There's no single best ecommerce platform — there's the right one for your product range, budget and how hands-on you want to be. Here's an honest look at the main options Australian businesses actually choose between.
WooCommerce
Open-source, built on WordPress, and the platform we build on most often. It's a genuinely cost-effective choice because there's no monthly platform fee beyond hosting, your team can manage it directly, and the plugin ecosystem covers most common needs — payments, shipping, subscriptions.
Good for: small-to-mid catalogues, businesses that want to own their platform outright, and anyone who wants a WordPress site and a store in one system.
Trade-off: you're responsible for hosting and updates, and very large or unusual catalogues can need custom work to stay fast.
Shopify
A hosted, subscription-based platform popular with Australian businesses that want a more guided, all-in-one setup. It handles hosting, security and uptime for you, and its app ecosystem is large. The trade-off is an ongoing subscription cost, transaction fees on some plans, and less flexibility once you need something outside its standard theme and app model.
Good for: businesses that want a managed platform and are comfortable with a monthly subscription instead of owning the infrastructure.
We don't build on Shopify ourselves — our stack is WooCommerce and custom PHP/Laravel — so we're not the right team if Shopify specifically is your final answer. We'd rather say that upfront than take on a platform we don't genuinely know.
Custom-built ecommerce
Built from scratch, usually on Laravel or a similar framework, for businesses whose pricing logic, inventory or integrations have outgrown what any plugin-based platform can cleanly handle. See our custom ecommerce development page for when this actually makes sense — it's the right call less often than people assume.
How to actually decide
- Want to own your platform outright, no subscription? WooCommerce.
- Want a fully managed, subscription-based setup? Shopify (or a similar hosted platform).
- Have pricing, inventory or integration needs a standard platform can't express? Custom ecommerce development.
- Selling wholesale, with account-based pricing and bulk orders? Look at B2B ecommerce development specifically — the requirements are different enough to plan for upfront.
The platform matters less than getting the fundamentals right: fast pages, a checkout that doesn't lose customers, correct GST, and a team that can actually support you after launch. A well-built store on the "wrong" platform still outperforms a poorly built one on the "right" platform.
For a closer look at two of the most commonly compared options, see our Shopify vs WooCommerce breakdown.
Not sure which platform fits your business?
Talk it through with us ↗