For most stores launching today, a hosted platform is the right call rather than a stopgap. The question worth your time is when the platform turns from a shortcut into a ceiling. That happens at one of three moments: when the cut taken from every sale grows large enough to notice, when your store needs behaviour the plan will not allow, or when an internal system becomes your source of truth and the platform cannot keep up with it.
This comparison between a custom online store and a hosted platform is built on what Salla, Zid, Shopify and WooCommerce publish on their own pages, read on a single date: 22 September 2026. Subscriptions, transaction fees, plan limits, and what leaves with you if you decide to go. Where a platform publishes no number, you will find that stated plainly instead of filled in with a guess.
Before price: is the platform even available where you are?
This filter comes before any comparison, and it removes half the options before you open a pricing page.
Salla states in the footer of its plans page that it is supported in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and it runs a separate sign-up path for UAE stores. Zid says in its help centre that it serves merchants in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states only, and that its payment service, Zid Pay, is available to merchants in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. A business registered in Egypt therefore has no Salla or Zid option at all, and is left with Shopify, WooCommerce, or a store built for it.
Shopify does not behave the same way in every market either. Its supported countries page for Shopify Payments does not include Egypt or Saudi Arabia, while it does include the UAE. The financial weight of that one sentence shows up in the next section.
What you actually pay: the subscription first, then the transaction fees
| Platform | Published subscription | What the platform takes per transaction | Availability |
|---|---|---|---|
| Salla | Basic free · Plus SAR 99/month or SAR 990/year · Pro SAR 299/month or SAR 2,990/year · Special by negotiation | Not published publicly | Saudi Arabia and the UAE |
| Zid | Start free · Launch SAR 99/month · Growth SAR 299/month · Professional by negotiation | A percentage that varies by payment network and plan, plus a fixed operating fee. The full rate card is not published | Saudi Arabia and the Gulf |
| Shopify | Basic $19/month billed yearly or $27 monthly · Grow $54 or $72 · Advanced $299 or $399 · Plus from $2,300/month | 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced, 0.2% on Plus, when you use a third-party payment provider | Available in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf |
| WooCommerce | Core is free. Hosting $25 to $350/month for most stores, and $29 to $299/year per extension | Nothing. The page states 0% revenue share | Anywhere you can host |
Each platform name in the table opens its official pricing page, and every figure was read there on 22 September 2026.
One small detail deserves attention before you subscribe: Salla publishes in its help centre that the Plus plan costs SAR 129 a month inside its iOS app against SAR 99 from the browser, and Pro costs SAR 389 against SAR 299, explaining the gap by Apple's in-app subscription fees, which the page says reach 30%. The features are identical either way. The whole difference is where you press the subscribe button.
Transaction fees: the line that drops out of the calculation
A subscription is a fixed number that is easy to remember. The cut taken from every order is the one that grows with your success, and it is the item most often missing from comparison tables.
Shopify is the clearest case here because it publishes the percentage on the pricing page itself. The fee applies when you use a third-party payment provider instead of Shopify Payments, and since that service is unavailable in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, a store there pays its plan percentage on top of the local gateway's own commission on every card order. Shopify's transaction fees page excludes manual payment methods, cash on delivery first among them, which carries real weight in the Egyptian market. For the arithmetic on an Egyptian order in pounds through Paymob, we worked it through in the cost of building an online store in Egypt, and for choosing the gateway itself see the payment gateways guide, and for the Saudi market what the rules decide before you pick a provider.
Zid does not publish its rate card, but it does publish the formula and one worked example: a SAR 100 transaction through the mada network on the Growth plan carries a fee of 1% plus SAR 1, and with VAT the deduction becomes SAR 2.3, leaving the merchant SAR 97.7 (how transaction fees are determined, updated 16 July 2024). The about Zid Pay page adds that there are no setup or monthly fees, that a bank deposit carries SAR 3 which is waived for Riyad Bank account holders, and that the minimum deposit is SAR 100.
Salla handles the number differently: no percentages on the website, and instead a fee calculator inside the dashboard where you enter the order value and the payment method and it shows you the deduction. In practice that means you cannot compare Salla with anyone else on paper before opening an account.
