Shopify, WooCommerce, headless commerce. Which ecommerce platform fits your business.

There's no universally best ecommerce platform. There's the right platform for your catalogue size, your team, your margin profile. The matrix we use to decide.

Choosing an ecommerce platform is one of those decisions hard to reverse. Once your products, customers, orders, integrations are sitting on a platform, switching is months of work. So the choice deserves real thought. Here's the matrix we use.

The three categories.

Shopify. Default for most independent ecommerce brands. Fully hosted. Mature app ecosystem. Familiar to your team plus future hires. Monthly fee starts around €36 (Basic). Strong checkout. Locked to their hosting plus their checkout flow. Customisations are possible through Shopify Plus or Hydrogen. They become expensive.

WooCommerce. The WordPress ecommerce plugin. Open source. Self-hosted. Cheaper at small scale because you control hosting. Customisable to a fault. Vulnerable to performance issues as your catalogue plus traffic grow. Right for content-led ecommerce or when you already run WordPress. Wrong for ambitious commerce operations because operational burden grows fast.

Headless commerce. A category, not a single product. Shopify Hydrogen. BigCommerce headless. Commerce Layer. Custom builds on Stripe plus Sanity. Your storefront is fully custom (Next.js, Astro). The commerce engine handles inventory, orders, payments. Most flexible. Most expensive to set up. Highest ceiling for performance plus design. Right for premium brands. Right for high-volume operations where every percent of conversion matters.

How we choose. Four questions.

How many SKUs. How often do they change. Under fifty, anything works. Hundreds with weekly updates, you need solid inventory tooling. Thousands with category complexity, you need a real ERP integration.

Who manages the store. Non-technical owner, Shopify wins on ease of use. Team with developer support, anything works. Outsourced to us, anything works because we handle the technical layer.

What's the expected revenue plus margin. Below €100k a year, transaction fees plus monthly fees matter. Shopify's percentage takes a real bite. Above that, platform fee becomes negligible. You optimise for conversion plus operational efficiency.

How custom is the experience. Standard product page with photos, options, add to cart, Shopify default works. Configurator. Wholesale account flow. Subscription with custom logic. Headless or Shopify Plus territory.

Our defaults. We don't build on Shopify. For most independent ecommerce brands launching in 2026, WooCommerce on a managed WordPress host. Familiar to your team, owned end to end, no platform percentage on every sale. We pair it with a clean theme, careful performance work, automated backups.

For premium brands where the brand is the product, we go custom headless. Next.js storefront on Stripe plus a headless commerce engine. Total control over the visual experience. Performance plus SEO advantages compound. Worth the extra setup if the brand needs it.

For content-led ecommerce where editorial drives sales, we lean into WooCommerce because the WordPress editorial system is the asset. The store sits inside the content engine, not the other way around.

The post-launch part. Platform choice matters less than what you do after launch. The brands that win are the ones shipping a product page test every two weeks, running a real email lifecycle programme, reading their analytics. Platform is the floor. Work above it determines the result.

What we don't recommend. Magento for new launches in 2026. Squarespace for any catalogue over twenty SKUs. Wix for ecommerce aspiring to scale. These tools fit specific cases. Rarely the right call when premium positioning is on the line.

The honest take. Most ecommerce platform debates are people arguing about technology when the actual decision is about the team running the store. A great team on Shopify outsells a mediocre team on a custom build every time. Pick the platform making your team productive. Then invest the saved energy into selling.