Shopify and WooCommerce will both run a Canadian online store perfectly well, and InceptiCode builds on both for retailers in Toronto and across Canada. Feature comparisons between them are close to useless, because both platforms can do almost everything most Canadian retailers need, and the differences that matter are not features at all.
Three questions decide it: what the store costs to run over three years, who maintains it between now and then, and how strange your products are.
The cost question, honestly
Shopify charges a monthly subscription, starting from roughly C$50 a month, and takes an additional transaction fee if you use a payment provider other than Shopify Payments. Hosting, security, PCI compliance and platform updates are included in that fee. The number is predictable and it never goes down.
WooCommerce is a free plugin for WordPress. That word does a lot of unearned work in marketing copy, because the store still needs hosting capable of running a database-backed shop under load, an SSL certificate, backups, and usually several paid extensions — subscriptions, bookings, advanced shipping, and a payment gateway plugin. A realistic WooCommerce store carries real costs; they are simply distributed across more invoices.
Over three years the two often land within a few hundred dollars of one another for a straightforward store. Where they genuinely diverge is at volume: a store doing serious revenue on a non-Shopify payment provider pays the transaction fee on every order, and that compounds. WooCommerce has no equivalent.
Who maintains it, which is the real question
Shopify updates itself. Nobody has to patch it, nothing breaks at 2am because a plugin author abandoned a project, and the store keeps working whether or not anybody is paying attention to it.
WooCommerce is WordPress, which means somebody has to keep WordPress, the theme, and every extension updated, take backups, and notice when something stops working. That somebody is either you, a developer you retain, or nobody — and “nobody” is how most abandoned WooCommerce stores end up compromised. Maintenance in this market runs from about C$69 a month at the budget end into the hundreds, and for a WooCommerce store it is not optional.
If there is nobody who will own that responsibility, Shopify is the correct answer and the rest of this article is academic.
When WooCommerce is genuinely better
Unusual product or pricing rules. Trade pricing by customer group, quantity breaks, made-to-order configurations, products priced by area or weight, quotes rather than checkout. Shopify handles these with apps, sometimes awkwardly; WooCommerce handles them in code, which is more work up front and less friction afterwards.
You already run WordPress. A business with an established WordPress site, years of content and existing rankings does not need a second platform, a second admin, and a subdomain that splits its search authority.
Content is doing the selling. Where the buying decision is driven by long-form articles, guides or a substantial blog, WordPress remains better at content than Shopify is, and keeping content and catalogue in one system is worth something.
Avoiding platform transaction fees at volume. Only relevant above a certain revenue, but at that point it is arithmetic rather than preference.
When Shopify is genuinely better
Nobody wants to be responsible for the software. The single most common situation.
The catalogue is conventional. Products, variants, inventory, shipping, discounts. If your products fit that shape, Shopify does it well and does it immediately.
Selling in person as well as online. Shopify’s point-of-sale keeps one inventory across the shop floor and the website, which is a real operational advantage that WooCommerce solutions approximate rather than match.
Growth is expected and unpredictable. Traffic spikes are the platform’s problem rather than yours.
The Canadian specifics that get missed
Both platforms can be configured correctly for Canada, and both are routinely configured incorrectly on stores built quickly.
Tax. GST, HST and PST have to be set by province, so a customer in Ontario is charged 13% HST and one in Alberta is charged 5% GST without anybody calculating it by hand. Both platforms support this. Neither does it by default.
Payments. Cards, Apple Pay and Google Pay are the baseline Canadian shoppers expect. Shop Pay and PayPal are worth adding where the customer base wants them, and each addition is a decision rather than an automatic yes — every extra option is another script and another choice at the moment of purchase.
Shipping. Canadian shipping is expensive and geographically awkward, and the single biggest cause of abandoned carts is a shipping cost that appears too late. Whichever platform you choose, the rate should be visible or estimable before checkout.
Duties and cross-border sales. Selling into the United States introduces duty and customs handling that both platforms can manage and neither manages silently.
Migration, and the part that goes wrong
Moving between the two is routine. Products, variants, collections, customers and order history all transfer, with the usual caveat that order history is the messiest part.
The part that goes wrong is URLs. Every product and collection address on the old store has to be mapped to its equivalent on the new one and redirected individually. A blanket redirect to the homepage is treated by Google as a soft 404 and passes nothing, which is how a store loses years of accumulated search visibility in an afternoon and nobody notices for six weeks.
Ask any agency quoting a migration how it handles URL mapping. The answer separates the careful from the fast.
The short version
Choose Shopify if nobody will own the maintenance, the catalogue is conventional, or you sell in person as well as online. Choose WooCommerce if you already run WordPress, your pricing rules are unusual, content drives the sales, or transaction fees at your volume are material.
InceptiCode builds on both, does not resell either, and earns nothing from the recommendation — which is the only condition under which the recommendation is worth anything. If you want the reasoning applied to your own catalogue, send it over and we will tell you which one we would use and what it costs to run.