If you need to sell online, you'll encounter both of these names early. They're both genuinely good products, but they serve different purposes and come with very different cost structures.
Shopify: the full platform
Shopify is a complete e-commerce platform. It handles your store, your checkout, your inventory, your shipping integrations, and your customer accounts — all in one place, with a visual editor you can use without a developer.
The trade-off: $29–$299/month, plus transaction fees on top of payment processing fees, plus costs for apps (most useful Shopify functionality requires paid apps). For a business doing serious volume — hundreds of orders a month — that's reasonable. For a small business just starting out, it adds up fast.
Stripe: the payment layer
Stripe is a payment processor, not a full store platform. It handles checkout, card processing, subscriptions, and invoicing with extraordinary reliability. It doesn't come with a product catalogue or a shipping manager out of the box — you bring those.
On a custom-built site, Stripe is wired in directly. You pay 2.7% + $0.05 per transaction for European cards. No monthly platform fee. No per-transaction surcharge on top.
Which one?
If you're selling a small catalogue of products or services — fewer than 50 SKUs, relatively simple checkout — a custom site with Stripe integration will cost you significantly less over 12 months and perform better.
If you're building a large-scale retail store with complex inventory and fulfilment needs, Shopify's ecosystem is genuinely worth the cost.
Most Irish small businesses we speak to fall into the first category.