Shopify Already Won the Platform War
WebPulse data shows Shopify at 7.8% of 10 million scanned sites — 777,276 detected instances. That's 1.7x the size of Drupal (444,706) and growing. Shopify didn't just compete with WooCommerce and Magento — it replaced them for an entire generation of merchants. The 'build your own store' era ended.
The Headless Path for Custom Commerce
For merchants who need more than Shopify offers — custom checkout flows, complex B2B pricing, multi-warehouse inventory — headless commerce is the migration target. Next.js frontend + headless commerce API (Shopify Hydrogen, Commerce.js, Medusa) gives you custom UI with platform-grade security.
The cost difference is staggering. A Magento installation costs $22,000-$125,000/year in hosting, maintenance, and security patching. A headless commerce stack on Vercel + Shopify costs $2,000-$8,000/year. That's not a marginal saving — it's an order of magnitude.
WooCommerce: The WordPress Tax on Commerce
WooCommerce inherits every WordPress vulnerability plus its own. It's WordPress (11,334 CVEs) with payment processing bolted on via plugins. Every WooCommerce site is a PCI DSS compliance risk that most merchants don't even know they're carrying. The migration from WooCommerce to Shopify or headless isn't a technology preference — it's a liability reduction.