WooCommerce is the only case with no platform percentage, because there is no platform taking one. You pay your payment processor, and you pay for the hosting and the extensions you choose.
One last line no platform publishes as a single number: app costs. Every app in the Shopify, Salla or Zid marketplace prices itself, so no figure belongs in a table. The only way to know yours is to write down what you actually need, such as loyalty points, search filters, shipment tracking or recurring subscriptions, and add up the prices from the app pages before you decide.
The technical ceiling: what the platform will not let you do
This is the part that pushes stores to migrate after two years, and it rarely appears in comparison tables because it does not show up in month one.
The purchase path. Shopify documents that the checkout.liquid file controlling the checkout page is available only to Shopify Plus merchants. The same document states that the file is no longer supported for the information, shipping and payment steps, that it was sunset on the Thank you and Order status pages on 28 August 2025, and that script tags are sunset on those pages for non-Plus stores on 26 August 2026. Changing the purchase path below Plus therefore runs exclusively through approved apps and extensions, not through code you write.
Limits written into the plan. Shopify's comparison table sets 10 inventory locations on Basic, Grow and Advanced against 200 on Plus, a maximum of 3 B2B catalogs on those three plans against unlimited on Plus, and additional staff accounts starting at five on Grow, fifteen on Advanced and unlimited on Plus. Zid's plans page sets team members at one on the first two plans, five on Growth and twenty on Professional. Salla places CSS and JS design customisation and staff accounts on the Pro plan alone. The constraint here is operational before it is technical: how many people can use the dashboard, how many branches are run from it, and how far wholesale selling can go.
Integration capacity. Shopify's documentation explains that API call limits vary by API and by plan, and its pricing page lists "up to 500% higher API call limits" among Plus-only features. That number means nothing to a store shipping fifty orders a day, and it means everything when an internal inventory system tries to sync thousands of SKUs every few minutes. The numbering and syncing decisions behind that are in SKU numbering and barcodes in a warehouse system.
Snaabble provides a tailored technical assessment to define the right stack & exact budget.
The situations where a real store hits the ceiling are repetitive and predictable: pricing that changes by customer or contract, a non-standard product such as selling by the metre or made-to-order with a configurator, two-way syncing with an accounting or POS system, or a purchase path that does not look like add to cart then pay. If your case is none of these, the ceiling is far away and not worth worrying about now.
WooCommerce has no ceiling of that kind because the code is yours, but the ceiling moves elsewhere: hosting, maintenance and security updates become your responsibility or that of whoever you contract. The same trade-off applies to any business system, and we covered it generally in off-the-shelf or custom business software.
E-invoicing: who handles it, the platform or you?
Here the Saudi platforms are clearly ahead, and the difference is a whole workload rather than a cosmetic feature.
Salla offers a ZATCA integration app that installs for free and uploads store invoices to the authority automatically. The article states the feature is currently limited to stores in Saudi Arabia, and requires registration with the authority, an approved commercial registration, a verified store, and complete address data for the main branch. Zid offers integration with the Fatoora platform free from settings in two steps, for compliance with the integration phase. What changes inside your own system at the point of integration is detailed in phase two of e-invoicing.
Egypt looks different. We searched the Shopify app store and the WooCommerce extension marketplace in September 2026 and found no official integration with the Egyptian Tax Authority's e-receipt system; the available options target European standards or other markets. In practice the obligation stays with you, through a system registered on the portal or an accredited service provider, independently of your store platform. The requirements and registration steps are in connecting your system to Egyptian e-invoicing, and what the law imposes on the cash register in each country is in restaurant systems and tax obligations.
The practical rule: if you sell in Saudi Arabia and fall in a group obliged under phase two, your platform choice settles part of the work for you. If you are in Egypt, no platform settles it, and you will need a compliance path either way, whether you stay hosted or build.
Your data on the way out: what can you actually take with you?
Read the export pages before you subscribe, not after you decide to leave.
