Shopify vs WooCommerce for UK businesses: real costs over three years

For most UK shops turning over less than about £250,000 a year online, Shopify and WooCommerce cost roughly the same over three years once you add up subscriptions, apps, hosting, maintenance and card fees. The real difference is who does the work. Choose Shopify if you want to run the shop yourself with no developer on call. Choose WooCommerce if you need custom checkout logic, content-heavy pages, trade pricing or full ownership of the code and data. Above that turnover, payment rates start to decide it, and WooCommerce with Stripe usually comes out cheaper.

We build on both, so we have no reason to sell you one over the other. Below is the comparison we give clients, with worked numbers at our real prices.

The short version

What Shopify actually costs a UK business

According to Shopify’s UK pricing page at the time of writing, the three main plans are Basic, Grow (labelled “Shopify” in some regions) and Advanced, priced at roughly £19, £49 and £259 a month when billed annually, with monthly billing costing more. Shopify Plus starts at a much higher figure, typically quoted in US dollars, and is aimed at large merchants. Prices change, so check the live page before you budget.

On top of the plan you’ll pay for:

• Card processing. Shopify Payments rates in the UK fall as you move up plans. If you use a different payment provider, Shopify adds its own transaction fee on top of that provider’s charges, historically 2 % on Basic, 1 % on Grow and 0.6 % on Advanced.
• Apps. Most shops end up with four to eight paid apps for reviews, subscriptions, upsells, filters, loyalty or B2B pricing. Many cost $10–$50 a month each and are billed in US dollars, so the pound matters.
• A theme. Free themes are fine; premium themes on the Shopify Theme Store are a one-off cost, typically a few hundred dollars.
• Customisation. Liquid templates, sections and app configuration need a developer if you want anything beyond the theme’s settings.

The thing that catches people out is the app bill. A shop that launches at £49 a month is often at £200 a month a year later, and nobody made a single decision to get there.

What WooCommerce actually costs a UK business

WooCommerce itself is free. The costs move elsewhere:

• Hosting. Good managed WordPress hosting for a small shop runs from roughly £15 to £60 a month. Cheap shared hosting is the most common reason WooCommerce shops feel slow.
• Extensions. Subscriptions, bookings, product add-ons and advanced shipping are paid extensions, commonly £50–£250 a year each.
• Maintenance. WordPress, WooCommerce and extensions need updating, testing and backing up. Either you do it, or you pay someone. Our guide to WordPress maintenance plans covers what that should include.
• Card processing. Stripe’s UK pricing page lists standard UK cards at around 1.5 % + 20p per transaction at the time of writing, with higher rates for European and international cards. There’s no platform fee on top.

The thing that catches people out here is maintenance. A WooCommerce shop that nobody updates for a year is a security risk and a bad weekend waiting to happen.

Three-year cost: a worked example

Here’s a realistic mid-sized shop. A homeware brand in Bristol with 200 products, £150,000 a year in online sales and an average order of £50, so around 3,000 orders a year. All prices exclude VAT; card fees assume UK cards only.

Shopify route

• Grow plan, annual billing: about £49 × 12 = £588 a year.
• Four paid apps averaging £15 a month: £720 a year.
• Shopify Payments, assumed at 1.8 % + 25p: £2,700 + £750 = £3,450 a year.
• Premium theme: around £300 one-off.
• Our setup and customisation: 30 hours of E-commerce Development at £65 = £1,950, less 15 % (20-hour band) = £1,657.50.

WooCommerce route

• Our Business / E-commerce package: £2,650 one-off (regular price £5,200), covering design, build, payments, CMS, SEO setup and deployment.
• Managed hosting at £30 a month: £360 a year.
• Paid extensions: about £300 a year.
• Maintenance: 24 hours a year of WordPress Development at £50 = £1,200, less 15 % = £1,020.
• Stripe at 1.5 % + 20p: £2,250 + £600 = £2,850 a year.

Ten pounds apart over three years. We didn’t fiddle the numbers to get there; it’s what we see again and again at this size. Card fees are the biggest line on both sides, and the platform choice barely moves the total.

When the numbers split

Scale the same shop to £600,000 a year and 12,000 orders. The assumed gap in card rates (0.3 percentage points plus 5p a transaction) is now worth about £1,800 + £600 = £2,400 a year in WooCommerce’s favour, or around £7,200 over three years. At that point Shopify Advanced, with its lower rates, or negotiated Stripe pricing both become worth modelling properly. Ask each provider for a quote on your real card mix; international and Amex payments change the picture.

At the other end, a maker in Cardiff selling 30 products and taking £20,000 a year should almost always start on Shopify Basic and do it themselves. Paying anyone to build a custom shop at that turnover rarely makes sense.

