If you're picking an e-commerce platform in 2026, the honest answer is it depends — but the trade-offs are far more lopsided than they were five years ago. Page speed now directly affects your ad cost. Server-side tracking is no longer optional. And the gap between a €348/year SaaS lock-in and a self-hosted store that costs €150/year to run is wider than ever.
I've spent ten years building stores on WooCommerce, watched clients migrate to Shopify and back, and now build on Medusa.js + Next.js headless. This is the comparison I wish existed when those clients first called me.
How to choose: 6 criteria that actually matter
Most comparisons rank platforms by feature count. That's noise. Here's what actually moves the needle:
- 3-year total cost of ownership — not month-one pricing, but what you'll pay including commissions, apps, hosting, and developer time.
- Page speed (Lighthouse / Core Web Vitals) — Google ranks faster stores higher and conversion drops by ~1% per 100ms of added load time.
- Vendor lock-in — can you take your store, customer data, and customisations to another platform if you need to?
- Customisation ceiling — how far can you push the platform before you hit a wall that costs €5,000+ to break?
- EU-specific features — Multibanco, SEPA, VAT-by-country, GDPR posture, EU Google Merchant Center feeds.
- Team requirements — can a non-technical owner operate it daily, or do you need a developer on retainer?
The five contenders side by side
The Lighthouse and TTFB numbers above are typical production figures across audited stores, not best-case demos.
When each platform is the right choice
Shopify Basic is right when — you're under €30k/year revenue, you don't have a developer, you ship one product family, and you accept that scaling means upgrading to Shopify Plus at €2,000+/month. The 2% transaction fee is invisible at small volumes and becomes painful around €60k/year. I wrote a full breakdown of Shopify's real cost here →
WooCommerce is right when — you have a strong WordPress developer already, you need a content-heavy site (blog + store), and you're comfortable managing 20+ plugins. It stops being right when page speed starts costing you ads ROI. Here's a deeper look at why →
Wix or Webflow is right when — your store is secondary to your brand site, your catalogue is under 50 SKUs, and you sell to a design-conscious audience. The catch: customisation hits a hard ceiling fast.
Headless (Medusa.js + Next.js) is right when — your revenue is €30k+/year, ad spend is meaningful, page speed has measurable conversion impact, and you'd rather own infrastructure than rent it. It's not the right call for hobbyist stores. Here's how headless delivers Lighthouse 90+ →
The decision tree
Ask yourself, in order:
- Will you have a developer involved (employee, agency, or freelance retainer)? If no → Shopify Basic or Wix. If yes → continue.
- Is your expected annual revenue under €30k? If yes → Shopify Basic — the simplicity wins. If no → continue.
- Does page speed affect your business (you run paid ads, you depend on SEO, you sell to mobile-heavy audiences)? If no → WooCommerce can still work. If yes → continue.
- Do you sell across multiple EU countries (multi-currency, multi-language, country-specific VAT)? If yes → headless wins by a wide margin.
- Do you plan to scale beyond €200k/year or eventually sell the business? If yes → vendor lock-in becomes a real exit cost. Choose ownership.
If you reached point 5 with yes-answers, headless is the rational choice. Everything before that point has legitimate alternatives.
The hidden cost dimension: time
Platform comparisons usually skip the time dimension, but it's where most of the real cost hides.
- A Shopify migration to a new platform later costs €5,000–€20,000 depending on theme complexity and app dependencies.
- A WooCommerce store with 30+ plugins becomes effectively impossible to update without breaking something — I see this in client audits every month.
- A headless build costs more upfront but avoids both of these failure modes because the code and data are portable by design.
If you're starting fresh today and you expect this store to be running in five years, optimise for the five-year outcome, not the four-week launch.
What I'd do in 2026
Given the numbers above, my honest recommendation for a serious e-commerce business in 2026:
- Under €30k/year: Shopify Basic. Don't overthink it.
- €30k–€200k/year: Headless if you have any partner relationship with a developer. WooCommerce only if your developer specifically prefers it and you accept the speed trade-off.
- €200k+/year: Headless. Anything else is leaving money on the table — in commissions, in ad costs from slow pages, in lock-in risk when you eventually want to change something fundamental.
FAQ
Is Shopify cheaper than building a custom store? Year one — yes, by a wide margin. Years 2–5 — no, especially once you factor in apps, commissions, and the migration cost when you outgrow it.
Can I migrate from WooCommerce to headless without losing SEO? Yes, with a proper 301 redirect map, preserved URL structure, and re-implementation of schema markup. I walk through the exact process in the Woo-to-Medusa migration guide.
Why does headless show Lighthouse 96 vs Shopify's 70? Headless storefronts ship static pages or ISR-cached pages from edge networks, with no theme runtime, no app sandbox, and no third-party script governance issues. It's a structural advantage, not a tuning advantage.
Do I need a developer to run a headless store day to day? No. The day-to-day admin (products, orders, content, prices) runs from a normal CMS. You need a developer for setup and significant changes — same as any custom build.
Next steps
If you're sizing up the move from a SaaS or WooCommerce store, the migration service starts at €1,200 and includes SEO-safe redirects, analytics history preservation, and a 30-day post-launch support window. If you're greenfield, the online store build starts at €2,000.
Want a second opinion on your specific situation before deciding? Send a one-line brief — I reply within 24 hours.