WooCommerce or Shopify for a European store

Both platforms sell products competently. The decision comes down to VAT, control and cost at your actual revenue — and the right answer flips depending on which of those matters most to you.

VAT

This is where European stores are won and lost. Selling digital goods or crossing the EU distance-selling threshold means charging the customer's local VAT rate and filing through OSS. Shopify handles a good deal of this natively now. WooCommerce needs a plugin, and you need to verify it actually does what you think — including reverse charge for B2B sales with a valid VAT ID.

If you sell only physical goods within one country, this section barely matters. If you sell downloads across the EU, it matters more than anything else on this page.

Control

WooCommerce is your code on your server. You can change checkout, integrate with an obscure ERP, and store data wherever you like. Shopify's checkout was closed for years; it is more extensible now, but it is still their platform and their rules.

For anything unusual — B2B pricing tiers, complex configurators, a warehouse system nobody has heard of — WooCommerce is the pragmatic choice.

Cost, honestly

• Shopify: subscription plus a transaction cut unless you use Shopify Payments, plus apps. Predictable, and it grows with revenue.
• WooCommerce: free licence, real hosting, several premium plugins, and maintenance. Cheaper at high volume, more expensive at low volume once you count the hours.

The crossover is usually somewhere around €150k–250k of annual revenue, but it moves a lot depending on how much bespoke work you need.

The parts people forget

• Payment methods. German buyers expect invoice (Kauf auf Rechnung), SEPA direct debit and PayPal. Card-first checkout converts poorly in Germany. Check both platforms support your providers before deciding.
• Withdrawal rights. EU consumers have a statutory 14-day right of withdrawal and your store has to state it correctly. This is a content problem, not a platform one, but it must be handled.
• Who maintains it. Shopify patches itself. WooCommerce does not.

The short version

Straightforward catalogue, small team, no unusual requirements: Shopify. Unusual requirements, existing WordPress site, or you want to own the whole stack: WooCommerce. Neither choice is wrong; picking the one that does not match your actual constraints is.