Ask ten people which platform to build your online store on and you’ll get ten confident answers. Shopify fans will tell you WooCommerce is a maintenance nightmare. WordPress people will tell you Shopify is a walled garden that taxes every sale. A Wix ad will tell you that you can do it yourself in an afternoon. None of that helps when you’re the one who has to live with the decision for the next five years.

We’ve built over 400 stores since 2014, across Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento and most of the others. Here’s what we’ve learned: there is no best platform. There’s only the best platform for your specific situation — and that comes down to six factors. Get those right and the decision makes itself. If you’d rather answer six questions and get a ranked recommendation instantly, our eCommerce Platform Picker does exactly that. This post is the long-form version of the same logic.

The six factors that actually decide it

Every platform decision is really an answer to these six questions. Be honest with yourself on each one, because the wrong answer here is what leads to expensive re-platforming a year later.

• What are you selling? Physical products, digital downloads, subscriptions, services, or a mix. Some platforms handle subscriptions and bookings far better than others.
• What’s your build budget? The one-off cost to get the store live — not the monthly fee. R8,000 and R250,000 point at very different platforms.
• How much tech do you want to handle? Be honest. “Fully managed, I never want to think about a server” rules out some options. “I have a developer” opens others.
• What order volume are you aiming for? Platforms scale at different points. A store doing 50 orders a month and one doing 5,000 have different needs.
• How much customisation do you need? Standard templates, brand-led design, or a fully custom checkout and B2B engine.
• What matters most? Speed to launch, lowest total cost, SA payment options, customisation freedom, scalability, or ease of use. This is the tie-breaker.

Notice that “which platform is most popular” isn’t on the list. Popularity is a vanity metric. A platform that 80% of stores use can still be the wrong fit for yours.

The honest shortlist for South Africa

For roughly 90% of SA stores, the real choice is between two platforms: Shopify and WooCommerce. The other eight are right for specific edge cases, which we’ll cover. Here’s the quick version.

Shopify vs WooCommerce: the decision 90% of stores actually face

This is the real fork in the road, so it’s worth doing properly. Both are excellent. They’re built on opposite philosophies.

Shopify is a hosted, managed platform. You pay a monthly fee and Shopify handles hosting, security, updates, performance, and uptime. You focus on selling. The trade-offs: a monthly subscription (from about R550/mo), and — this is the SA-specific catch — because Shopify Payments isn’t available here yet, you pay Shopify an extra transaction fee (0.6–2% depending on plan) on top of your normal gateway fee. It’s the fastest, lowest-hassle way to run a serious store, and its checkout converts well.

WooCommerce is a self-hosted WordPress plugin. You own everything, pay no platform subscription and no transaction fees beyond your gateway. The trade-offs: you (or someone you pay) are responsible for hosting, security, backups, updates and performance. It’s infinitely customisable, but it’s more work to run, and a careless plugin update can break your checkout on a Friday afternoon.

The honest rule of thumb: if you want to focus on selling and never think about infrastructure, choose Shopify. If you want total control and have the technical capacity (or budget for a retainer) to maintain it, choose WooCommerce. Both will serve a growing SA store well. We build and support both, and we’ll tell you honestly which fits when you ask.

One thing that surprises people: at lower revenue, WooCommerce is cheaper per month, but the gap narrows fast once you count hosting, maintenance and the cost of things breaking. We break the real monthly numbers down in our WooCommerce to Shopify guide, and you can model your own margin on either platform with the Shopify Profit Margin Calculator.

The honest take on the other eight

Shopify Plus: Only makes sense once you’re doing R3M+/month or need custom checkout logic and B2B at enterprise scale. Below that, the R42,000/mo minimum is money you’d rather spend on ads.

BigCommerce: Genuinely strong for B2B and has no transaction fees on any plan, which is appealing. The catch in South Africa is patchy payment gateway support — PayFast works, Yoco needs custom integration. If SA payment flexibility matters, it’s a mark against it.

Wix: Fine for a tiny store or a service business with a handful of products. You’ll hit walls as you grow, payment options are limited, and migrating off Wix later is genuinely painful — they let you export your data but not your site. Cheapest entry, but also the cheapest exit.

Squarespace: The most beautiful templates of any platform. The weakest SA payment story of any platform — effectively Stripe only, no native Yoco or PayGate. Best for brand-led businesses with a small, considered product range, not high-volume retail.

Magento (Adobe Commerce): The most flexible platform on earth, and the heaviest. The community edition is free to licence but needs serious hosting and full-time developers. Only consider it if you have genuinely unique requirements that Shopify Plus can’t handle — and you’d be surprised how rarely that’s actually true.

OpenCart: Open-source, free licence, all SA gateways have extensions, and it has a surprisingly active local community. Smaller ecosystem than Woo or Shopify and most extensions are paid. A reasonable budget self-hosted option for the technically comfortable.

Takealot / Bidorbuy: These aren’t platforms you build on — they’re marketplaces you sell on. Commission runs 10–30% per sale, you don’t own the customer relationship, and you can’t market to them afterwards. Excellent as an additional sales channel alongside your own store. A bad idea as your only one.

Custom / headless build: Next.js, Shopify Hydrogen, Medusa, or fully bespoke. Total control over UX and performance. Also R250,000+ to build and ongoing development for every change. Worth it past roughly R10M/year with truly unique needs. For everyone else, it’s expensive ambition.

Can I change my mind later?

Yes, but it costs. Product data, customers and order history migrate cleanly between most platforms. The painful part is SEO — your URL structure changes, and without a proper 301 redirect map you lose rankings. Most migrations to Shopify take 2–6 weeks. The worst migration story is leaving Wix, which won’t let you export your actual site.

The takeaway: choosing well up front is cheaper than re-platforming. That’s the whole reason we built the Platform Picker — to get the decision right before you’ve sunk money into the wrong tool.

Frequently asked questions

The bottom line

Stop asking which platform is best and start asking which is best for your six answers. For most South African stores the realistic choice is Shopify for speed and low hassle, or WooCommerce for control and no transaction fees. The rest are right only for specific situations — and knowing which situation you’re in is the whole game.

The fastest way to get a clear answer is the eCommerce Platform Picker: six questions, a ranked top three, and an honest note on each. Once you know your platform, run your numbers through the Profit Margin Calculator so you know what you’ll actually keep. And if you’d rather just talk it through with someone who’s built 400+ stores, we’re a message away.