Shopify vs WooCommerce: Trust Signals Across 10,502 Stores
We run automated public-signal checks on 10,502 independent online stores and record which platform each one runs on. That makes it possible to ask a question shoppers and merchants both care about: does the platform a store is built on tell you anything about whether you can trust it?
The short answer is that it tells you a great deal about what you can verify, and much less about the merchant. Those are different things, and conflating them is the mistake this data makes easy.
The numbers
Percentage of stores on each platform where our automated check found the signal. Platforms with fewer than 50 stores in the corpus are omitted as too small to read anything into.
| Signal | WooCommerce | Shopify | Undetected | Salesforce Commerce | Magento |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Privacy policy | 60.83% | 92.71% | 86.35% | 90.48% | 84.21% |
| Terms | 53.92% | 92.58% | 84.3% | 90.48% | 89.47% |
| Refund policy | 27.71% | 87.72% | 79.35% | 88.1% | 75.44% |
| Shipping policy | 26.73% | 66.75% | 80.03% | 84.52% | 73.68% |
| Contact page | 86.16% | 93.99% | 89.93% | 95.24% | 98.25% |
| Public email | 59.16% | 52.17% | 6.48% | 23.81% | 38.6% |
| Public phone | 83.19% | 70.08% | 9.39% | 75% | 75.44% |
| No social presence | 25.26% | 11.76% | 92.15% | 5.95% | 5.26% |
| Valid SSL | 99.1% | 99.36% | 95.7% | 90.24% | 100% |
| Stores measured | 8,972 | 782 | 586 | 84 | 57 |
| Median domain age | 8.6 yr | 11.1 yr | 7.6 yr | 28.6 yr | 23.6 yr |
| Mean trust score | 78.1 | 85.4 | 49.3 | 82.9 | 86.5 |
Shopify stores publish policies; WooCommerce stores often don't
The starkest gap is the refund policy: 87.72% of Shopify stores have one we can find, against 27.71% of WooCommerce stores — a 3.2× difference. Shipping policies follow the same pattern (66.75% vs 26.73%), and privacy policies are near universal on Shopify (92.71%) but present on barely half of WooCommerce stores (60.83%).
This is a platform-defaults story, not a merchant-diligence story. Shopify's setup flow generates policy documents and links them in the footer by default; a merchant has to actively remove them. WooCommerce ships a shop, and everything else is the store owner's problem. The result is that the average Shopify store clears a verification bar its owner may never have thought about, and the average WooCommerce store doesn't.
The finding that keeps this honest
There is an obvious objection to everything above: our checker probes Shopify's
canonical /policies/* URLs directly, so perhaps we simply
find Shopify policies more easily rather than Shopify stores having more of
them. That would be a measurement artefact, not a finding.
The contact signals are the control, and they point the other way. WooCommerce stores list a public email more often than Shopify stores (59.16% vs 52.17%) and a public phone number more often too (83.19% vs 70.08%). If our detection simply favoured Shopify, that advantage would show up everywhere. It doesn't — it shows up precisely where Shopify has a documented default and vanishes where it doesn't.
That inversion is also the more useful finding for a shopper. A WooCommerce store is more likely to tell you how to reach a human; a Shopify store is more likely to have the paperwork. Neither is trustworthiness.
Platform doesn't track age the way you'd guess
Median domain age is 11.1 years for Shopify stores and 8.6 for WooCommerce — Shopify stores in this corpus sit on older domains, not newer ones. The "Shopify means a fly-by-night dropshipper" intuition does not survive contact with a general sample of independent stores. It likely reflects established businesses migrating onto Shopify rather than new businesses starting there.
SSL is now effectively universal everywhere (99.1%–99.36%), which means it has stopped being a useful discriminator. A valid certificate tells you almost nothing in 2026; its absence still tells you something.
Methodology and limitations
Based on 10,502 independent online stores, each fetched and assessed from public signals. Platform is detected from homepage markup markers. Data as of 2026-08-10.
- The sample is heavily unbalanced. WooCommerce accounts for 8,972 of the 10,502 stores and Shopify only 782. The WooCommerce figures are far more precise than the rest, and the two smallest platforms shown should be read as indicative only.
- This is not a random sample of e-commerce. It is a corpus of independent stores, skewed toward self-hosted ones, and excludes marketplaces and large retailers. Shopify's real-world market share is nothing like the 7.4% seen here.
- Detection is not existence. Every figure means "found by an automated check of the homepage and common paths". Policies behind a checkout flow, rendered by JavaScript, or at unconventional URLs read as absent.
- Known detection asymmetry. Shopify's canonical policy paths are in our probe list; WooCommerce has no equivalent convention. We argue above that the contact-signal inversion shows this does not drive the result, but it is a real asymmetry and you should weigh the policy figures with it in mind.
- Platform detection can misattribute. Headless builds and heavily customised themes may hide the markers we look for.
- None of this measures merchant conduct. We check what a store publishes, not whether it ships orders or honours refunds.
Related
See also what 10,502 online stores reveal about trust signals, or browse stores by platform, country or trust level.