Shopify vs Webflow vs WordPress for NZ small businesses

Start from the job, not the logo

Each platform is excellent at one job and merely adequate at the others. Most bad choices we see came from picking the tool a friend uses, or the one a developer preferred, rather than the one that matches what the business does every day.

Platform	Best when	Watch-outs
Shopify	Catalogue, checkout, Shopping, apps	App bloat; feed hygiene required
Webflow	Marketing/brand sites, CMS collections	Not a full ecommerce ops stack
WordPress	Content, membership, flexible stacks	Plugin/security maintenance

If you sell physical products, Shopify is the default and the burden of proof sits with the alternatives. If you sell time, advice or projects and the website’s job is to earn an enquiry, Webflow or WordPress will usually serve you better and cost less to run. Plenty of NZ businesses end up with two: a Shopify store for the catalogue and checkout, and a content site on another platform. That is fine, provided the two agree about who you are and where you are.

Shopify: when selling is the business

Shopify’s strength is everything that happens after someone clicks “add to cart”: checkout, payments, tax settings, shipping rules, inventory across locations, point of sale in a physical shop, and the feeds that put your products into Google Shopping and Meta. For an NZ retailer that means GST-inclusive pricing, local payment methods and courier rates can be set up without custom code, and the Merchant Center and Meta catalogue connections are native.

The watch-out is app creep. Every gap gets an app, every app adds a script and a monthly fee, and two years in the store is slower and the admin is cluttered. Our app audit guide covers how to unwind that. Shopify’s blog and pages are serviceable for content, but if you plan to publish a lot, expect to work around the editor rather than with it.

Webflow: when the site is the brochure and the brochure matters

Webflow gives a designer close control over layout and motion, with a CMS underneath for structured pages: services, locations, team, case studies. For a professional services firm, a trades business with town pages, or a brand that lives on its look, that combination is hard to beat, and hosting, SSL and forms come with it.

Its ecommerce is real but thin next to Shopify: fewer payment and shipping options, a smaller app ecosystem, and little of the operational tooling (returns, POS, multi-location stock) a growing retailer needs. If you sell a handful of products alongside a service, it can be enough. If the catalogue is the business, it will not be.

WordPress: when publishing volume or flexibility wins

WordPress still runs a large share of the web because it can be bent to almost anything: editorial sites, memberships, directories, course platforms and, with WooCommerce, a full store. If your plan involves hundreds of articles, gated content, or an integration nobody has built a Shopify app for, it is often the pragmatic choice. WordPress.com takes hosting and updates off your hands; self-hosting gives you full control and full responsibility.

That responsibility is the watch-out. Plugins need updating, hosting needs watching, and a neglected site is the one most likely to be hacked or to quietly break after an update. Budget for maintenance from day one, or choose a managed host that does it for you.

What it costs, in the shape that matters

Comparing headline subscription prices is the least useful part of the decision, and the figures change often enough that we will not quote them here. What matters is the shape of the cost over three years: the platform fee, the apps or plugins you will actually need, payment processing fees on every sale, hosting (built in for Shopify and Webflow, separate for self-hosted WordPress), and the developer or operator time to keep it all working. A cheap platform that needs a developer every month is not cheap. Write the three-year total for each option on one page before you decide, and include the cost of your own time.

GST, shipping and payments for NZ sellers

All three can present prices GST-inclusive and produce compliant invoices, but Shopify does it with the least configuration and has the broadest range of NZ payment options out of the box. Check three things on any platform before committing: whether tax can be set as included in the displayed price, whether your courier rates can be applied at checkout without a workaround, and whether order data can reach Xero cleanly. The Xero–Shopify reconciliation guide explains why that last point matters more than it sounds.

AI search angle

Assistants cite HTML pages that answer a question plainly. A Webflow CMS article and a Shopify blog post can both be cited if they are written well and reachable by crawlers. A gorgeous Webflow site with no text loses to a plain WordPress page that answers the GST and shipping questions a buyer actually asks. None of the three platforms has an advantage with ChatGPT, Claude or Google AI Overviews that outweighs the quality of what you publish, so do not migrate for “AI SEO”.

Four questions that usually settle it

1. Is a product catalogue and checkout the core of the business? Yes: Shopify. No: keep reading.
2. Does the site need to look designed and hold structured pages (services, towns, team)? Yes: Webflow, or WordPress with a good theme.
3. Will you publish at volume, gate content, or need an unusual integration? Yes: WordPress.
4. Who will maintain it, and have you costed their time? If the answer is “nobody”, choose a hosted option (Shopify, Webflow or WordPress.com) over self-hosting.

If you do need to move

Migrations go wrong when they are done in a weekend. Stage them: keep the old site live, build the new one on a separate domain or a password-protected store, map every old URL to its new home with a redirect, move products and content in batches you check, then switch DNS at a quiet time with the old site still available to roll back to. Nothing goes live without the owner approving the redirect map and the checkout test, and for a store the first week after launch gets a daily check of orders, feeds and Xero.

Illustrative example

Illustrative.

Related: Platforms we connect to · What a free SEO audit should include.

FAQ

Next step

If you want this done with you approving every change: book a free diagnostic (same free engagement report on the homepage). We show what search and assistants currently say in your niche, then a staged list you approve. Store ops stay approval-gated and month to month.

Glossary (Ahrefs, Search Console, Merchant Center): /#glossary. About: /about/.