WooCommerce vs Shopify for dropshipping: the real bill — comparison table

WooCommerce vs Shopify for dropshipping: the real bill

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By Jason Feng, Founder & Researcher. See how this review was researched.

Quick answer

Shopify for dropshipping costs $39 a month on Basic plus a supplier app that runs $0 to $99.99 a month, and its marketplace order sync allowance is 50 orders before a 1% fee up to $99 a month. WooCommerce costs $0 for the platform, $25 to $350 a month for hosting, and the supplier integration is one more extension you buy and maintain.

At 1,000 orders a month and a $40 average order value, both platforms land within a few hundred dollars of each other. Shopify is the shorter setup. WooCommerce has no order or product ceiling at all, and no platform to penalize a payment processor you chose.

Table of contents

Two unmarked cardboard boxes with packing tape on top

What dropshipping changes about the cost stack

A dropshipping store has almost no inventory cost and almost no storage cost. What it has instead are three lines that a stocked store does not carry at the same weight.

The supplier app subscription comes first. It is not part of the platform, it is priced separately, and on Shopify it is usually sold on the platform’s own app store, which makes its price easy to find. On WooCommerce the same function arrives as an extension, and the published extension band is $29 to $299 a year each. A supplier integration is one of those extensions.

The second line is the order ceiling. Shopify meters synced marketplace orders: 50 free per month, then 1% up to $99 a month. That is not a dropshipping fee exactly, but a dropshipping store that also sells on marketplaces hits it early.

The third is stock accuracy. You are syncing inventory from someone else’s warehouse, and the sync interval decides whether you sell a product you can no longer ship. That is a product quality problem with a platform-shaped solution.

If you are still comparing platforms rather than suppliers, our dropshipping-focused alternatives guide covers BigCommerce, Squarespace and Wix on the same lines.

Same order volume, two platforms

Assumptions stated so you can argue with them: 1,000 orders in a month, $40 average order value, so $40,000 in monthly online sales. Card payments through each platform’s own processor. No apps other than a supplier integration. No cost of goods and no shipping. These are arithmetic on published rate cards, not quotes.

Setup Subscription Processing Platform fees Monthly total
Shopify Basic, Shopify Payments $39 2.9% + 30¢ on 1,000 orders = $1,460 None $1,499 plus supplier app
Shopify Basic, outside processor $39 Your processor’s rate Third-party fee 2% = $800 $839 plus processor and supplier app
WooCommerce, WooPayments $0 2.9% + 30¢ on 1,000 orders = $1,460 None $1,485 to $1,810 including hosting
WooCommerce, any other gateway $0 Your processor’s rate None Hosting plus processor plus extension

Two rows carry the whole argument. Shopify’s third-party transaction fee is 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow and 0.6% on Advanced, and it applies when Shopify Payments is not the processor. At this volume that is $800 a month, which is larger than the subscription and larger than most supplier apps.

WooCommerce has no equivalent penalty. Its pricing page says you can "use any gateway or BNPL provider without penalty" and "run multiple gateways to maximize conversion." For a dropshipping store that already has a processor relationship, that is the single biggest structural difference between the two.

Shopify’s advantage is on the other side of the ledger: hosting, SSL, CDN and backups are inside the $39. A WooCommerce store pays $25 to $350 a month for those, and the low end of that band assumes a host that can handle the order volume on a busy day.

The supplier app is the second subscription

This is where a dropshipping store actually gets priced. I pulled current listings from the Shopify App Store on 2026-10-01, because that is where most of this tooling is sold in public.

Supplier app Free tier Paid tiers (published, US) What the tier buys
DSers Free Basic plan Advanced $19.90/mo, Pro $49.90/mo Bulk ordering, auto price sync
AutoDS Free trial only Import 200 $26.90/mo, Advanced 1K $66.90/mo Import and product-count tiers
Spocket Free plan Starter $39.99/mo, Pro $59.99/mo, Empire $99.99/mo Pro lists 250 unique products; Empire lists 10,000
Zendrop Free to install, no linked products Beginner $29/mo, Pro $49/mo, Plus $79/mo Linked products: 1 to 20, 21 to 100, 101+
Printful Free plan Growth Plan $24.99/mo Discounted product pricing and branding

Read the tier names rather than the feature lists. Zendrop sells by linked product count, Spocket by unique and premium product allowances, and AutoDS by imported products. You are buying headroom, not features.

On the WooCommerce side, the dropshipping extension category page returned a 404 when I fetched it on the research date, so I am not quoting a specific extension price. [DATA NOT VERIFIED: no WooCommerce dropshipping extension price could be confirmed from the vendor on 2026-10-01.] The published band of $29 to $299 a year per extension would cover one, and that band is documented on the WooCommerce pricing page.

Inventory sync and stock accuracy

Dropshipping lives or dies on whether the site knows what the supplier has.

Shopify ships inventory management on every plan and lists inventory locations as a plan feature, with 10 locations on Basic and more on higher tiers. Stock sync to a supplier happens through the app, and the app decides the interval. That means the platform gives you the location model and the app gives you the freshness, and you are buying both.

