EAGLE SOLUTIONS
You want to launch an online shop, and everyone tells you something different: one friend swears by Shopify, another uses WooCommerce, a third runs OpenCart. I have been building online shops since 2011, I have worked with all three, and below I lay out what a small business in Harghita County or elsewhere in Transylvania should actually weigh up.
The three platforms in one sentence each
- WooCommerce: the free e-commerce plugin for WordPress. You own the whole system, there is no monthly fee, everything can be customised, but it needs maintenance.
- Shopify: a rented, cloud-based platform. For a monthly fee they run everything, you launch quickly, but customisation and Romanian integrations are more limited, and you also pay a commission on every sale unless you use their own payment system.
- OpenCart: a standalone, open-source shop engine. Strong product management, but a smaller plugin and developer community than WordPress.
Costs: monthly fee or one-off development?
Shopify's base plan is billed monthly, in dollars, plus transaction fees, plus paid apps. Over five years that easily exceeds the price of a custom WooCommerce shop, which with me starts at 5,000 RON as a one-off cost, with hosting at a few hundred RON per year. In return, with WooCommerce you (or your maintenance provider) are responsible for updates and security.
Romanian payments, shipping and invoicing
This is the point that decides most local projects. For Romanian card payment providers (Netopia, EuPlatesc, PayU), courier services (Fan Courier, Sameday, Cargus) and invoicing systems (SmartBill, Oblio, e-Factura) there are ready-made, maintained WooCommerce plugins. On Shopify some of these exist, others only work through third-party apps at extra cost. Cash on delivery, which still makes up a significant share of orders in Romania, is a single click to enable in WooCommerce.
A Hungarian and Romanian online shop
In Székely Land some customers search and shop in Hungarian, others in Romanian. WooCommerce with the Polylang or WPML plugin gives you a fully bilingual shop with its own URLs, which also matters for search engine optimisation. Shopify does support multiple languages, but it is limited on the lower plans, and managing translations is more cumbersome.
When do I still recommend Shopify?
If you have no need for local integrations, you mainly sell abroad, you want to launch very quickly, and the monthly fee is not an issue – then Shopify can be a good choice. I help with the setup in that case too, but I will tell you honestly that for most of my local clients WooCommerce is the more economical option in the long run.
And OpenCart?
If you already have a working OpenCart shop, you do not necessarily have to migrate – I maintain and extend those as well. For a new project, though, I recommend the WordPress + WooCommerce pair, because you can manage the content side (blog, pages, SEO) in the same system as your products.
Next step
Tell me what you would sell, roughly how many products you have, and which payment and shipping methods you want. Based on that, I will tell you within a day which platform I recommend and what it costs. Details on the online shops page, quote requests on the contact page.
