Shopify or WooCommerce for an Irish online shop: what each costs, and the rules that apply to both

Shopify is a hosted platform. Its plans include the hosting, a free TLS/SSL certificate for any domain you add, and a myshopify.com address, and you can connect a domain you already own. You pay for a plan, monthly or yearly, and a fee on each card payment.

WooCommerce is a free, open-source plugin for WordPress, published by Automattic. The plugin costs nothing; the running costs are the hosting the WordPress site needs, any paid extensions, and the fees of whichever payment provider you choose. What hosting includes covers the first of those.

As Shopify's Irish pricing page showed them on 29 October 2026, in euro. The page does not say whether the plan prices include VAT; it shows every card rate excluding VAT. The card rates are what Shopify Payments charges on an online payment by a standard card.

Shopify Payments is available to businesses located in Ireland, and Shopify's help centre says the rates you pay on customer card purchases depend on your plan. Setting it up can mean verifying personal and business information. Shopify also says that a business in a category Shopify Payments does not support has to use a third-party payment provider.

Where another provider takes the payments, Shopify charges its third-party transaction fee from the last column above: 2% on Basic, falling to 0.2% on Plus.

WooCommerce's pricing page lists the costs as the core platform, free with no monthly subscription; payments, where you pay your chosen processor's fees; hosting; and extensions bought one at a time. Its own estimate, in US dollars, is $25 to $350 a month for hosting, rising with traffic, and $29 to $299 a year for each extension. It takes no share of your sales.

WooCommerce runs on WordPress: its plugin page asks for WordPress 7.0 or greater and PHP 7.4 or greater, and recommends HTTPS support. Somebody has to keep WordPress, WooCommerce and every extension updated. WordPress.com's own comparison says the owner of a self-hosted WordPress site is responsible for its hosting, security and maintenance.

WooPayments, WooCommerce's own payment service, is available to individuals and businesses in Ireland; for a business, the country that counts is the one where it is registered. It charges no setup fee and no monthly fee for online payments, and takes its fees from each payment. For an account in Ireland, as its fees page showed them on 29 October 2026:

The VAT on sales to consumers in other EU countries works the same on either platform. Revenue's guidance sets a threshold of €10,000 a calendar year, counting your distance sales of goods and your cross-border telecommunications, broadcasting and electronic services to customers in all EU Member States together. A seller stays under it while that total is €10,000 or less in both the current and the previous calendar year, and the threshold applies only to a seller established in one Member State.

Under the threshold, an Irish seller charges Irish VAT on those sales. Over it, the seller accounts for VAT at the rates of each customer's country, either by registering for VAT in each country it sells to or by registering for the Union scheme of the One Stop Shop (OSS) in Ireland, through ROS.

Under the Union scheme, the VAT due in the other countries goes on one electronic quarterly return to Revenue. The manual sets the return, and the payment, for the end of the month after each quarter, and a nil return is due for a quarter with no sales. Shopify lists automatic VAT collection from its Basic plan up; the registration, the return and the payment are the seller's.

The cancellation duties in the Consumer Rights Act 2022 fall on the trader, which is the shop, whatever software the shop runs on. A consumer may cancel a distance contract before the cancellation period expires, without giving any reason (section 112(1)).

For goods, the cancellation period is 14 days, beginning on the day on which the consumer acquires physical possession of them, or of the last of them where one order is delivered separately (section 113(4) and (5)). If the shop does not give the information on the right to cancel required by clause (m) of Schedule 3, the period instead runs for 12 months beginning on the day on which it would otherwise have expired (section 114(1)).

Since 30 June 2026 there is one more duty, in section 115A, which S.I. No. 309 of 2026 inserted into the Act. Where a consumer concludes a distance contract by means of an online interface, the trader must ensure the consumer can cancel through an online cancellation function: labelled "cancel contract here" or in a similarly unambiguous and easily legible manner, prominently displayed and easily accessible, and continuously available throughout the cancellation period. It must let the consumer submit a cancellation statement and confirm it with a function labelled "confirm cancellation", and the trader must then send an acknowledgement of receipt on a durable medium without undue delay. A trader who breaches these requirements commits an offence. Whichever platform you choose, check how the shop will provide it before the shop opens.

Whether the Digital Services Act reaches a shop is a separate question, answered in our guide for an Irish online shop.

The platform decides the running costs; the build is a cost of its own, and what a website costs in Ireland sets published Irish prices side by side. From what each platform publishes: