Almost every platform comparison you will read assumes a market where the shopper pays by card, the courier exposes an API, and the catalog exists in one language. Egypt is not that market, and the differences are not cosmetic. Cash on delivery still carries a large share of orders. Addresses are landmarks rather than postcodes. Half your product copy has to exist twice. Feature tables do not settle this. Three questions do.
Who runs the store on a Thursday afternoon
Shopify is the right answer when nobody on your team wants to think about servers, patches or plugin conflicts. You pay a monthly fee instead of carrying an operational risk. WooCommerce is the right answer when you have, or will hire, somebody who genuinely maintains it. That means updates on a schedule, backups you have tested by restoring them, a staging site and an eye on performance. Woo is not cheaper than Shopify. It is cheaper in month one and more expensive the first month you ignore it.
Custom belongs to a narrower set of businesses than the people asking for it believe. Build custom when the catalog model does not fit the business. Examples include made to order manufacturing, B2B accounts with negotiated price lists and rental inventory booked by date. Another is stock that lives in an ERP across several branches and has to stay honest minute by minute. If the business is products, variants and a cart, custom is an expensive way to rebuild something that already exists and already works.
Checkout is where the platforms really differ here
An Egyptian checkout has jobs that a template from elsewhere never anticipated. It has to capture a building number, a floor and a landmark rather than a postcode. It has to price delivery by governorate. It usually has to offer cash on delivery beside card, wallet and installments. It often needs an order confirmation step or a small prepayment to keep failed deliveries under control. Our guide to payment methods and checkout in Egypt covers those options in detail.
On Shopify below the enterprise tier you extend checkout with apps rather than rewrite it. That keeps the store stable and puts a ceiling on how far the flow can bend. Shopify Payments is not available in Egypt either. You connect a local gateway such as Paymob, Kashier or Fawry, and you pay Shopify a transaction percentage on top of the gateway cut. Shopify bills the plan and most serious apps in dollars. After the 2024 float that is a materially different cost base than it looks on the pricing page. The Shopify Help Center lists which payment options each country supports.
WooCommerce hands you the checkout to shape as you like. Hosting costs pounds, plugins connect directly to the local gateways and to couriers such as Bosta and Mylerz, and nobody takes a percentage of your sales. It also hands you a site that gets slower every quarter, a plugin whose author stops maintaining it, and an update that breaks the cart at eleven at night. That is not a hypothetical. That is Tuesday. The WooCommerce documentation shows what a properly maintained store involves.
Shopify or WooCommerce: the four questions that settle it
How many products do you have, and how often do prices change? A catalog that reprices weekly needs a bulk editing workflow far more than it needs a beautiful theme. What share of orders is cash on delivery? A high share moves value toward checkout control and order verification. Do you need stock per branch? That is an integration project on any platform, so choose the one your developer can actually integrate. And who edits the homepage banner on a Thursday afternoon? If the honest answer is nobody, pick the platform that survives neglect. If it is your own team, make sure they can reorder a collection or retire a season without a developer. That is how we set up the Aran Fashion storefront.
Our default is Shopify when speed to launch and low operational load win. We pick WooCommerce when checkout control, local integration depth and a pound denominated cost base win. We pick custom only when the business logic leaves no choice. Going headless usually means paying for two systems and hiring for both. If you want that call made against your real catalog and order mix, our e-commerce website development team runs it as a short scoping exercise before anybody writes code.
