For most UK shops turning over under £500,000, Shopify is the safer default, WooCommerce suits a business that already runs WordPress and wants control of its own data, and a custom build only pays off when your ordering process is unusual.
That is a starting position, not a verdict. The right choice depends on three things: what you sell, who will run the shop day to day, and how much of each sale you can afford to lose to fees.
This article compares Shopify vs WooCommerce for UK sellers, works through the payment fees on a worked example, and says when a custom shop is worth considering. It forms part of our wider guide to choosing a web design agency in the UK.
What is the real difference between Shopify, WooCommerce and custom?
Shopify is a hosted service you rent, WooCommerce is a free plugin you host and maintain yourself, and a custom shop is code written for your business.
With Shopify, you pay a monthly plan and the platform handles hosting, security patches, checkout and uptime. You are limited to what the platform and its app store allow, and you pay for most extensions as monthly app fees.
With WooCommerce, you install a plugin on a WordPress site. The software is free, but you pay for hosting, premium extensions and someone to keep it patched. You can change almost anything, and you can take the whole store elsewhere.
A custom build, in our case usually Next.js with a database and Stripe, gives you full control over speed, checkout and integrations. It also puts the build and upkeep cost on you. We explain our reasoning in why we build on Next.js rather than WordPress.
How much do the payment fees cost on a £250,000 shop?
On £250,000 of sales at a £50 average order, card fees run to about £4,750 a year with Stripe on WooCommerce and £6,250 with Shopify Payments on the Basic plan.
Here are the standard rates, taken from the providers' UK pricing pages. Stripe charges 1.5% plus 20p on standard UK cards. Shopify's own payment service on the Basic plan charges 2% plus 25p online, according to Shopify's UK pricing as summarised by Expert Market in 2026. Check the live pages before you decide, because both change.
The sums, assuming all cards are standard UK cards:
- 5,000 orders a year at £50 each
- Stripe: 5,000 × (£0.75 + £0.20) = £4,750
- Shopify Payments, Basic: 5,000 × (£1.00 + £0.25) = £6,250
- Difference: £1,500 a year, before the plan fee
The trap is using an outside gateway on Shopify. Per the same pricing summary, Shopify adds a 2% third-party transaction fee on the Basic plan, 1% on Grow and 0.6% on Advanced, on top of what the gateway charges. On the £250,000 example, a Basic plan using Stripe would pay another £5,000 a year in that extra fee.
Premium and international cards cost more on every platform. For a shop that sells mainly to UK consumers, the standard-card figures are a fair guide.
When does Shopify win?
Shopify wins when you want to sell quickly, with little technical help, and your catalogue and checkout are fairly conventional.
It suits a retailer or DTC brand with tens to a few thousand products, standard delivery rules and a team that wants to add products, change prices and run discounts without calling a developer. Plans start low, and the checkout is well tested.
The costs to watch are the app bill and the fees above. Apps for reviews, subscriptions, bundles and search each carry a monthly charge, and a store with eight of them can pay more in apps than in the plan itself.
Exit is the other consideration. You can export products and customers, but the theme, the checkout logic and the apps stay behind. Moving platforms later is a rebuild.
When does WooCommerce win?
WooCommerce wins when you already have a WordPress site, a lot of content that sits alongside the shop, or special requirements that a hosted platform would block.
Content-heavy shops often belong here: a retailer with a large buying guide section, or a seller whose product pages need detailed specifications. The data stays in your database, you choose the host and you can change nearly any behaviour with code.
The cost is responsibility. Updates, backups, security and speed are yours. WordPress performance varies widely: the HTTP Archive's 2025 Web Almanac found that only 45% of WordPress sites passed Core Web Vitals on mobile, compared with 74% for Wix. A well-built, well-hosted WooCommerce shop can be fast, but a plugin-heavy one usually is not.
Security is part of the same bill. A shop that takes payments needs prompt updates, and a security firm, Patchstack, reported that more than 60% of attacks it tracked exploited vulnerabilities that already had a patch available. Our article on what a monthly maintenance plan covers lists the work that keeps that risk down.
