Build an e-commerce store with AI

Stripe Checkout (hosted). The right default. Stripe hosts the checkout page, handles SCA/3DS, accepts every payment method automatically (Apple Pay, Google Pay, Klarna, Afterpay, Link), updates compliance for you. You write 30 lines of code to create a session and 100 lines for the webhook handler. Done.

Use Stripe Checkout if: your store has < 100 SKUs, you're not doing exotic upsells or post-purchase one-clicks, and your customers won't blink at being redirected to a stripe.com URL. That's 90% of stores.

Custom cart with Stripe Elements (embedded). Right when you need full control over the checkout UXmulti-step flows, post-purchase upsells, in-cart discounts that update in real-time, or you need to keep customers on your domain end-to-end for conversion-tracking reasons.

You're trading 1–2 weeks of build time for the control. Webtwizz can scaffold either; tell the AI "use Stripe Checkout" or "use Elements with a custom cart" upfront.

Avoid: rolling your own card-input forms. PCI scope is a swamp, Stripe Elements or Checkout both keep you out of it.

Shopify Basic is $39/mo + 2.9% + 30¢ per transaction. Plus apps. The average serious Shopify store spends $200–400/mo before they realize it: Klaviyo for email, Judge.me for reviews, Subbly or Recharge for subscriptions, a theme upgrade, a custom-checkout app. By the time you're at scale, you're $500–1,000/mo in SaaS to run the store.

Webtwizz + Stripe is $25/mo (Webtwizz Standard) + Stripe's 2.9% + 30¢. That's it. Email goes through Resend ($20/mo). Reviews are a table in your Supabase. Subscriptions are Stripe Billing.

When Shopify still wins: if you want every payment method, fraud detection, abandoned-cart recovery, multi-currency, dozens of pre-built apps with no engineering effort, and your store is genuinely 100+ SKUs with complex variants. Shopify is the right tool for the job.

When Webtwizz wins: narrower stores (digital goods, subscription boxes, single-product, niche merch) where the cost stack adds up faster than the Shopify-app stack saves you. You also own the storefront, change anything, no theme limits, no app conflicts. Move off Webtwizz any time; the real code is yours.