Shopify vs WooCommerce for UK small businesses: the honest comparison.

Shopify versus WooCommerce comes down to one trade: Shopify rents you simplicity for £25 to £105 a month plus transaction fees, while WooCommerce gives you free software and hands you every other cost, hosting, plugins, maintenance and the responsibility, yourself. Both can run an excellent UK shop, both can quietly drain one, and for a surprising number of Welsh small businesses the honest answer is neither, because their products sell by enquiry rather than checkout. We should declare our position up front: we build custom-coded sites and sell neither Shopify themes nor WooCommerce plugins, which means we have no commission riding on your choice, and this comparison can afford to be straight.

The three-year bill for each

Platform comparisons love feature grids and skip the arithmetic, so start with what each route genuinely costs a small UK shop over three years.

Cost	Shopify (Basic)	WooCommerce	Custom build with us
Software	£25/month · £900 over 3 years	Free	Included in build
Hosting	Included	£10 to £30/month · £360 to £1,080	Included in £39 +VAT plan
Transaction fees	up to 2% extra unless using Shopify Payments	Gateway fees only (Stripe/PayPal ~1.5 to 2.9%)	Gateway fees only
Themes and plugins	£0 to £300 one-off + app subscriptions	£100 to £400/year typical plugin stack	Not applicable
Maintenance	Handled by Shopify	Your time or a £30 to £150/month care plan	Included in plan
Build help	£500 to £3,000 if hired	£800 to £5,000 if hired	From £1,350 +VAT

The pattern to notice: Shopify's costs are predictable and forever, WooCommerce's costs are variable and mostly invisible on day one, and the biggest line in both columns is usually the one nobody prices at the start, the help you hire when DIY stalls. Our ecommerce website cost guide breaks the full budget down for either route.

Where Shopify honestly wins

Shopify's pitch is real: it is the fastest route from nothing to a working shop, and its checkout is among the best-converting in the world, battle-tested by millions of stores. Stock, orders, shipping labels and payment all live in one tidy dashboard, updates happen invisibly, and the platform simply does not go down on Black Friday. If your business is products-first, fashion, gifts, dropshipping, anything with high order volume and standard fulfilment, and you want to spend your evenings packing orders rather than updating plugins, Shopify earns its £25 a month.

The honest costs of that convenience: the monthly fee never ends, transaction fees stack on top unless you use Shopify Payments, apps that felt optional become £10 to £30 monthly habits, and your shop lives on rented land, leave, and you export your data but not your store.

Where WooCommerce honestly wins

WooCommerce's case is ownership and reach. It is free software on your own hosting, so nobody charges you per sale, and it turns a WordPress site into a shop, which matters if content is your engine: a business built on articles, recipes, tutorials or a big local audience gets commerce and content in one place. It also bends further: unusual product logic, memberships, bookings mixed with retail, all possible with the right plugins.

The honest costs: you have just bought the WordPress maintenance treadmill with a till attached. A typical Woo shop runs core, theme, WooCommerce itself and a dozen plugins, all updating on their own schedules, and a broken update on a brochure site is an inconvenience while on a shop it is lost revenue by the hour. Our guide to WordPress maintenance costs covers exactly what that upkeep runs; add a store's stakes to every number in it.

If you would rather talk through which model fits your products before committing to any of them, our ecommerce service starts with that conversation, free and without obligation.

The fees nobody reads until they scale

Transaction fees are where platform choices quietly compound. Take a shop turning over £5,000 a month. On Shopify without Shopify Payments, the extra 2% platform fee alone is £100 a month, £1,200 a year, on top of the card gateway's own charges. Using Shopify Payments removes it, at the price of being locked to their gateway and its rules. WooCommerce charges nothing per sale, so the same shop pays only its gateway (roughly £75 to £145 a month at typical Stripe rates), and a custom-coded shop with a direct Stripe integration sits in the same place.

At £500 a month of sales these differences are noise. At £20,000 a month they are a part-time wage. The platform that is cheapest at your current size is not automatically cheapest at the size you are aiming for, which is why the three-year view above matters more than the sticker price.

Shopify charges you for growing. WooCommerce charges you for existing. A custom build charges you once, then gets out of the way.

Speed and SEO, without the folklore

Both platforms can rank and both can be fast; neither has a secret Google handshake. What actually decides speed and rankings is build quality: how many apps or plugins are stacked on, how heavy the theme is, how well the product pages are structured. A lean Shopify store outruns a bloated WooCommerce one and vice versa, and both are routinely beaten by a custom-coded storefront with no template weight at all, which is why every shop we build loads in under a second and ships with product schema in place. Treat "which platform is better for SEO" as the wrong question; "which build will be lighter" is the right one.

The third option nobody advertises

Here is the part the platform comparisons skip, because neither platform profits from it: plenty of small businesses do not need a checkout at all. If your catalogue is a dozen products, if prices vary by job, if customers want to ask questions before buying, then a quote-led site converts better than a shop and costs less to run. We built exactly this for Bramwood Timber in Glynneath: garden buildings that customers configure through a custom instant quote builder with live pricing, no basket, no checkout, no platform fees, because a £4,000 summerhouse is bought through a conversation, not an impulse click. Their "shop" is a quoting machine, and it fits how their customers actually buy.

The rule of thumb we give on first calls: high-volume, standard products with fixed prices want a real checkout; low-volume, high-value or configurable products usually want enquiry and quote flows. Choose the buying journey first and the platform question often answers itself, sometimes with "neither".

Two decision walkthroughs

Watch the logic run on two typical Welsh shops. First, a candle maker doing two hundred standard orders a month at £15 each: high volume, fixed prices, fulfilment is the whole job. Shopify wins comfortably, the £25 fee is noise against £3,000 monthly turnover, Shopify Payments removes the platform fee, and the maker's evenings go on pouring wax rather than patching plugins. WooCommerce would save little and cost weekends; a custom build would be over-engineering a solved problem.

Second, a smallholder selling meat boxes through a site built on recipes and a monthly newsletter, with seasonal availability and collection slots. Content drives everything, the product logic is unusual, and order volume is modest: WooCommerce fits, provided the maintenance line goes in the budget from day one. And if the same smallholder sold only a quarterly box by pre-order conversation, the honest answer would shift again, to an enquiry-led site with no checkout at all.

Same question, three different right answers, decided by buying journey rather than platform loyalty. That is the whole method.

Which one your shop should pick

Straight recommendations, the kind we give when nobody is selling anything. Pick Shopify if you are launching fast, selling standard products at volume, and want operations handled: accept the rent as the price of your evenings back. Pick WooCommerce if content and commerce genuinely live together in your business, you need unusual store logic, and you have a real plan, budgeted, not hoped, for the maintenance. Pick a custom build if speed, ownership and running costs matter more than app ecosystems, or if your products sell by quote: from £1,350 +VAT with us, with hosting, SSL and upkeep in the £39 +VAT monthly plan and no per-sale platform fees ever.

And pick none of them, honestly, if you are testing an idea: a marketplace listing or a one-page site with an order form will tell you whether anyone wants the product before a penny goes into infrastructure.

The plain next step

If you are weighing the two platforms for a Welsh shop, or suspecting your products might sell better by quote than by basket, send us what you sell via the contact page and you will get a straight recommendation, including "just use Shopify" when that is the truth, at no charge and with no obligation. Every price we work to is published, and the shops and quote builders we have built are live to inspect.