Shopify vs Wix
Shopify vs Wix: Which Is Better for a UK Online Shop?
Wix now sells its ecommerce hard, and Shopify has a cheaper starter tier than most people realise. Here's the honest comparison for UK small businesses selling online in 2026.
Shopify
Purpose-built ecommerce — everything is designed around selling.
Best for:
Anyone whose main goal is selling products and growing order volume.
Pricing:
From £25/month + app costs
Pros
- + Checkout converts better than almost anything else
- + Scales from 5 products to 5,000 without a rebuild
- + Serious apps for shipping, subscriptions and accounting
- + Handles VAT, multi-currency and Royal Mail properly
Cons
- − From £25/month before apps
- − Transaction fee unless you use Shopify Payments
- − Blog and content pages are weak compared to WordPress
Wix
Website builder with a shop bolted on — cheap and easy to start.
Best for:
Small catalogues, side projects, or a service business selling a few extras.
Pricing:
From ~£13/month for a business plan
Pros
- + Cheap entry price and one bill for site + shop
- + Drag-and-drop editing anyone can use
- + Fine for a handful of products or bookings
Cons
- − Checkout and shipping options are limited
- − Gets slow and clunky past ~100 products
- − Hard to migrate away from later
- − Weaker technical SEO control
The verdict
If selling is the point of the site, Shopify. If the shop is a side feature on a brochure site with under about 20 products, Wix will do the job for less.
RIOT's take
We've migrated more shops off Wix than onto it. The pattern is always the same — it's fine for the first year, then order volume grows and the limits on shipping rules, discounts and speed start costing more in lost sales than Shopify's monthly fee. If you know you're serious about selling, start on Shopify and skip the rebuild.
FAQs
Is Shopify worth it for a small UK shop?
Usually yes once you're doing more than about £1,000 a month in orders. Below that, the monthly fee is a real cost — but so is rebuilding on Shopify a year later.
Can you move a Wix shop to Shopify?
Yes. Products, customers and orders can be exported and imported, and we set up redirects so you keep the rankings you've earned. A 100-product move typically takes 2-3 weeks.
Which is better for SEO?
Shopify, mainly because of speed, cleaner URLs and better structured data. Neither beats WordPress/WooCommerce for content-led SEO.
What about payment fees?
Shopify Payments avoids the extra platform fee; using Stripe or PayPal instead adds up to 2% per order. Wix charges standard card processing without the extra platform fee.
Need help choosing?
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