WooCommerce, with the running costs named up front.
A WooCommerce store from A$5,500 — ex GST, and more than our Shopify price for a reason we explain below. WooCommerce gives you a store nobody can take away and a maintenance job nobody else will do for you. Both halves of that are real.
The process, in five steps.
What you actually get.
A block theme, not a builder
Elementor and its relatives are the single most common cause of a slow WooCommerce store. We write the theme; you keep the speed.
Hosting chosen for the catalogue
Sized for your product count and your traffic, with the figure written down before you commit to it.
Staging that actually matches
A copy you can break. The reason WooCommerce updates go wrong is that most stores have nowhere safe to try them.
Backups you have restored
A backup nobody has restored is a hope. Part of handover is restoring one in front of you.
The update routine, written down
Which plugins update automatically, which need a human, and what to do when one breaks the cart.
Monitoring that walks the buy path
Bilby works on any ecommerce platform, WooCommerce included: a nightly visit through to the payment step, not a ping at the homepage.
What it costs, from.
| What | From | Covers |
|---|---|---|
| WooCommerce store | A$5,500 / US$3,600 | up to 100 products |
Up to 100 products; past that it is 0.15 hours a product. Hourly work is A$140 / US$95. Hosting, plugins and licences are yours and we will price them with you before you commit. AUD is ex GST for Australian clients; USD everywhere else. Every one of these is a fixed price against a written scope before the work starts — and the cost guide shows the arithmetic, including the hours behind every addition.
What we can and cannot show you.
We have no public WooCommerce build to point you at. Our own stores are a Shopify store and a custom-built one, and the honest thing to do on a services page is say so rather than borrow somebody else’s screenshot or describe a job we cannot name.
What we can show you is adjacent and real: our free scanner reads any store’s homepage and the scripts it loads, WooCommerce included; Bilby walks any ecommerce platform’s buying path nightly and was built platform-agnostic from the start; and the custom store we built for GenFul — not Shopify, not WooCommerce — went from a 4.4 MB homepage to 541 KB, which is 88% lighter.
If a WooCommerce reference is what decides this for you, we are the wrong studio today and we would rather you knew that in the first minute than the third meeting.
Straight answers.
Why is WooCommerce more expensive than Shopify to build?
Because the build includes what Shopify does for you: hosting chosen and configured, PHP and plugin updates, backups, a staging environment, security patching and PCI considerations. That is real work, and it is the whole of the difference between A$5,500 and A$4,900. The ongoing cost runs the other way: no platform fee.
Should I be on WooCommerce at all?
If you want to own the whole stack, have unusual product logic, or already have a WordPress site with real content equity: yes. If you want to sell things and not think about servers: Shopify, and we will build that instead. We have no preference worth paying for — we will tell you which one your situation points at.
Who maintains it after launch?
You, us, or your host, and the page should not pretend that question away. Hourly at A$140 / US$95, or a monthly retainer with no lock-in. What we will not do is hand over a store whose update routine is undocumented.
Can you move me off WooCommerce?
Yes, and there is a page for it with the real numbers from a migration we did: 479 products, 1,767 SKUs, zero data loss, 92 redirects. The redirects are the part most migrations get wrong.
Do you use page builders?
No. A page builder is a performance cost on every page view and a dependency you cannot leave. If you need to edit page content yourself, a block theme and the WordPress editor do that without the tax.
Prices are published. A quote still needs a conversation.
The cost guide prices your own build from the same hours and the same rate we quote with, and the form at the bottom of it carries your estimate into the message — so the reply starts from what you chose.