Shopify or WooCommerce for a small UK shop? An honest comparison

This decision gets argued about mostly by people with a preference to defend. The honest answer is that both work, they fail in different ways, and the right choice depends on who is going to look after the shop in eighteen months.

Real cost over three years

Sticker price is where most comparisons stop, which is why they mislead.

	Shopify	WooCommerce
Build cost	£2,500 – £6,000	£2,000 – £5,000
Platform fee	From about £25/month	None
Hosting	Included	£15 – £60/month for decent hosting
Apps / plugins	£20 – £150/month, and it creeps	£100 – £400/year in licences
Payment fees	Standard rates, plus an extra fee unless you use Shopify Payments	Whatever your gateway charges
Maintenance	Handled for you	Yours, or a retainer
Security	Handled for you	Yours

The gap narrows more than people expect. Shopify's monthly fee is visible and predictable; WooCommerce's costs are invisible until a plugin breaks or a security update is missed.

Where Shopify genuinely wins

You will not be maintaining it

This is the deciding factor for most small shops. Shopify handles hosting, security patches, PCI compliance and uptime. If nobody at your business is going to log in and update things, that removes a real risk rather than a theoretical one.

Checkout is done properly

Shopify's checkout is heavily optimised and you cannot easily break it. On WooCommerce, checkout quality depends on your theme, your plugins and your hosting, and it is entirely possible to ship one that loses sales on mobile.

Faster to launch

Fewer decisions, fewer moving parts. A straightforward Shopify shop can be live in four weeks.

Where WooCommerce genuinely wins

You already have a WordPress site with rankings

If your existing site has content that ranks, moving to Shopify means a migration with all the redirect risk that carries. Adding WooCommerce to what you have avoids that entirely.

You need something unusual

Complex product configurations, unusual pricing rules, deep integration with an existing system. Shopify can do a lot, but when you hit its edges you hit them hard.

Content-heavy selling

If your strategy is guides, comparisons and articles that bring people in, WordPress remains better at publishing. Shopify's blog is serviceable rather than good.

No permanent platform fee

Over five years, a monthly platform charge adds up. Whether that matters depends on your margins.

The SEO comparison, honestly

Both can rank well. Both have a characteristic weakness.

Shopify's weakness: duplicate collection URLs

By default, the same product is reachable at more than one address depending on which collection you browsed through. Your own pages end up competing with each other and splitting their ranking signals. It is fixable with canonical tags, but it is not fixed for you, and most stores never touch it.

Shopify also fixes parts of the URL structure — /products/ and /collections/ are not negotiable. In practice this matters far less than people claim.

WooCommerce's weakness: you can break it yourself

Full control includes full control to make a mess. Plugin bloat is the usual outcome: fifteen plugins, each adding scripts, and a shop that takes six seconds to load on mobile. Every WooCommerce site we are asked to fix has this problem, and it is self-inflicted rather than inherent.

What actually decides rankings on either

Product descriptions written by you rather than copied from a supplier. Product schema with price and stock status. Compressed images. A checkout that works on a phone. Category pages with real content on them. None of that is platform-specific — which is why the platform argument is less important than the argument suggests.

Migrating between them: what it actually costs

If you already have a shop and are considering a move, price the whole job rather than the build.

• Product data migration. Titles, descriptions, variants, images, stock levels, historic orders. Automated tools handle the simple cases and mangle the rest, so budget for manual checking.
• URL mapping. Product and collection URLs will change. Every old address needs a 301 to its new equivalent or you lose the rankings those pages hold. On a shop with several hundred products this is the largest single line item and the one most often left out.
• Rebuilding integrations. Accounting, shipping, email, reviews, loyalty. Each has to be reconnected and tested.
• Customer accounts. Passwords cannot be migrated. Customers will need to reset, which means a communication plan.

A realistic migration for a small shop is four to eight weeks and a meaningful fraction of a fresh build. Worth doing when there is a real reason. Not worth doing on a hunch.

UK-specific considerations

• VAT. Both handle it. Shopify's is configured in settings; WooCommerce needs correct tax settings and often a plugin for anything complex.
• Payments. Shopify charges an additional transaction fee if you use an external gateway rather than Shopify Payments. Worth calculating against your volume before deciding.
• Accessibility. If you sell to customers in the EU, the European Accessibility Act applies to e-commerce and has been enforceable since June 2025. Neither platform makes you compliant by default — the theme and your content decide it.
• Consumer law. Distance selling rules require clear returns information, business details and pricing. Both can display it; neither adds it for you.

What we recommend, and when

Shopify for most product businesses. Particularly if nobody in-house is technical, if you sell a straightforward catalogue, or if you want to launch quickly and stop thinking about infrastructure.

WooCommerce if you already run WordPress with content that ranks, if you need functionality Shopify cannot reach, or if content marketing is central to how you sell — and you have a plan for who maintains it.

What we would not do is migrate a working shop from one to the other without a specific reason. Migration is a real project with real risk to your existing rankings, and "I read that the other one is better for SEO" is not a reason.