WooCommerce or Shopify for a UK business?

The short comparison

Shopify is a hosted platform. You pay a monthly subscription, Shopify runs the servers, checkout and security, and you extend it with apps. You trade some control for far less maintenance.

WooCommerce is a free plugin for WordPress. You choose the hosting, the theme and the extensions, and you own every line of code. You gain control and flexibility, and take on responsibility for updates, security, backups and performance.

Neither is better in general. The right choice depends on who will look after the shop, how unusual your products and pricing are, and how much of your traffic comes from content rather than product pages.

Both are mature, widely used platforms with large pools of UK developers and agencies, so you will not be stuck for help either way. The difference shows up in the day-to-day running, not in what the shop can sell.

What each really costs

Shopify's UK pricing, checked in November 2026, is £25 a month for Basic, £65 for Grow and £344 for Advanced on monthly billing, or £19, £49 and £259 a month billed annually. Paid apps are on top, and many shops run several, commonly priced at £10 to £50 a month each.

WooCommerce itself is free, but the shop around it is not. Hosting ranges from around £10 a month for basic shared hosting to £40 or more for managed WooCommerce hosting, and busy shops pay well beyond that. Premium themes and extensions usually charge annual licences. Then there is maintenance: someone has to apply updates, test them and fix what breaks, which is either your time or a monthly care plan.

Compare the two over three years, including development, apps or extensions, hosting, maintenance and payment fees on your forecast revenue. On that basis the gap is usually smaller than the headline prices suggest, and sometimes reverses.

Payments and transaction fees

Shopify Payments lists UK online card rates of 2% plus 25p on Basic, 1.7% plus 25p on Grow and 1.5% plus 25p on Advanced. If you use a different payment provider, Shopify adds its own transaction fee of 2%, 1% or 0.6% depending on plan. That fee is the main reason most Shopify shops use Shopify Payments.

WooCommerce charges no platform fee on payments, so you pay only your provider. WooPayments lists 1.5% plus 25p for UK merchants, with an extra 2% for international cards and 2% for currency conversion. Since Brexit, cards issued in the EU count as international for a UK merchant. Stripe, PayPal and other gateways plug in too, so you can shop around.

On a store taking £30,000 a month, a 0.5 percentage point difference in fees is £150 a month. Worth checking, but rarely the deciding factor on its own. Look at what each option costs to run and maintain first, then compare the payment rates on your real card mix, including overseas customers.

Hosting, maintenance and VAT

This is the real difference. On Shopify, hosting, security patches, the checkout and PCI compliance are Shopify's job. On WooCommerce, WordPress core, the theme and every plugin need updating, and a plugin update can break the checkout on a Friday evening. A well-run WooCommerce shop has staging, daily backups, uptime monitoring and a named person responsible for updates.

Abandoned WooCommerce shops are a common security problem: outdated plugins are a frequent way in. If nobody will own updates, that alone is a strong argument for Shopify.

For VAT, both can show prices including VAT, charge UK VAT correctly and produce the reports your accountant needs. Shopify's tax settings cover the UK and EU in its admin. WooCommerce uses tax tables you configure yourself, or an extension if you sell to EU consumers and need to handle One Stop Shop rates. WooPayments adds 20% VAT to its fees unless you give a valid VAT number, which applies the reverse charge. Whichever you choose, ask your accountant to check the settings before launch.

When to stay on WooCommerce

Stay on WooCommerce when the shop works, it is fast, it is maintained and the team knows it. A migration costs money and carries ranking risk, so it needs a reason beyond fashion.

Stay when content drives your sales. WordPress is still one of the best places to run a large blog, guides and landing pages alongside a shop. Stay when your products need logic that Shopify handles awkwardly, such as complex made-to-measure pricing, bookings or unusual subscriptions, and you have a developer who has built it well. And stay when you need the site on UK hosting you control, or full access to your database.

Move to Shopify when maintenance is eating your time, plugin conflicts keep breaking things, the site is slow and the hosting bill keeps rising, or nobody on the team can safely update it. Moving is a planned project: data, redirects for every URL with traffic or links, and tracking rebuilt and tested before launch.

How to decide

List who will maintain the shop, what your products and pricing need, and where your traffic comes from. Price both options over three years with real revenue figures. Then decide whether the problems you have are platform problems or problems that would follow you to a new platform, such as poor tracking or thin product content.

Be sceptical of anyone who answers this question before asking about your team. An agency that only builds on one platform will usually recommend that platform, which is why we ask who will run the shop day to day before we look at features or prices.

We build and maintain both. Our £1,950 WooCommerce audit checks the theme, plugins, hosting and tracking and tells you whether to fix what you have or move, and is credited against any build or migration that follows. WooCommerce care starts from £250 a month.