Ask a developer which platform to use and you will usually learn which one they prefer building on. Here is the version that starts from your business instead.
If selling products online is the business, start with Shopify. If content and search visibility matter more than transactions, start with WordPress. Most other considerations are detail.
Everything infrastructural is handled — hosting, security patching, payment compliance, uptime. For a business that wants to sell rather than administer a server, that is worth the monthly fee.
Checkout is excellent, and it has been optimised across an enormous number of transactions. Building a checkout that converts as well is genuinely difficult.
Inventory, shipping rules, taxes and payment processing work out of the box, including the parts that are tedious to get right.
Content and SEO are workable but constrained. URL structures are partly fixed, and the blogging tools are basic compared with WordPress.
Deep customisation eventually means working within the platform's boundaries. For most stores this never becomes a problem; for unusual requirements it becomes the whole problem.
The monthly cost is permanent, and it climbs with apps. Several apps at modest monthly fees add up faster than people expect.
Content and search. If the plan is to rank for a lot of terms by publishing genuinely useful material, WordPress is built for it and gives you complete control of structure and URLs.
Flexibility. It can be a brochure site, a directory, a membership site, a booking system or a store, and it can change shape as the business does.
No platform fee. You pay for hosting and maintenance instead — often less, provided you actually do the maintenance.
Maintenance is not optional. Outdated core, themes and plugins are how nearly every compromised site gets compromised. If nobody is patching it, it will eventually be a problem.
Plugin sprawl. Every convenient plugin is more code to maintain and more surface to attack. Bloated WordPress sites got that way one reasonable decision at a time.
You own the consequences. Nobody else is responsible for backups, uptime or security.
WordPress with a store attached. It makes sense when content and SEO lead and commerce follows, or when you need control Shopify will not give you. It inherits both WordPress's flexibility and its maintenance burden.
Ask what would hurt more: being unable to rank for the content you want to publish, or having to administer security and hosting yourself. Whichever answer makes you wince tells you which platform to avoid.
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