If you are opening an online store in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the platform question is the first one you will be asked and the first one nobody answers honestly. Shopify salespeople tell you Shopify. WooCommerce developers tell you WooCommerce. A custom shop says custom. What you actually need is an answer tied to your product, your volume and your patience for technical work.
This piece walks through the three paths for a BiH store, with real numbers and real integrations. KM currency, Monri and WSPAY payment gateways, BH Pošta shipping, 17 percent VAT, Bosnian language, cash on delivery still being king. By the end you will know which one fits your case, and you will know why.
The three options in one sentence each
Shopify is a hosted, subscription-based platform where you pay monthly and get a complete system out of the box. WooCommerce is a free WordPress plugin that turns a self-hosted WordPress site into a store, with endless customisation and endless moving parts. A custom build is a store written from scratch on a modern stack, controlled entirely by you, expensive to build and expensive to maintain.
Each has a place. The trick is matching the place to your business rather than to your developer's preference.
Setup cost and monthly cost, in KM
Numbers below are realistic 2026 ranges for a store with 50 to 500 products, payments in KM, shipping across BiH, and a Bosnian-first interface. They exclude photography, copy and ad spend.
| Platform | Setup (KM) | Monthly (KM) | Time to launch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shopify Basic | 1,500 - 4,000 | 60 - 150 | 1 - 2 weeks |
| Shopify (Shopify plan) | 2,500 - 6,000 | 150 - 300 | 2 - 3 weeks |
| WooCommerce template | 1,200 - 3,500 | 40 - 100 | 2 - 3 weeks |
| WooCommerce custom theme | 4,000 - 12,000 | 80 - 200 | 4 - 8 weeks |
| Custom build (Next.js, Medusa, etc.) | 15,000 - 60,000+ | 200 - 800 | 8 - 20 weeks |
Two numbers jump out. Shopify monthly fees are steady but add up. Over three years a mid-Shopify store pays 5,400 to 10,800 KM in subscription alone. A WooCommerce store on a decent hosting plan pays a third of that. Custom has no subscription beyond hosting but carries heavy maintenance hours.
Localisation: KM, BS, VAT
KM is not a supported Shopify Payments currency, because Shopify Payments is not available in Bosnia at all. You can still display prices in KM, charge in KM and settle in KM, but you do it through a third-party gateway. Shopify then adds a 2 percent fee on top of every transaction as a penalty for not using their own processor. That 2 percent compounds: on 10,000 KM of monthly sales you leave 200 KM on the table every month.
WooCommerce has no such penalty. You connect Monri or WSPAY through their official WooCommerce plugin and pay only the gateway fee. For a BiH store, that difference alone often pays for the extra hosting and maintenance of a WooCommerce build within a year.
On language, both platforms handle Bosnian cleanly. Shopify uses Markets for multi-region and Weglot or Translate & Adapt for languages. WooCommerce uses WPML or Polylang. Neither is hard. Both give you a BS primary, EN secondary setup inside a day once the strings are ready.
VAT at 17 percent is where Bosnian owners trip. You must show tax-inclusive prices to consumers, generate invoices with your VAT number, and use sequential numbering the tax authority accepts. Shopify handles this if you configure tax-inclusive pricing and enter your VAT number correctly. WooCommerce does too, with the Tax settings and a Bosnian-compliant invoice plugin, of which there are two reliable ones in 2026.
Payment gateways: Monri, WSPAY, cash on delivery
The two serious card gateways for a Bosnian store are Monri, run by Addiko, and WSPAY, Croatian-origin but widely used across the region. Both accept Visa, Mastercard and Maestro, settle in KM, and integrate with Shopify and WooCommerce. Monthly fees are negligible; per-transaction fees sit between 1.8 and 2.5 percent depending on volume.
Then there is cash on delivery, which in 2026 still accounts for 40 to 70 percent of orders in BiH depending on category. Clothing, cosmetics and small electronics skew heavily to cash on delivery. B2B and subscription products skew toward card. Any platform you pick must support cash on delivery as a native payment method, and your shipping partner must offer collection on delivery and weekly reconciliation.
