WooCommerce vs Shopify for UK Businesses

WooCommerce vs Shopify is less a question of which platform is better and more a question of which set of responsibilities you want. Shopify is a hosted service: you pay a monthly fee, and Shopify runs the servers, security, checkout and updates. WooCommerce is a free plugin for WordPress: you own and control everything, and you are responsible for everything. For a UK business, the right answer depends mainly on who will run the store day to day and how much the shop needs to do beyond selling products.

I build on WooCommerce more often than Shopify, so take that into account. But I also tell people to use Shopify when it fits, and the cases where it fits are set out below.

WooCommerce vs Shopify: the short version

What Shopify costs in the UK

At the time of writing (October 2026), Shopify's UK pricing page listed these plans:

Those are the platform costs. Most real Shopify stores also pay for a premium theme (a one-off cost) and several apps billed monthly: reviews, subscriptions, upsells, advanced filtering, bundles, wholesale pricing. App spend is the line that quietly grows, and it is the one most comparisons leave out.

What WooCommerce costs in the UK

WooCommerce itself is free. The costs are:

• hosting suitable for a store, which costs more than brochure-site hosting because cart and checkout pages cannot be cached
• payment processing, at your gateway's rate with no platform fee on top
• paid extensions where you need them, usually annual licences
• maintenance: updates, backups, security monitoring and fixing what breaks
• the build, which is usually more than a Shopify theme setup because you are configuring the whole stack

Payment processing fees are compared in WooCommerce payment gateways for UK stores, and the build and running costs in detail in how much a WooCommerce store costs in the UK.

A worked monthly comparison

The numbers below are hypothetical, to show the method. Say a store takes £8,000 a month in online card sales from 200 orders, averaging £40. All cards are treated as standard UK cards, which is optimistic, because premium and international cards cost more on every provider.

Shopify Basic, billed monthly, Shopify Payments:

• plan: £25
• card fees: 2% of £8,000 = £160, plus 200 x 25p = £50
• apps, say four at a combined £40
• total: around £275 a month

WooCommerce with Stripe:

• hosting suitable for a small store, say £30
• card fees at Stripe's standard UK card rate, listed on Stripe's UK pricing page as 1.5% + 20p at the time of writing: £120 + £40 = £160
• extension licences, say £300 a year, so £25 a month
• maintenance, say £99 a month
• total: around £314 a month

So in this example WooCommerce costs slightly more each month, because maintenance is a real cost that Shopify absorbs into its fee. Change the inputs and the answer changes: at higher sales volumes the percentage difference in card fees starts to dominate, and if the Shopify store needs ten apps instead of four, the comparison flips. If you handle maintenance yourself, WooCommerce gets cheaper but your time is not free.

The point is not the totals. It is that the gap is usually smaller than either side's marketing claims, so the decision should rest on fit rather than price.

When Shopify is the better choice

• Nobody on your side wants to own the technical side. No updates, no hosting decisions, no plugin conflicts. That is worth paying for.
• The store is the whole business. If the site is a catalogue, a basket and little else, Shopify's constraints rarely bite.
• You want to launch quickly on a modest budget. A Shopify theme, configured well, can be live in days.
• You sell across several channels. Shopify's integrations with marketplaces and social selling are mature. If you are setting up a dropshipping store specifically, setting up a Shopify dropshipping store covers that path.
• Peak traffic is spiky. Flash sales and TV mentions are Shopify's problem, not yours.

When WooCommerce is the better choice

• Content matters as much as products. If you plan to publish guides, resources or a serious blog alongside the shop, WordPress is a much stronger content platform.
• You need functionality Shopify apps do not cover well. Complex product configurators, unusual pricing rules, trade accounts with custom logic, deep integration with your own systems. On WooCommerce this can be built properly, as a custom plugin you own.
• You want full control of the checkout. Below Shopify Plus, checkout customisation is limited. WooCommerce lets you change anything.
• You want to own the whole stack. Your database, your server, your code. No platform can change its terms, its fees or its app policies under you.
• You already have a WordPress site that ranks. Adding a shop to it keeps your existing content and URLs intact.

