How Much Does an Ecommerce Website Cost in the UK?
- Website Design
WooCommerce vs Shopify is decided by fit and by who runs the shop day to day, not by which platform is more powerful. If you have a small, tidy range, one price per product, and you want to be trading in a fortnight managing it yourself, Shopify will get you there faster and cheaper than a built WooCommerce site will. If your prices come out of another system, if different customers pay different amounts, or if the shop has to do something the platform never anticipated, WooCommerce is the one that bends. The size of your catalogue barely comes into it.
Most comparisons of these two are written by somebody who set up a demo store on both and wrote down the menu items. That is why they all arrive at “Shopify is easier, WooCommerce is more flexible” and leave you exactly where you started.
The reason people give for picking one over the other is usually the size of the catalogue, and it is usually the least useful reason available.
It is rarely about size. We keep 1,946 products priced and in stock across four storefronts on WooCommerce, with the prices coming from the client’s ERP rather than the website, and it copes fine. Nothing about that build was hard because of the product count. WooCommerce ships with an official product importer that reads a CSV, so getting a couple of thousand rows in is a morning.
What made it a real piece of engineering was that the website is not the source of truth. Prices are set somewhere else, by somebody else, and the shop has to reflect that faithfully every day without a human retyping anything. That is a rules problem, not a volume problem.
So when you read that a platform “can handle up to X products”, treat it as trivia. The question underneath is whether the platform can express your rules.
The platform question is really a staffing question, and answering it honestly narrows the choice faster than any feature list.
Shopify is a hosted platform. The upkeep, the updates, the security patching and the servers are part of what the subscription buys. You are renting a working shop and your job is to run the business inside it.
WooCommerce is a plugin that sits on WordPress, which means everything true of running a WordPress site is true of it. Core updates, plugin updates, hosting, backups, certificates. None of it is difficult and all of it is somebody’s job. Either that somebody is you, or it is somebody holding that job for you, and it is worth knowing what that upkeep costs each month before you decide.
If nobody in your business is going to do that work, and you do not want to pay anyone to do it either, that is an argument for Shopify. We would say so on the phone rather than sell you a build nobody is going to look after.
Answer these on paper before you look at either platform. They decide it more reliably than any comparison table, including the one further down this page.
Most people find the platform picks itself somewhere around question two or three.
These are different products that happen to overlap, so the table below is about fit rather than which one wins.
| Shopify | WooCommerce | |
|---|---|---|
| Who does the technical upkeep | The platform, as part of the subscription | You, your developer, or an agency on a plan |
| Realistic time to first sale | Days, if your range is simple | Weeks, because it is a build |
| Where it lives | Rented on the platform’s infrastructure | Your hosting, your database, your files |
| Cost shape | Monthly platform fee, plus apps, plus payment processing | Build cost up front, then hosting, upkeep and any paid extensions |
| Extra transaction charge | Possible if you use an external payment gateway, see their pricing page | None from the platform itself |
| Trade or customer-specific pricing | Possible, usually through an app | Native territory, this is what it is good at |
| Fed by another system | Doable, via apps and the API | Doable, and the more usual reason people are here |
| Something genuinely unusual | You are working inside what the platform allows | You can build it, and then you own it |
| Content and SEO alongside the shop | Adequate | The stronger half of the argument |
| If you stop paying | The shop goes away | The files and database are still yours |
The last row is worth reading twice if you are choosing mainly on price.
Comparing these two on price is where almost every article goes wrong, because they compare a subscription to a plugin and the plugin is free.
The plugin genuinely is free. What costs money is the hosting, the build, the upkeep and whichever paid extensions you actually need, none of which a free-plugin comparison covers. If you want the full picture of that side, we have written up what a website actually costs to build in the UK separately.
On the Shopify side the shape is a monthly platform fee, plus whatever the apps you add cost each month, plus card processing, plus a possible extra charge on each order if you use an external payment gateway rather than theirs. We are deliberately not printing percentages here, because those terms have changed more than once and a number in a blog post rots quietly. Read them at source on Shopify’s own UK pricing page on the day you decide.
