Shopify vs WooCommerce vs Shopwired: Which Ecommerce Platform Is Right for Your UK Business? (2026)

For most UK businesses, the short answer is this: Shopify is the safest, lowest-maintenance choice, WooCommerce gives you the most control if you can own the upkeep, and Shopwired is often the best value for trade and wholesale sellers. The harder truth is that the right platform is rarely decided by the headline features. It is decided by the detail: which one fits how your team works, and which one connects cleanly to the systems you already run.

We design and build on all three, so this is the comparison the way we would talk a client through it, not the way a platform would sell itself. We have no allegiance to any of them. The platform is the tool we use to build the site, and the only sensible choice is the one that fits the brief.

It is worth getting right, because the platform is one of the harder decisions to undo. Moving a live store from one to another later is a planned, careful migration rather than a quick switch, so it pays to choose well at the start.

Shopify vs WooCommerce vs Shopwired at a glance

Each platform can run a serious store. The differences are in upkeep, flexibility, how trade and subscriptions are handled, and total cost, not in whether they work.

Starting prices are the base platform cost in 2026. The real monthly cost rises with the plan tier and the apps or plugins you add for features like trade and subscriptions, covered below. Exact prices move, so check the live pages before you commit.

When is Shopify the right choice?

Shopify is the platform we recommend most often, for one simple reason: it removes the parts of running a store that quietly eat your time. Hosting, security, updates and uptime are handled for you, so your attention goes on selling rather than maintaining.

Its real advantage is the ecosystem. With more than 13,000 apps in its store, almost any tool a UK business already uses, from accounts software to couriers and marketplaces, has a maintained, supported connector ready to go. That matters more than it sounds, and we come back to it below.

The checkout is one of the most refined in the market, it scales from a handful of products up to large operations on Shopify Plus, and it stays fast without you thinking about it. For most growing retailers, that combination is exactly right.

The trade-offs are worth knowing. Shopify charges a transaction fee of 2%, 1% or 0.6% depending on your plan unless you use Shopify Payments, the monthly cost climbs as you add paid apps, and serious B2B or subscription features live in apps rather than the core platform. For the majority of stores, none of that outweighs the benefit of a store that simply stays up and stays fast. We go into more depth on our Shopify web design page.

When is WooCommerce the right choice?

WooCommerce is a plugin that turns a WordPress website into a shop, so it is the natural choice if you already run on WordPress or you publish a lot of content alongside selling. It is one of the most-used ecommerce platforms in the UK, on around 15% of live stores, so it is far from a niche option.

Because it is open-source, you own everything: the data, the code and the hosting. There are no platform transaction fees, and with around 60,000 WordPress plugins to draw on, almost any feature you can picture already exists in some form. That depth is also why we often reach for WooCommerce when a publisher or content-led business wants to sell alongside a large library of articles, titles or resources. Content and commerce live in the same place.

The catch is ownership in the other sense: you are responsible for hosting, security, backups and updates. A WooCommerce store left unmaintained gets slow and vulnerable, and the running cost is the least predictable of the three. Once you count hosting, premium plugins and maintenance in full, an equivalent WooCommerce build often lands around a third more expensive than the same store on Shopify.

WooCommerce rewards businesses that either have technical capability in-house or work with a partner who keeps it healthy. It is the most flexible option here, and the one that asks the most of you in return. We cover how we approach it on our WordPress web design page.

When is Shopwired the right choice?

Shopwired is the one most people have not heard of, which is a shame, because for the right business it is the best value of the three. It is a UK-built and UK-hosted platform, not a US tool with a British skin, used by around 10,000 stores, almost all of them in the UK, and it holds a Trustpilot score around 4.9 out of 5.

Its standout strength is everything it includes as standard. Trade and wholesale is built in and free on the Advanced plan, at around £80 a month: trade-account applications, customer-specific pricing, multiple price bands, gated trade-only ordering, pro-forma and credit terms, and a request-a-quote system. Rolling subscriptions are built in too. On Shopify, that same B2B depth usually means a paid app or the Plus tier, so Shopwired can deliver a fully gated trade store on a flat fee with no app stack.

It also charges 0% transaction fees on every payment gateway, where Shopify charges a penalty unless you use its own payments. For a UK trade or catalogue seller under roughly £500,000 turnover, that combination of built-in features and predictable pricing is hard to beat.

The honest trade-offs are real. The app and theme ecosystem is small, so if a feature is not already native you may not get it. Support is weekday hours only, the built-in subscriptions cover rolling plans but not prepaid or gift terms, and historical orders cannot currently be imported if you migrate in. There is also one integration gap that catches UK businesses out, and it is important enough to have its own section below.

How do trade and subscriptions compare?

For trade and subscription businesses, the question is not whether each platform can do it, but whether it is built in, bolted on, or assembled. That difference shapes both the cost and the reliability.

On trade and B2B, the pattern is clear. Shopwired builds it into the core platform. Shopify offers a basic version natively, capped at three price lists, with real depth coming from an app such as SparkLayer, billed in US dollars from around $49 to $499 a month (roughly £40 to £400), or from the Plus tier. WooCommerce handles it through plugins like B2BKing or Wholesale Suite, which are capable and cheaper in licence terms but are yours to configure and maintain.

On subscriptions, it splits differently. Shopwired and WooCommerce handle straightforward rolling subscriptions well, Shopwired natively and WooCommerce through its official Subscriptions plugin. The moment you need prepaid or gift subscriptions, fixed terms paid upfront, the picture changes. Shopify, paired with an app like Seal or Recharge, has the strongest support for prepaid, gift and reliable customer self-management. WooCommerce can do it, but it stacks a second paid plugin on top. Shopwired largely does not cover prepaid or gift at all.