WooCommerce’s position is that inventory is yours to configure. It publishes "unlimited products, orders, and APIs" on the core platform, and its extensions handle the parts a hosted platform bundles. Its current builds include High performance order storage, which moves order data out of the traditional post tables and matters once a store processes orders at volume.

The practical difference is where a sync failure shows up. On Shopify, a broken app connection is visible in the app and usually recoverable in the admin. On WooCommerce, a broken integration is a plugin conflict, and diagnosing it means reading logs on your own server.

Neither platform solves the underlying problem, which is that you are reselling inventory you do not hold. Both give you the tools to detect it faster, and Shopify’s are assembled for you.

SKU, variant and order limits

Limit Shopify WooCommerce
Product count Unlimited Unlimited
Variants per product Up to 2,048, max 3 option types Unlimited
Synced marketplace orders 50 free per month, then 1% up to $99/mo No platform meter
Platform revenue share None None
Third-party processor fee 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced No penalty
Inventory locations 10 on Basic Configured by the host and plugin stack

The variant ceilings in the Shopify column come from WooCommerce’s own published comparison table rather than from Shopify, and that attribution matters when you read it. The same table lists several competitors on the same row.

For dropshipping the product-count row is the least interesting one, because supplier catalogs are effectively unlimited on both. The order meter is the row that surprises people, and it applies to marketplace orders rather than to your own store. A dropshipping store selling only on its own domain never touches it.

The variant row matters more than it looks. A product with many color and size combinations, pulled from a supplier feed, can hit Shopify’s option-type limit before it hits the variant number. WooCommerce’s lack of a published ceiling means your host becomes the limit instead.

Fulfillment automation

Automation is where the two diverge in effort rather than cost.

Shopify’s ecosystem prices this as an app subscription, and the tier tables above show what that costs. The store owner installs, connects, and configures rules. Shopify Flow handles native workflow automation, and the marketplace apps in the table above each add order routing on top.

WooCommerce prices automation two ways: an extension with a yearly license, or a developer. The extension route keeps the store inside the admin. The developer route is where a store ends up when its supplier arrangement is unusual, and that cost never appears on a pricing page.

For a store that also sells outside its own site, our platform fee comparison puts the marketplace and gateway fees on one table, which is the fastest way to see where an automation decision turns into a fee decision.

Our verdict

Both platforms work for dropshipping. The split is about what you are willing to run.

  • Fastest path to a working dropshipping store: Shopify. Basic at $39 includes hosting, the app store is where the supplier tooling is priced in public, and the whole setup is install-and-connect.
  • Lowest structural cost at volume: WooCommerce. No platform fee, no third-party processor penalty, no order meter, and unlimited products and APIs. You pay $25 to $350 a month for hosting and $29 to $299 a year per extension, and you own the maintenance.
  • Using a processor you already have: WooCommerce, unless you are on a higher Shopify plan. At 1,000 orders a month, Shopify’s 2% third-party fee on Basic is $800, which no supplier app subscription comes close to.
  • Selling heavily on marketplaces as well as your own store: check Shopify’s 50-order sync allowance before you commit to Basic. Above it, the fee runs to $99 a month.
  • Moving between the two: read the WooCommerce to Shopify migration path before you start, because supplier app data, product options and URL structures are the parts that do not travel cleanly.

Whichever you pick, price the supplier app before the platform. It is the only line in this comparison that scales with your catalog rather than with your sales.

How we researched this

  • This is a research-based review. Every figure comes from a vendor’s own pricing page, developer documentation or public marketplace listing, captured on 2026-10-01 through a US exit IP with an en-US locale.
  • Supplier app prices are the app developers’ own published list prices from their Shopify App Store listings. A developer can change them at any time.
  • The worked month is arithmetic on published rate cards at a stated order count and average order value. It excludes cost of goods, shipping and paid development.
  • Where a price could not be confirmed from the vendor, the cell is marked as unverified rather than estimated. The full method is on our how we research page.

Sources

All URLs fetched 2026-10-01 via a US exit IP with Accept-Language: en-US.

  1. Shopify pricing (https://www.shopify.com/pricing): plan prices, card rates, third-party transaction fees, marketplace order allowance, inventory locations, hosting statements
  2. WooCommerce pricing (https://woocommerce.com/pricing/): $0 platform fee, hosting band, extension band, WooPayments rate, gateway flexibility, product and variant comparison table
  3. Shopify App Store, DSers (https://apps.shopify.com/dsers): plan prices
  4. Shopify App Store, AutoDS (https://apps.shopify.com/autods): tier prices and annual options
  5. Shopify App Store, Spocket (https://apps.shopify.com/spocket): tier prices and product allowances
  6. Shopify App Store, Zendrop (https://apps.shopify.com/zendrop): tier prices and linked-product limits
  7. Shopify App Store, Printful (https://apps.shopify.com/printful): free plan and Growth Plan price
  8. WooCommerce Subscriptions (https://woocommerce.com/products/woocommerce-subscriptions/): extension pricing example within the published band
  9. BigCommerce pricing (https://www.bigcommerce.com/pricing/): cross-platform plan comparison context
  10. Shopify legal, acceptable use policy (https://www.shopify.com/legal/aup): fulfillment and product eligibility rules

Directly comparable breakdowns on this site:

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