WooCommerce or Shopify for a Danish webshop
Both run fine Danish shops. The choice is rarely about features - it is about who owns the server, what the accounting sync has to survive, and how much of the shop you will want to change in year three.
Most shop owners who ask me this have already read the comparison tables. Both platforms take MobilePay, both have a Danish checkout, both can be made fast. The tables stop being useful at exactly the point where the decision gets made, so this is the version I actually walk people through.
The question underneath the question#
WooCommerce is software you run. Shopify is a service you rent. Everything else follows from that.
With WooCommerce you own the server, the database and every line of code. That means you can change anything, and it also means somebody has to keep PHP, WordPress, WooCommerce and twenty plugins updated without breaking checkout on a Friday. With Shopify, Shopify does that part, and in exchange you can only change what their theme and app system lets you change.
Neither is better. The useful question is which of those two costs you would rather carry.
When Shopify is the right answer#
You sell physical products in a fairly standard way: a catalogue, a cart, shipping, returns.
Nobody on the team wants to think about hosting, backups or security updates.
The shop is the business, not one part of a larger system that has to talk to it.
You can live with the checkout Shopify gives you.
For most new shops this is the honest recommendation, and I would rather say so than sell a custom build that is not needed.
When WooCommerce earns its keep#
The shop has to do something unusual: subscriptions with odd rules, B2B price lists per customer, products configured from many options, bookings.
The shop sits next to a WordPress site with a lot of content that already ranks.
You need the data in your own database, for reporting or for a system that reads it directly.
You want to change the checkout itself, not just its colours.
The part nobody puts in the table: the accounting sync#
In Denmark the shop almost always has to talk to e-conomic, Billy or Dinero, and often to a warehouse or Shipmondo. On both platforms that connection is usually an app or a plugin, and on both platforms it tends to handle the normal order well and fail quietly on the rest: a credit note, a partial delivery, a VAT code on an item shipped outside the EU, an item that is sold out in the warehouse but still for sale in the shop.
That is where most of my shop work ends up, whichever platform it is. The platform choice matters less than whether somebody finds out the sync broke the day it breaks, not at the end of the quarter.
Speed#
Both can be fast and both are routinely slow. On Shopify the usual cause is apps, each one adding its own script to every page. On WooCommerce it is usually hosting and plugins doing work on every request. Neither fix is a new platform.
If you already have one#
Moving platforms is expensive and it resets a lot of SEO work. If the shop works and the problem is speed, a sync or the checkout, fix that first. A migration makes sense when the platform itself is the constraint, and that is rarer than it feels on a bad day.
More on how I work with each: WooCommerce and Shopify.
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