What do the monthly running costs look like?
Shopify's plan is a visible monthly fee, while WooCommerce spreads its cost across hosting, extensions and maintenance, so the totals can end up closer than the headline prices suggest.
Shopify's UK plans, as summarised by Expert Market in 2026, run at £25 a month on Basic (£19 billed annually), £65 on Grow (£49 annually) and £344 on Advanced (£259 annually). Apps are extra and the same summary puts the typical app spend at anything from nothing to £100 a month.
A WooCommerce shop has no licence fee, but the UK cost guide we cited earlier lists hosting at £10 to £60 a month and maintenance at £20 to £100 a month. Premium extensions for bookings, subscriptions or shipping add yearly licences.
On a like-for-like basis a tidy WooCommerce shop and a Shopify Basic shop with a few apps often land within £50 a month of each other.
So the monthly bill rarely decides it. Payment fees and the cost of your own time decide it, and the fee sums above matter more as you grow.
What about speed and search?
Both platforms can rank and convert well, and both can be slowed down by what you add to them.
Shopify gives you a decent starting speed, then every app injects scripts that load on each page. WooCommerce speed depends on the host, the theme and the number of plugins, which is why the pass rates vary so much.
In both cases the number to watch is the one real customers get on a phone, measured by Google's Core Web Vitals. Our article on page speed as a sales metric explains how to read those numbers.
For search, check the basics whichever platform you choose: clean URLs, a product page for each item with its own description, sensible category pages and structured data for price and availability. A platform cannot write product descriptions for you, and copied supplier text is the commonest reason a new shop gets nowhere.
How hard is it to leave?
Leaving WooCommerce is a content migration, while leaving Shopify is closer to a rebuild, because your products and customers export but your design and checkout logic do not.
Plan the exit when you plan the entry. Ask yourself whether you could move your product data, order history and customer list in a clean file. Check that you own the domain and that your payment account is in your name, not the agency's. We keep those questions in our list of what an agency should hand over.
When is a custom shop worth it?
A custom shop is worth it when the way you sell does not fit a standard cart: made-to-order products, trade pricing, quote requests, subscriptions with unusual rules or links to stock and production systems.
It is rarely worth it for a straightforward shop. One UK cost guide puts an ecommerce build at £3,000 to £10,000, with shop functionality adding £300 to £2,000 on top of design costs. A truly custom shop sits above that, and you carry the maintenance.
The test we use is simple. Write down the three steps in your ordering process that Shopify or WooCommerce would force you to change. If you cannot name any, you do not need custom.
How do you choose?
Start from the order process, then the team, then the budget.
flowchart TD
A["Planning a UK online shop"] --> B{"Is your ordering process unusual?"}
B -- "Yes: quotes, made to order, trade pricing" --> C["Custom build, or WooCommerce with custom code"]
B -- "No" --> D{"Do you already run WordPress with lots of content?"}
D -- "Yes" --> E["WooCommerce, with a proper host and maintenance plan"]
D -- "No" --> F{"Is someone technical on hand?"}
F -- "No" --> G["Shopify"]
F -- "Yes" --> H["Shopify or WooCommerce: compare fees and exit options"]
Two final checks apply on any platform. Speed on a phone decides how many visitors reach the basket, which is why we cover it in page speed as a sales metric. And if you plan to advertise your products on Google, the setup of your feed and campaigns matters as much as the platform.
See our guide to Performance Max versus standard Shopping.
What should you ask a web agency before building a shop?
Ask who will own the store, what the first-year running costs are and what it would take to move platforms later.
Ask also for the fee calculation using your own order volume and average order value, not a generic claim that one platform is cheaper. The £1,500 difference above came from one set of assumptions, and yours will differ.
If you are a retailer or ecommerce brand weighing the options, our website design service includes shop builds, and you can send us your order volumes through the contact page for a plain recommendation.
