Shopify or WooCommerce for a UK small business?

This is the question we get asked most by businesses about to sell online, and most of the answers you will find are written by people who only build on one of them.

The short answer: Shopify suits you if you want to be selling in weeks and would rather pay a monthly fee than think about hosting. WooCommerce suits you if you already have a WordPress site, want to avoid platform transaction fees as you grow, or need something unusual. Below about £50,000 a year the cost difference is small enough that convenience should decide it. Above that, the fees start to matter.

What each actually costs

Prices below are current as of September 2026 and change regularly — check before committing.

	Shopify	WooCommerce
Platform fee	From about £25/month (Basic)	Free (open-source plugin)
Hosting	Included	About £5–£30/month
Domain	About £10–£20/year	About £10–£20/year
SSL certificate	Included	Usually included by the host
Theme	Free options, or roughly £150–£300 one-off	Free options, or roughly £40–£80
Extensions	Many are monthly subscriptions	Mix of free, one-off and annual

Shopify's number is predictable and Woo's is not, which is the real difference. With Shopify you know what next month costs. With WooCommerce you own the pieces, which is cheaper in the long run and means you are the one responsible when something needs updating.

The transaction fees are the part that bites

This is where the platforms genuinely diverge, and it is the bit most comparisons skate over.

Shopify charges card processing of around 2% + 25p on UK cards on the Basic plan. That is competitive. But if you use any payment provider other than Shopify Payments, Shopify adds its own platform fee on top — roughly 2% on Basic, falling to about 1% and 0.6% on higher plans. That is charged on every order, in addition to whatever your gateway charges.

WooCommerce charges nothing itself. Your fees are purely your gateway's — Stripe is about 1.5% + 25p for UK cards.

At small volumes this is noise. At £200,000 a year through Shopify Basic on Shopify Payments, processing fees alone run to something in the region of £4,500 a year. The same turnover on WooCommerce with Stripe would be meaningfully less — and none of it is a platform fee you could avoid by moving.

The practical rule: the more you sell, the more WooCommerce's cost advantage compounds. The trade-off is that you are buying that saving with your own time or a developer's.

When Shopify is the right answer

• You want to be selling within weeks, not months.
• Nobody in the business wants to think about updates, backups or hosting.
• You sell physical products with straightforward variants.
• You want a support line to ring when something breaks at 9pm.
• You are doing under roughly £100k a year, where the fee difference is small next to the hours you would spend maintaining WordPress.

Shopify is genuinely good software. The reason agencies sometimes talk people out of it is rarely technical — it is that the fees keep growing with you and you cannot negotiate them.

When WooCommerce is the right answer

• You already have a WordPress site and content that ranks.
• You are past about £100k a year, where platform fees become real money.
• You need something specific: unusual pricing rules, trade accounts, custom shipping logic, a booking or hire model.
• You want to own the whole thing, including the data and the checkout.
• You have someone — in house or on retainer — who will keep it updated.

That last point is not optional. An unmaintained WooCommerce store is a security liability. If nobody is going to update it, choose Shopify.

What about Wix or Squarespace?

Fine for a handful of products alongside a brochure site. They become limiting quickly once you need real stock control, multiple shipping rules, or serious SEO control. If ecommerce is going to be the main way your business makes money, start on a platform built for it.

What about switching later?

You can move, and people do — but it is a project, not an afternoon. Products and customers export reasonably well. What hurts is URLs: change them without redirects and you lose the search rankings you spent years building. Budget for a proper redirect map whichever direction you go.

This is the main argument for thinking about it properly now rather than "starting simple and moving later".

How to decide in five minutes

Answer these honestly:

1. What is your annual online turnover, or your realistic target for year one? Under £50k, pick on convenience. Over £100k, the fees justify looking hard at WooCommerce.
2. Who maintains it? Nobody? Shopify.
3. Do you already have a WordPress site with traffic? Then WooCommerce keeps what you have built.
4. Is anything about your selling unusual? Trade pricing, hire, bookings, bundles — Woo bends further.
5. How fast do you need to launch? Shopify is faster to a working shop, almost always.

There is no universally correct answer here, and anyone who gives you one without asking about your turnover and who maintains it is telling you what they prefer to build.

We build on both. If you want an opinion based on your numbers rather than ours, tell us what you sell and we will tell you which way we would go — including when that means not using us. You can also see what an ecommerce build involves and what it costs.