidden cost of migration.
- Most online comparisons have a stake. A large share of the „Shopify or WooCommerce” style articles are written by agencies that are partners or resellers of one system or the other. They do not necessarily lie, but they are not neutral either. If you do one thing before deciding, let it be checking who wrote the article you are learning from.
This article is not neutral either: we work in bespoke development, so if anyone has an interest in slanting things, it is us. That is exactly why we have set out the three-year total cost: it shows that in many cases a rented platform is the better offer even in our own view.
When it works: if there is already a WordPress site with content, if content marketing and SEO are the main source of traffic, if the catalogue stays within a few thousand products. The engine is free, the plugin ecosystem is huge, and the content and the shop live in one system.
When it does not: with a catalogue of tens of thousands or heavy concurrent load. WooCommerce still works, but tuning the server and the cache becomes serious work, and the interaction between plugins becomes the biggest risk.
Cost: on the market a proper rollout is €2,900 to €4,500 net, plus hosting or the server, premium plugin licences and maintenance. We went through this item by item in the WordPress maintenance prices article.
When it works: with several thousand or tens of thousands of products, when you have to work with variants and attributes, when you sell into several countries or under several brand names, when there are B2B price lists and customer-specific prices, or when a two-way link with an ERP and a warehouse system is needed. None of these is a matter of convenience: this is where the other platforms fail.
When it does not: if it would be chosen only because it sounds serious. Magento 2 needs a dedicated server, regular maintenance and an expert developer. Without the business size behind it, it becomes expensive and slow to move.
Prices: the rollout starts at €5,000 net, and for a complex B2B or multistore system it can go above €50,000. We have set out the details on the Magento 2 webshop page, and the server side on the Ubuntu VPS page.
There is a fourth route that rarely comes up: your own framework. With us that is WShop, the webshop module of our own CMS. It makes sense when there is a process around the shop that no off-the-shelf system covers, yet Magento 2 is too big for it. We do not recommend it to everyone, because a bespoke system is an advantage only if whoever builds it stays available in the long run.
One-off prices are misleading. This is how the same shop looks over three years, with medium traffic, in net values.
| Solution | One-off | Monthly | Three-year total |
|---|
| Shopify Basic | €500 to €1,500 for customisation | €29 | approx. €1,500 to €2,500 |
| Shopify Grow, annual billing | €700 to €2,000 for customisation | €59 | approx. €2,800 to €4,100 |
| Shopify Advanced, annual billing | €1,000 to €2,500 for customisation | €229 | approx. €9,200 to €10,700 |
| Local rented platform (UNAS, Shoprenter) | €400 to €1,300 for customisation | €15 to €100 | approx. €1,000 to €4,900 |
| WooCommerce | €2,900 to €4,500 | €70 to €180 | approx. €5,400 to €11,000 |
| Magento 2, standard rollout | €5,000 to €18,000 | €150 to €400 | approx. €10,400 to €32,400 |
The lesson is not that the cheapest is best. The lesson is that a rented platform stays cheaper even over three years, so if the shop fits within its limits, there is nothing to argue about. A more expensive platform pays off when it can do something that brings revenue directly or saves working hours.