If you launch without cash on delivery, expect a 30 to 50 percent drop in conversion versus a competitor that offers it. That is not a guess, it is what I have watched happen on two client stores in 2024 and 2025.
Shipping integrations: BH Pošta, DHL, GLS, InTime
Shipping is where the cleanliness of Shopify and the scrappiness of WooCommerce show up most. Shopify integrates natively with DHL and offers third-party apps for GLS. BH Pošta, the state postal operator, does not have a modern API, so on both platforms you end up with a manual export-print-label workflow or a partial plugin solution.
GLS has the best 2026 integration in Bosnia. Their plugin for WooCommerce generates labels, tracking numbers and pickup requests directly from the order screen. InTime is the dominant regional courier and also has a solid WooCommerce plugin. DHL is available on both but expensive for domestic shipments.
The practical setup for most BiH stores: offer GLS or InTime as the primary courier, BH Pošta as a cheaper fallback, and cash on delivery on both. Skip DHL unless you ship internationally or you sell luxury goods where the brand of the courier matters.
SEO defaults out of the box
Shopify has tightened its SEO defaults considerably since 2023. Clean URLs, schema markup on product and collection pages, automatic sitemap, decent mobile Core Web Vitals on the default themes. The weakness is content SEO: blog tooling is thin and you cannot easily build out the kind of deep content hub that wins long-tail search.
WooCommerce inherits WordPress, which is still the most flexible content engine on the web. Pair it with RankMath or Yoast and you can build a store plus a content hub that feeds organic traffic for years. The catch is that a poorly configured WooCommerce site can be a Core Web Vitals disaster: 50 plugins, unoptimised images, no caching, and you drop to a Lighthouse score of 30.
For pure SEO upside, WooCommerce done right beats Shopify. For SEO that works on day one without thinking, Shopify wins.
Support and who you call at 11pm
Shopify has 24/7 chat and email support in English. If the store is down, you open a ticket and get a human within the hour. That matters on Black Friday at midnight when payments stop processing and you are losing 400 KM an hour.
WooCommerce has no vendor support. You call your developer, your host, or you fix it yourself. If your developer is offline, the store stays broken. This is the single most under-weighted factor for small Bosnian owners who build on WooCommerce and then discover they have no one to call.
Custom builds inherit this problem amplified. You are entirely dependent on the team that built it. If they stop answering, you are rewriting.
Escape hatch: what if you want to leave
Every platform choice should be made with an exit in mind. Products and customers export cleanly from both Shopify and WooCommerce as CSV files. What does not export is design, custom apps, subscription logic and URL structure. A migration between platforms almost always loses some SEO juice for three to six months and costs 2,000 to 10,000 KM in rebuild fees.
WooCommerce wins on portability because you own the MySQL database and the files. You can lift and shift to a different host or rebuild the store on top of the existing data. Shopify is a walled garden: clean to use, harder to leave.
Decision framework by case
Pick Shopify if you are a first-time owner, you want to launch in two weeks, you have 10 to 300 products, you sell mostly to retail customers, and you can absorb the 2 percent non-native-gateway penalty. The predictable monthly bill and the 24/7 support are worth the premium for people who do not want to manage a stack.
Pick WooCommerce if you already have a WordPress site, you have or can hire a developer on retainer, you want content SEO to be a channel, and you are comfortable owning the uptime. The total cost over three years is usually 30 to 50 percent lower than Shopify for a small BiH store.
Pick custom if, and only if, your business has logic no standard platform handles: complex B2B pricing, membership mechanics, serial-number tracking, ERP integration, or a catalogue past 50,000 SKUs. For a normal consumer store with 20 to 2,000 products, custom is overpriced and over-engineered.
If you want a store that is actually set up for the Bosnian market, see the e-commerce service. For the first-clients pricing this year, the founding offer still covers a Shopify or WooCommerce launch at 2,490 KM, delivered in 10 to 14 days, payments and shipping configured, no deposit.