Shopify vs custom
All three can take a card payment. The real differences are what you pay every month, how much of the store you control, and how easily it can be found on Google.
Shopify gets you trading fast and handles the technical side for you. The trade-off is a monthly subscription in dollars, app subscriptions on top for things like delivery rates or reviews, and an extra transaction fee unless you use their own payment product, which is limited here.
For a small catalogue with simple needs it is a perfectly reasonable choice, and we will say so if that is what suits you.
WooCommerce sits on WordPress, so there is no platform subscription and endless plugins are available. What you inherit instead is maintenance: plugin updates, conflicts between them, security patching and a store that slows down as the plugin count grows.
It works well when somebody is actively looking after it. It fails quietly when nobody is.
We build the checkout, payment gateways, automated order emails, stock control and delivery rules around your actual business rather than bending your business to fit a template. There is no platform fee and no commission on your sales, only the payment gateway's own transaction charge.
It also means the store is fast, the product pages are structured for search, and adding something unusual, like trade pricing or a custom quote flow, is a build decision rather than a plugin hunt.
Cheaper to start, more expensive to keep. Once you add the subscription, the paid apps and the extra transaction percentage, many South African stores pay more over three years than a custom build would have cost.
Yes. We migrate products, customers and past orders where the platform allows, keep your existing URLs working so rankings survive, and only switch the domain once everything is tested.
A well built custom store, because we control page structure, speed and product schema directly. A well managed Shopify store can still rank fine, so this is rarely the deciding factor on its own.
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