In focus
WooCommerce vs Shopify vs a Facebook page, for a Chattogram seller
Every seller weighing this asks the same three-way question, so here is the honest version. A Facebook page is free and where your buyers already are, but it does not scale — there is no catalogue, no fixed pricing, no order record, and you are answering koto taka by hand all day. Shopify is genuinely good software, but it bills monthly in dollars, takes a cut of sales, and its bKash, Nagad and cash-on-delivery support is awkward for the Bangladesh market, so you end up patching what should be native.
WooCommerce sits in the middle that actually fits a Chattogram store: a one-time build you fully own, hosting you pay for in BDT, and clean, native handling of the things that matter here — bKash and Nagad merchant flow, COD as the default, and Pathao or Steadfast pickup. The one real trade-off is that WooCommerce needs a competent person to maintain it, because there is no SaaS support desk behind it. That is exactly the gap I fill.
Where WooCommerce earns its place for a port-city seller is the catalogue itself. When your stock is import-side and variable — a lot of electronics in this week, a clothing shipment that sells out next week, supplier prices that move with the dollar — you need to edit prices, add variants and toggle stock yourself, instantly, without a developer in the loop. WooCommerce gives you that ownership; a hosted builder rents it back to you.
We talk over the phone or a call about how your buyers actually order — most message first, ask koto taka, then pay COD or bKash on delivery — and the WooCommerce checkout gets built around that reality, not a Western template that assumes a credit card and fibre. Design is approved before I write a line of code, which is the design-approval guarantee: if the homepage and product pages do not match what we agreed, you get revisions, not excuses.
Price is locked at 50,000 BDT for a focused store, 90,000 and 1,50,000 BDT for larger catalogues, and from 3,00,000 BDT for genuinely custom work like a multi-vendor marketplace or ERP sync. 50% advance to start, 50% on launch day — no retainer trap, no "SEO package" that is just a monthly bill for nothing.