So a business whose growth depends on classic trade ordering and simple recurring billing is well served, and cheaply, by Shopwired. A business built on prepaid boxes, gifting and a polished subscriber experience is better served by Shopify and the right app, at a higher and more variable cost.

The detail that usually decides it: integrations

The flashy comparison points rarely settle a platform choice. The integrations do, and this is where a great deal of money is quietly saved or lost.

We recently worked with a UK food and drink business merging two sites into one, with subscriptions and a trade portal to add. They came to us set on Shopwired, drawn by its built-in trade features and subscriptions, and they were right that those are genuine strengths. After looking at the detail, we recommended Shopify, and the deciding factor was not on any feature comparison.

Their accounts run on Sage 50, the desktop product that a great many established UK businesses use. Shopwired markets a Sage integration, but its own help documentation is clear that the integration connects only to Sage's cloud accounting and "cannot be used to export orders to other Sage accounting products such as Sage 50." Shopify, by contrast, has proven, widely used Sage 50 connectors such as Zynk, and so does WooCommerce. A reliable link to the system they run the entire business on mattered more than any single feature on a comparison table.

This is what ecosystem size really buys you, and the gap between the three is wide. Shopify has more than 13,000 apps in a curated, reviewed store. WooCommerce can draw on around 60,000 WordPress plugins, the largest pool of the three, though an open and unvetted one. Shopwired has a small, in-house set of apps and themes, because so much is built into the core instead.

Those numbers matter because they set the odds that the specific tools you already run, your accounts package, your courier, your stock system, your till, have a maintained, supported connector rather than a bespoke one that someone has to keep alive every time an API changes. Shopify wins on "a supported connector almost certainly exists." WooCommerce wins on "you own everything, including the maintenance." Shopwired wins on "you need fewer connectors," right up until you need one it does not have.

There is a future-proofing point here too. The larger and more active a platform's ecosystem, the sooner new ways of selling arrive as supported features rather than custom work. Shopify tends to be first to new commerce trends, from new payment methods to AI and agentic shopping, where an AI assistant finds and buys on a customer's behalf. A smaller platform is slower to follow, and sometimes never does. Picking the platform that moves with the market is part of picking one you will not have to leave again in a few years.

The platform you choose also shapes how a move onto it is handled, which matters if you are replatforming rather than starting fresh. Every migration lives or dies by its redirect plan: handled poorly, a move can lose between 20% and 60% of a site's organic traffic, so the redirects from the old addresses matter as much as the build itself. Each platform then has its own quirks to plan around. Shopify enforces its own URL structure, so every old web address has to be mapped and redirected to a new equivalent. Shopwired cannot currently import historical orders, so a business that needs its order history carried across has to plan for that separately.

How much does each really cost?

The platform fee is the smallest part of the picture. The real cost of an ecommerce store is the build, the apps or plugins, and the ongoing upkeep, and the total varies more by how the store is made than by which platform it runs on.

Each platform starts cheap and scales with what you ask of it, so the useful comparison is the direction costs move rather than a single figure. For a store that needs subscriptions and trade pricing, Shopwired tends to be the cheapest to run, because trade, subscriptions and 0% transaction fees are baked in with no app stack to pay for. WooCommerce has the lowest licence cost but the least predictable total, cheap with in-house developers and noticeably dearer once maintenance is counted properly. Shopify is usually the most expensive once you add the transaction-fee penalty and the apps that serious B2B and subscriptions need, with full native B2B effectively sitting behind the Plus tier.

The build is the bigger number on top of all that. A professionally built ecommerce store in the UK runs from around £2,000 for a basic store to well beyond £20,000 for a larger, custom catalogue, on any of the three. We break the full picture down in our guide to ecommerce website costs. The point worth holding onto is simple: a cheap platform with a poor build will cost you far more in lost sales than a slightly dearer one done properly.

Which ecommerce platform should you choose?

Here is the decision in three lines:

• Choose Shopify if you want a reliable, fast store with minimal maintenance, room to grow, and the widest choice of proven integrations.
• Choose WooCommerce if you are on WordPress, publish a lot of content, or need full control, and you can own the upkeep.
• Choose Shopwired if you sell trade or wholesale, want straightforward B2B pricing and rolling subscriptions built in with no transaction fees, and your accounts sit on Sage cloud, Xero or QuickBooks rather than Sage 50. Its built-in tools cover the essentials well, but not more complex cases like prepaid or gift subscriptions, so check they fit your needs first.

If you are still torn, the tie-breaker is not the feature list. Before you commit, check how each platform connects to the systems you already run, your accounts software most of all. That one unglamorous question decides more builds than any comparison table.

The platform matters far less than most people think. We have seen polished Shopify stores that never sell, and modest WooCommerce shops that quietly take hundreds of orders a week. The real decider is rarely the feature list. It is which platform fits how your team works, and which one connects cleanly to the systems you already run.

- Miles Debinski, Co-Founder & Technical Lead at Digital Otter

Whichever platform fits, the difference between a store that sells and one that just sits there is rarely the platform itself. It is the design, the setup and the care behind it. We build on Shopify, WooCommerce and Shopwired, and we will recommend the one that suits your business rather than the one we happen to feel like building.

If you are weighing up a new store, or a move from one platform to another, we are happy to talk it through. Tell us about your project, or read more about our ecommerce web design.