Where Shopify is the better choice

• You have no developer and don’t want one. Shopify handles hosting, security patches, PCI compliance and uptime.
• You sell in person too. Shopify POS ties stock and orders across a market stall, pop-up or shop and your website in one system.
• You want to launch in weeks with a small team, and your products are simple: a size, a colour, a price.
• You sell on social channels and marketplaces and want those connections managed for you.
• Your brand is product-first, and the website is mostly a catalogue and a checkout.

Where WooCommerce is the better choice

• You need checkout rules Shopify won’t allow below Plus: conditional fields, deposits, custom delivery logic, quotes, trade accounts with their own price lists.
• Content matters as much as products. If you rank on guides, recipes, how-tos or local landing pages, WordPress is a far more flexible publishing tool.
• You want control over URLs. Shopify forces /products/ and /collections/ into every product and category address. That’s fine for a new shop, but painful if you’re migrating an established one with years of rankings.
• You sell services and products together, like a salon selling treatments and retail, or a training company selling courses and kits.
• You want to own everything and be able to move host or developer without asking permission.
• You process high volumes and want to choose and negotiate your own payment provider.

UK-specific details that matter on both

VAT

Both platforms can display prices inclusive of VAT, which UK consumers expect, and both handle standard, reduced and zero rates. Shopify’s subscription is charged with UK VAT; if you’re VAT-registered you reclaim it. If you sell to customers in Northern Ireland and the EU, check how each platform handles the rules for goods moving across the border, and speak to your accountant before you switch on EU shipping.

Payments

Strong Customer Authentication (3D Secure) applies to most UK card payments online. Shopify Payments and Stripe both handle it. If you take recurring payments, deposits or Direct Debit, our comparison of Stripe, PayPal and GoCardless walks through fees and use cases.

Consumer law and accessibility

The Consumer Contracts Regulations give online buyers a 14-day cancellation right on most goods, and your terms, returns process and order emails must reflect that on either platform. Accessibility is the same story: a theme isn’t automatically accessible because it’s popular. We test every template we build against WCAG 2.2 AA.

Delivery and accounting

Royal Mail Click & Drop, Evri, DPD and the main UK couriers integrate with both. So do Xero, QuickBooks and Sage. Check the specific app or extension you’d use before you commit, and look at when it was last updated.

Speed and performance

Shopify’s hosting is fast and consistent, and you can’t make a basic mistake with the server because you never touch it. What slows Shopify shops down is apps: each one tends to inject its own scripts into every page, and after a year of installing and uninstalling them, leftover code is common. Audit the theme whenever you remove an app.

WooCommerce speed depends almost entirely on the build and the hosting. On cheap shared hosting with a page builder and thirty plugins it will be slow. On decent managed hosting, with a hand-built theme, page caching, a CDN such as Cloudflare and image optimisation, it can match or beat Shopify. We aim for Lighthouse scores of 95 or more on every template we build, and that target is realistic on either platform if someone is paying attention.

Speed matters beyond scores. Google uses Core Web Vitals as a ranking signal, and slow product pages on a mobile connection lose sales whatever platform sits underneath.

Migrating between them

We do migrations in both directions. Products, customers and orders move reasonably cleanly with the right tools. What needs care:

• 301 redirects for every old product, category and page URL. Skip this and you’ll lose organic traffic.
• Customer passwords can’t be migrated between platforms, so customers will need to reset theirs. Plan the email that tells them.
• Reviews, subscriptions and gift cards each need their own plan, and active subscriptions are the hardest part.
• Plan the switch for a quiet week, never the run-up to Black Friday or Christmas.

A small-to-medium migration is usually 20–60 hours of work. At our E-commerce rate of £65, 20 hours costs £1,300, less 15 % = £1,105, plus VAT £221 = £1,326. Volume discounts rise to 20 % at 50 hours.

Decision checklist

Answer these honestly and the choice usually makes itself:

• Will anyone technical look after the shop month to month? If not, Shopify.
• Do you need a checkout feature that Shopify only offers on Plus? If yes, WooCommerce.
• Is content (blog, guides, landing pages) a big part of how customers find you? Lean WooCommerce.
• Do you sell in person as well as online? Lean Shopify.
• Is your online turnover heading past £500,000? Model card fees on both, with real quotes.
• Are you moving an established shop with strong Google rankings? Check how much the URL changes would cost you before choosing Shopify.

Our recommendation

If you’re a small product brand launching from a spare room in Manchester or a unit in Glasgow, start on Shopify, keep the apps to a minimum and revisit in two years. If you’re an established UK business with custom rules, a content strategy or a turnover that makes card fees a serious line in your accounts, WooCommerce built properly will serve you longer and cost no more.

Our team is based in St Albans and builds shops for clients across the UK. See our e-commerce development service, compare fixed prices on packages, or book hours for Shopify customisation or a migration. If you’re weighing up more than two platforms, read WooCommerce vs Magento vs PrestaShop.

Photo: rupixen via Unsplash