The trade-off nobody puts in the comparison table

Shopify's real cost is not the plan fee. It is that you rent the platform, and the platform's rules are its rules. Fees, app availability and what the checkout can do are decided by Shopify.

WooCommerce's real cost is not the hosting. It is that someone has to own it. An unmaintained WooCommerce store accumulates outdated plugins, slows down as the database grows and eventually breaks after an update nobody tested. If nobody is going to look after it, Shopify is the safer choice, and I will say so.

Running the store day to day

This is the part people underweight when they compare feature lists. Somebody on your team will spend hours a week in the admin, so it matters which one they find easier.

Shopify's admin is built for one job and does it well. Orders, products, customers, discounts and reports are where you expect them. The mobile app is good enough to run a small store from a phone. Staff accounts and permissions are straightforward. The limitation is that anything outside commerce, such as a complex content page, feels bolted on.

WooCommerce's admin is the WordPress dashboard with a shop added. It is perfectly usable, and anyone who already edits a WordPress site will find it familiar. It gets cluttered as extensions add their own menus and notices, and how tidy it stays depends on how carefully the store was built. A well-built WooCommerce store hides what staff do not need. A badly built one shows them twenty plugin settings pages.

Payments and checkout

Both platforms take cards, Apple Pay and Google Pay, and both support PayPal and pay-later providers. The differences are commercial and practical:

• Shopify nudges you towards Shopify Payments by charging an extra percentage on third-party providers. If you already have a preferred provider or negotiated rates, that fee matters.
• WooCommerce has no platform fee on payments at all. You pick the gateway, and the only fee is the gateway's own.
• Shopify's checkout is fast, trusted and consistent, and you cannot change much of it below Plus. For most stores that is a feature, not a limitation.
• WooCommerce's checkout can be changed completely. That freedom is useful for unusual requirements, such as delivery date selection, trade account terms or custom fields, and risky when someone adds fields nobody needs.

Lock-in and leaving

Every platform has some lock-in. The question is what leaving would cost.

Leaving Shopify means exporting products, customers and orders (all straightforward), then rebuilding the theme and replacing every app with an equivalent elsewhere. Your URLs will change because Shopify's prefixes are fixed, so you will need redirects.

Leaving WooCommerce means moving a database and files to new hosting, which is routine, or migrating the data to another platform, which is the same exercise as above in reverse. If your developer stops working with you, the store keeps running and another developer can pick it up, provided the hosting and code are in your name.

SEO differences, honestly stated

Both platforms can rank. The practical differences:

• Shopify forces URL prefixes (/products/, /collections/, /pages/, /blogs/news/). That is fine for most stores but it is inflexible.
• Shopify can create duplicate product URLs through collection paths, which it handles with canonical tags. It works, but you do not control it.
• WooCommerce lets you set any URL structure, any template and any schema, which is useful and also lets you get it wrong.
• WordPress is a better publishing tool, which matters if content is part of how you plan to win search traffic.

If you are migrating from one to the other, the redirect map is what protects your rankings. The website migration SEO checklist covers the process.

How to decide in ten minutes

Answer these honestly:

1. Will anyone on your side, or a paid developer, look after updates and hosting every month?
2. Do you need content, functionality or checkout behaviour beyond a standard shop?
3. Is owning the code and data outright important to you?
4. Do you expect to grow beyond a few hundred products or into custom integrations?

Mostly no: Shopify. Mostly yes: WooCommerce. Split: either will work, so pick the one your team is more comfortable running.

Next step

If WooCommerce looks like the better fit, the WooCommerce store development guide sets out how the build runs, and the WordPress development service covers the work. If you are still unsure, the WordPress website development guide explains what owning a WordPress site involves, and a short call about your catalogue and operations usually settles it.