Short answer: Shopify is the fastest way to start, while WooCommerce is cheaper long-term and best suited to the Lithuanian market. Neither is "better" — it depends on how much control you want, your fees, and how fast you need to launch.
Ownership. WooCommerce is an open-source WordPress plugin — you own the store, host it yourself (~10 €/month), with no monthly platform fee. Shopify is a hosted SaaS — you pay Shopify monthly (~$29) and they host it. WooCommerce is a house you maintain; Shopify is a convenient rented apartment with a fee.
When speed and simplicity matter most. Launch in 1–2 weeks, no servers or updates to manage. Great for exporting abroad, dropshipping, or predictable monthly costs. Downsides: monthly + transaction fees, and less convenient for Lithuanian accounting and payments.
It usually wins in Lithuania — native Paysera, Lithuanian accounting plugins, LP Express/DPD/Omniva shipping, strong SEO (WordPress), no monthly platform fee, full ownership. Downside: someone must maintain hosting and updates.
For large catalogs, B2B logic, custom checkout, or deep integrations with accounting, warehouse or CRM. Fastest and unrestricted, but a bigger upfront investment — for growing or atypical businesses.
Look at total cost of ownership. Shopify: from 1 500 € + ~$29/month for 36 months ≈ 950–1 000 € extra, excluding transaction fees. WooCommerce: from 1 500 € + ~10 €/month hosting ≈ 360 € extra, no platform or transaction fees. The 3-year gap often reaches 600–800 € in WooCommerce favour.
Need to launch fast or sell abroad — Shopify. Lithuanian market, lower long-term cost, full ownership, strong SEO — WooCommerce. Large or atypical — custom Next.js. The right answer comes from your catalog, market and budget — which we discuss in a free first call.
Payments usually decide the choice, even though they are considered last. Buyers in the Baltics are used to paying by bank link through Paysera, Montonio or Kevin — not by card. WooCommerce has official plugins for all of these; they install within an hour and cost only the provider’s commission.
Shopify is trickier here. Shopify Payments does not operate in Lithuania the way it does in the US or Western Europe, so you have to connect an external payment provider. When you do, Shopify adds a 0.5–2% transaction fee on every order — purely for not using their payments. At 5 000 € monthly turnover that is 25–100 € a month that simply does not exist on WooCommerce.
The practical conclusion: if most buyers are local and pay by bank link, WooCommerce saves a noticeable amount. If you sell abroad by card, Shopify Payments being unavailable locally matters less, because you would use Stripe or similar anyway.
Roughly four out of five orders in the Baltics go to a parcel locker, so the store must offer locker selection at checkout — with a live terminal list, not a hand-typed one. WooCommerce has ready plugins for Omniva, LP Express and DPD that pull the terminal list automatically and can generate shipping labels straight from the order.
Shopify has no official integrations of this kind — you need third-party apps, which often carry their own monthly fee and are not always maintained. It is solvable, but it becomes another line in monthly costs and another dependency on a small developer.
If the store has to issue VAT invoices that connect to accounting software, WooCommerce wins without much debate — B1.lt, Rivilė and Saskaitos.lt have direct integrations, and the invoice reaches the buyer automatically along with the order confirmation.
Shopify issues invoices its own way and they do not always meet local formatting requirements, so you often end up buying an extra app or entering invoices into accounting by hand. At a few dozen orders that goes unnoticed; at a few hundred it becomes real work every month.
Worth knowing separately: OSS VAT. If you sell to consumers in other EU countries and pass the 10 000 € annual threshold, VAT must be calculated by the buyer’s country. Both platforms handle it, but it has to be configured deliberately — one of the most common mistakes in new export stores.
The usual argument against WooCommerce is “it will need maintaining”. That is true, but the scale is often exaggerated. In practice it means updates roughly once a month, backups (automated) and watching that plugins do not conflict. For a cleanly configured store that is about an hour a month, or a support plan.
The risk comes not from WooCommerce itself but from plugin excess. A store with forty plugins will be slow and fragile no matter who maintains it. So we follow a rule: the fewer plugins, the less maintenance and the faster the store.
Shopify requires none of this work — a real, tangible advantage if you have neither the time nor a partner. Just be aware that this peace of mind costs roughly 350 € a year, and that fee never ends.
You can, and it happens more often than you would think. Products, categories, customers and orders move via CSV files or migration tools — the data part usually takes a few days. The harder part is the design, which cannot be transferred: it has to be rebuilt on the new platform.
The critical thing in any migration is not destroying what you have already earned in Google. If product URLs change and the old ones are not redirected, you lose the visitors who arrived from search. So the first task in any migration is a table of 301 redirects from old to new addresses, and only then everything else.
Practical advice: if you are unsure and turnover is still small, start where you can launch fastest. Moving from Shopify to WooCommerce after a year will cost roughly what building a new store costs — but by then you will know exactly what you need, and the decision will be far better informed than it is today.
Technically both platforms can rank in Google and neither grants an inherent advantage. The difference shows up in content: WooCommerce lives inside WordPress, so articles, guides and category descriptions are created with the same tool, at no extra cost and with no constraints on URL structure.
The Shopify blog is simpler and locks you into a fixed address structure (the mandatory /collections/ and /products/ segments, for instance) that cannot be changed. For small stores this does not matter. But if you plan to attract customers through content rather than advertising, a WordPress foundation gives more freedom over time.
WooCommerce, in most cases. There is no platform fee — you pay only for hosting, roughly 10 € a month. Shopify costs $29–99 a month plus a 0.5–2% transaction fee when you use an external payment provider. Over three years the difference typically reaches around 600 € in WooCommerce’s favour.
Only through third-party apps, and Shopify then adds its own transaction fee on top. WooCommerce has official Paysera, Montonio and Kevin plugins with no extra platform charge. If most of your buyers pay by bank link, this alone often decides the choice.
Yes, on both platforms. Shopify’s admin is slightly simpler for a first-time user; WooCommerce sits inside WordPress, which is familiar to many. We train you on whichever you choose and hand over recorded instructions for your specific setup.
Shopify: 1–2 weeks. WooCommerce: 2–3 weeks. A custom Next.js store: 4–8 weeks. The timeline depends mostly on how many products there are and how quickly we receive photographs and descriptions.
Yes. Products, customers and orders transfer via CSV or migration tools, usually within a few days. The design has to be rebuilt. The critical part is a table of 301 redirects from old URLs to new ones — without it you lose the search traffic you have earned.
It needs updates roughly monthly, automated backups and a check that plugins do not conflict — about an hour a month for a cleanly built store. The real risk is plugin excess, not WooCommerce itself. Shopify requires none of this, but you pay roughly 350 € a year for that, indefinitely.
Yes, once you sell to consumers in other EU countries and pass the 10 000 € annual threshold — that is the OSS scheme. Both platforms support it, but it must be configured deliberately. It is one of the most common mistakes in new export stores.
In a free call we discuss your market, catalog size and budget — you leave with a concrete recommendation and a fixed price. No pushing.