Salla offers export templates for products and orders where you pick the fields and their order, in Excel or CSV, up to five templates for products and five for orders, with the file delivered to your email. Zid lets you export customers, all or selected, to an Excel file sent to the registered email, and the same applies to orders and products. Shopify exports products as CSV with two caveats on its product export page: product images are not included in the file, and any product with more than 100 variants makes the file arrive by email instead of downloading. WooCommerce has a built-in product CSV importer and exporter where you choose the columns and include meta data, alongside the database itself, because it is yours.
What matters more is what no file contains: the design and its customisations, data held inside the apps you installed, and the URL structure that built your search rankings. That is why the domain remains the cheapest insurance you can buy: register it in your own name in an account you control, not inside the platform's account and not under the name of whoever designed the store. And if you do reach the decision to move, the migration steps and preserving your indexing are in migrating your store from a hosted platform to a custom system.
Decision signals
A hosted platform is the right fit if you are testing a product and sales have not settled, if the catalogue is standard and the purchase path ordinary, if your team is small with nobody to watch a server and its updates, or if you are in Saudi Arabia and want e-invoicing handled for you. That describes most stores, and there is nothing wrong with it. The practical starting point is in how to build an online store in Egypt, and the fashion sector specifically in the online clothing stores guide.
It turns into a ceiling at specific signals:
- You multiply your plan percentage by your monthly card sales and the result is a number worth comparing against an annual hosting and maintenance quote.
- You ask for a feature and the answer is "upgrade to the higher plan", and that answer keeps repeating.
- Your internal system becomes the source of truth for stock or pricing, and you need syncing deeper and faster than the APIs allow.
- Your product or your pricing leaves the standard pattern in a way no off-the-shelf app addresses.
- You sell in Egypt and need an e-receipt path and local logistics, which intersects with shipping solutions for online stores.
A warning is due here: a custom store does not remove costs, it relocates them. The platform percentage disappears, and hosting, maintenance, monitoring, security updates and your responsibility for all of them appear. Building a custom store to save a monthly subscription is usually a losing decision. Building it because the platform blocks something that moves your sales is a decision you can defend with numbers.
The shortest way to settle this: write on one page your current plan percentage and your card sales volume, then write underneath the three things you asked the platform for and did not get. If the bottom of the page is empty, stay where you are.
Frequently asked questions
Can I open a Salla or Zid store from Egypt?
No, according to what both platforms publish. Salla states in its plans page footer that it is supported in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and Zid says in its help centre that it serves merchants in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states only. What is practically available to an Egyptian merchant is Shopify, WooCommerce, or a store built for them.
Does Shopify take its cut on cash-on-delivery orders?
No. Shopify's transaction fees page excludes manual payment methods, cash on delivery among them, and excludes POS orders. The percentage applies to orders that go through a third-party payment provider, which is the default situation in Egypt and Saudi Arabia because Shopify Payments is unavailable there.
Does a custom store remove the payment gateway commission?
No. What disappears is the platform's percentage. The gateway remains an independent party with its own commission whether you are hosted or custom. The difference is that you become free to negotiate with any gateway and move between them.
What does not come out when I export my store data?
Export files cover products, orders and customers, and Shopify's page warns that product images are not included in the CSV. The design and its customisations, data held inside installed apps, and the URL structure that built your search rankings are not handled by any export file, and they are what consumes the real time in any move.
At Snaabble we build custom stores and connect them to payment gateways, shipping companies and internal systems, and we tell a client plainly when a hosted platform suits their case better. If you want an opinion based on your store's numbers rather than a general rule, bring your case to the e-commerce team and ask for a written comparison between staying on the platform and building.
Sources
- Salla plans, plan prices on mobile devices, activating electronic payments, ZATCA integration and export templates, Salla, 22 September 2026.
- Zid plans, how transaction fees are determined, about Zid Pay, Fatoora platform integration and customer export, Zid, 22 September 2026.
- Shopify pricing, third-party transaction fees, Shopify Payments supported countries, checkout.liquid and API limits, Shopify, 22 September 2026.
- WooCommerce pricing and the product CSV importer and exporter, WooCommerce, 22 September 2026.
