Shopify and WooCommerce both promise to get you selling online fast, and they deliver on that promise. What they don't advertise as clearly is the ongoing cost: Shopify's transaction fees on every sale (on top of the monthly plan, unless you use their own payment processor), and WooCommerce's habit of needing a paid plugin for anything beyond the basics — memberships, subscriptions, advanced shipping rules, better SEO controls.
A custom store built on Next.js and Stripe skips both of those cost structures. That doesn't automatically make it the right choice — here's how to actually weigh it.
What you're paying for with Shopify or WooCommerce
Shopify's appeal is real: a working store in days, an app ecosystem for almost anything, hosting handled for you. The cost shows up as a percentage of revenue (unless you're on their payment gateway and a higher plan) plus subscriptions for every app you add — reviews, upsells, inventory sync, email marketing. At meaningful sales volume, that percentage adds up to real money, every month, forever.
WooCommerce trades the transaction fee for plugin sprawl. It's "free" in the sense that WordPress and WooCommerce are open-source, but a functional store usually needs paid plugins for security, backups, page speed, SEO and whatever specific feature the business needs — and each one is another piece of software to update, another point of failure, another WordPress admin login someone has to secure.
What a custom store actually looks like
A Next.js + Stripe store means: pages generated ahead of time and served from a CDN (fast by default, no plugin needed to make it fast), Stripe handling checkout and payments directly (no percentage on top of Stripe's own processing fee), and a product catalog that's exactly as complex as your business needs — no more, no less.
There's no monthly platform fee and no per-sale cut beyond what Stripe itself charges to process the card. What you pay for instead is the build itself, upfront.
When it's worth it
Sales volume is meaningful and growing. The break-even point where "no transaction fee" outweighs the upfront build cost depends on volume — for a store doing real revenue, it's usually a matter of months, not years. The catalog and rules are stable enough to build once. A custom store isn't a drag-and-drop page builder — changing structure later means development time, not a plugin toggle. You want full control over checkout, speed and SEO without depending on whichever app happens to support the feature you need this quarter.
When it isn't
You're testing an idea and don't know if it'll sell yet. Shopify's speed to launch is genuinely valuable when the real question is "will anyone buy this," not "how do we optimize an established store." The catalog changes constantly and non-technical staff need to manage it themselves daily without any developer involvement — a headless setup can support this, but it needs to be planned for from the start, not assumed. Sales volume is low enough that the transaction-fee savings would take years to offset the build.
The honest math
Add up what you're currently paying (or would pay) in monthly platform fees, transaction percentages and app subscriptions over 2-3 years, and compare it to a one-time custom build. For an established or fast-growing store, the custom route usually wins on cost within the first year or two, on top of being faster for customers and easier to maintain long-term.
Not sure which side of that math you're on? Talk to us about your numbers, or see what's included in a custom ecommerce build.