Broadly, Shopify costs less to start and more to run, and WooCommerce is the other way round. Where those lines cross depends on how much you sell and how many apps you end up subscribed to, so treat any fixed month number for it as a guess.
Whichever way you go, the UK rules on selling online land on you rather than the platform. Cancellation rights, the information you have to show before somebody buys, the returns position. No subscription covers that.
Both platforms have a ceiling. What happens when you reach it is not the same.
On Shopify, you reach for an app, and most of the time an app exists. When it does not, you are working inside what the platform permits, and checkout is the part it guards most carefully. What you are allowed to change there varies by plan and has changed over time, so confirm it with Shopify directly before you build a business model that depends on it.
On WooCommerce there is effectively no ceiling, which is not automatically a good thing, because anything built is then something to maintain. Custom code that nobody documented tends to show up as a problem two years later, when whoever wrote it has moved on.
One thing we would not do: rebuild a working Shopify store in WooCommerce because somebody read that the platform fees are lower. The migration, the redesign, the re-import and the SEO work of changing every product URL will cost more than the fees for a long time. Move when the platform is actually stopping you doing something, not on principle.
Choose Shopify if your range is small and tidy, everybody pays the same price, you want to be selling within a fortnight, you will be managing it yourself, no other system owns your prices or your stock, and you have no requirement that makes a developer wince. That is a lot of UK businesses and there is nothing second-best about it.
Choose WooCommerce if your prices come from somewhere else, trade customers pay differently to the public, you are running more than one storefront or country, content and search are how people find you, you already have a WordPress site with an audience attached, or you have a rule the hosted platforms simply will not express. That is the sort of ecommerce build we take on, and it is a build rather than a setup.
If you land in the middle, weight it towards whoever is going to look after the thing on a wet Tuesday in February. That has been the more reliable question in our experience.
Is WooCommerce better than Shopify? Neither is better in general. Shopify is better when you want to be trading quickly, run it yourself and have a simple range. WooCommerce is better when prices or stock come from another system, different customers pay different amounts, or you need something the hosted platforms will not do. Fit decides it, not power.
Is WooCommerce cheaper than Shopify? Usually more expensive to start and cheaper to run. WooCommerce shifts the money to a one-off build plus hosting and upkeep, while Shopify spreads it across a monthly fee, apps and possible transaction charges. Where the lines cross depends on your sales volume and how many apps you subscribe to.
Can WooCommerce handle a large product catalogue? Comfortably. We keep 1,946 products priced and in stock across four storefronts on WooCommerce, with prices fed from a client’s ERP rather than typed into the website. Catalogue size is rarely the constraint. Complicated pricing rules, integrations and hosting quality are what actually decide whether a large store behaves.
Is Shopify better for SEO than WooCommerce? Both can rank perfectly well and the technical differences are smaller than either side claims. WordPress has the edge when written content does the selling, because publishing and structuring long-form pages is what it was built for. If people arrive already knowing what they want, the gap barely matters.
Can you move from Shopify to WooCommerce later? Yes, and it is a proper project rather than an export. Products and customers move reasonably well, but the design is rebuilt, integrations are redone, and every product URL changes, which needs redirects planning before launch. Worth doing when the platform is blocking you, not to save on fees.
Do I need a developer to run a WooCommerce shop? Not to run one day to day, adding products and processing orders is straightforward. You do need somebody technical for the build and for ongoing updates, backups and hosting. If nobody will hold that and you would rather not pay for it, that is a genuine reason to choose a hosted platform instead.
Which is right for a small UK business just starting out? If you are testing whether people will buy at all, start hosted, sell something, and learn what your business actually needs. Getting something live and learning from it is usually worth more at that stage than a better shop still in design. Move to a built platform when a real requirement forces it.
Write down where your prices come from, whether everyone pays the same, and who is going to look after the site in six months. Those answers will settle WooCommerce vs Shopify more reliably than any feature list, ours included.
If you want us to look at your range and tell you straight which one you should be on, you know where we are.
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