| Criterion | Shopify | WooCommerce | Custom |
|---|---|---|---|
| Launch speed | Fast | Medium | Slower |
| Technical maintenance | Low (Shopify handles it) | Medium/high (yours or outsourced) | Yours or outsourced |
| Local payments in Paraguay | Via external gateway (Pagopar) | Wider range of integrations | Integrate whatever you need |
| Extra platform fee | Yes, if using an external gateway | No | No |
| System control | Medium | High | Full |
| Best for | Standard catalog and logic | Control on tight budget | Integrations or logic no platform covers |
What is Shopify, what is WooCommerce, and what is custom development
Shopify is a SaaS platform: you pay a monthly subscription and Shopify handles hosting, security, and updates. You just configure the store.
WooCommerce is a free e-commerce plugin that runs on WordPress. The software costs nothing, but you supply your own hosting, theme, and maintenance, whether in-house or outsourced.
Custom development is building the store from scratch (or on your own framework), with full control over business logic, integrations, and user experience, but without the pre-built foundation the other two options give you.
Real costs of each option
Shopify
Prices verified on Shopify’s official page in August 2026. Shopify may apply different prices by market and billing mode, so it’s worth confirming the current rate for your account before deciding.
Shopify’s public plans are: Basic starting at USD 29/month (annual) or USD 39/month (monthly), Grow from USD 79/month or USD 105/month, and Advanced from USD 299/month or USD 399/month. Plus starts at USD 2,300/month for large operations. If you need physical POS in a location, the POS Pro add-on costs USD 89/month per location (included free in Plus, up to 20 locations).
You also need to add transaction fees when using an external payment gateway outside Shopify Payments: 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced, and 0.2% on Plus. This Shopify fee stacks on top of what the gateway itself charges; it doesn’t replace it, so your real processing cost is both fees combined. This matters especially in Paraguay, as we see below.
WooCommerce
The plugin itself is free, with no revenue share and no subscription. But a working store needs hosting (WooCommerce officially estimates between USD 25 and USD 350 per month depending on traffic, though regional providers quote different ranges), premium extensions (between USD 29 and USD 299 per year each, depending on the catalog), and, if the business has no in-house technical capacity, you’ll usually need to budget for ongoing maintenance, in-house or outsourced, covering WordPress and plugin updates, security, backups, and plugin compatibility. WooCommerce takes no cut of your sales; processing cost depends on the gateway you pick. WooPayments, WooCommerce’s native gateway, is not currently available for businesses registered in Paraguay, so in practice you need to use local integrations or external providers (see more below).
WooCommerce is free to install, but not free to run.
Custom development
International benchmarks for custom e-commerce development show very wide variation, because the cost depends on each project’s catalog, checkout, integrations, automation, and infrastructure. We found no source with specific or representative figures for the Paraguayan market. So this kind of benchmark helps you gauge the order of magnitude of effort involved (weeks or months of work, not days) rather than price out a specific project: the real number depends on how much of what Shopify or WooCommerce already solve you need to rebuild.
Payment gateways and the Paraguay context
This is the factor that weighs most heavily in Paraguay. According to Shopify’s official documentation, Paraguay is not currently among the countries supported by Shopify Payments — when the country is not on that list, Shopify requires using an external gateway. The practical consequence: payments processed with an external gateway are still subject to Shopify’s additional fee for using an external provider (2%, 1%, 0.6%, or 0.2% depending on your plan), on top of the gateway’s own fee. Manual payment methods such as bank transfer or cash on delivery are treated differently and are not subject to that extra fee.
A local alternative for Shopify is Pagopar, which has its own official integration with Shopify (its own app, not through a third-party intermediary). It supports guaraníes and local cards. We found insufficient official documentation to confirm whether that integration supports recurring payments or subscriptions — if your business model depends on recurring charges, it’s worth verifying directly with Pagopar before deciding.
WooCommerce, being open source, has more local integration variety: there is an official Pagopar plugin in the WordPress repository that already covers Bancard, Cabal, local cards, wallets like Tigo Money, Personal Pay, and Zimple, plus transfers and PIX. There are also community implementations to integrate some providers directly, though their maintenance level and compatibility vary and should be evaluated before using them in production. That is a real WooCommerce advantage in Paraguay: anyone can write an integration, while on Shopify you depend on a third party publishing an approved app in their App Store. The flip side, said just as plainly: a community plugin maintained by one person is a continuity risk the day that developer stops supporting it.
When Shopify DOES make sense
If you need to launch fast, you don’t have your own technical team and your catalog and business logic are relatively standard, Shopify makes sense: the learning curve is short, the app ecosystem is huge, and hosting and security aren’t your problem. Paying in dollars and absorbing the extra fee that comes with not having Shopify Payments in the country is, for many businesses, a fair price for speed and stability.
When WooCommerce DOES make sense
If you already have (or will have) a WordPress presence, a tighter budget up front, and are willing to put in time or pay for ongoing maintenance, WooCommerce gives you more control for less money up front. It’s also the option with the most local integrations ready to use, thanks to its open-source nature.
When custom development DOES make sense
Go custom when the cost of Shopify’s or WooCommerce’s limitations, meaning no native gateway, no local invoicing or inventory integration, no recurring payments at checkout, or business logic that fits no plugin or app, outweighs the cost of building something yourself. Not before. For a small or mid-sized store with no complex integrations, going custom from the start doesn’t pay off: it’s commissioning an architect-designed house when a well-built prefab already does the job.
If your operation needs that level of control, Flexora works on both e-commerce built on existing platforms and custom software when the case calls for it. For a clearer sense of when you cross that line, see also when a business needs custom software (and when it doesn’t) and how much custom software costs in Paraguay.