It's all about the money. If you're running an online store you're trying to make as much as possible as quickly as possible whilst keeping your costs to a minimum.

WordPress / WooCommerce ( or EDD ) on the face of it looks a good solution. Both are free to download, grab a cheap web host and you can create a basic store for the price of a coffee.

But BASIC is the right word. You soon realise that to create the kind of store that will generate decent sales and be fit for purpose is going to require plugins. Time to get the wallet out.

By the time you've put the wallet away you'll have burned through $500 as a bare minimum (recurring each year at the full price) that's before you start forking out for hosting, SSL certs etc

You'll have also spent an inordinate amount of time setting the damn thing up and as mentioned in the article, you're now solely responsible for the maintenance and updating of the plugins, self hosted server etc etc.

Nah. Shopify for me. It takes a fraction of the time to get online and selling so negating the opportunity cost, the running costs are less, much less and it just works. You know what I mean? No rogue plugin crashing the site, no having to close your eyes and pray each time there's a woo update and you have to press that update button. It just works.

Which means you get to spend more time on customer service, marketing and sales. Which is where the money is. WordPress is great, I love it for blogging which is what it is, a blogging platform. But most of my previously woocommerce sites are slowly getting moved into Shopify as the licenses expire and I couldn't be happier.

Final note. There's too much of WooCommerce that is left to plugins that should be in core. If you're going to do a proper bolt on ecommerce solution then things like multi-language, fraud analysis, social logins, import/export, advanced reports, bookings, cart recovery, built in gateways (not just PayPal) should all be included and shouldn't have to be bought at great expense. It's just taking peoples eyes out charging for things like that. I had hoped that EDD might offer a good half way house between Woo and Shopify but their recent pricing has left me cold as well.

Sorry for the ramble, started to write and got carried away!