Shopify vs WooCommerce in the UK: what each really costs to run

For a small UK shop, Shopify and WooCommerce both cost roughly £2,500 to £3,500 a year to run once you count card fees, apps or plugins, hosting and upkeep, and card fees are the biggest line on either. As sales grow, the gap between them narrows further, so the real choice is about ownership and who does the work, not the monthly plan price. The worked example below shows the sums and the assumptions behind them.

Build costs are separate and depend on the project; this guide is about running costs after launch. All figures exclude VAT and were checked on 3 October 2026.

What Shopify costs in the UK

Shopify charges a monthly plan fee, takes card fees through Shopify Payments, and adds a transaction fee if you use a different payment provider. Annual billing is cheaper than monthly.

Source: Shopify UK pricing page. Shopify often runs an introductory offer for new stores; at the time of checking it was three days free, then £1 a month for three months.

Apps and themes

Most Shopify stores add apps for things the platform doesn’t do out of the box: reviews, subscriptions, product options, advanced search, loyalty, feeds, accounting links. Many are charged monthly, and they add up quietly. A paid theme is usually a one-off cost. When comparing quotes, ask for the list of apps the build relies on and their monthly fees.

The payment provider question

If you want to keep an existing card processor, Shopify adds its own fee on top of that provider’s charges, from 2% on Basic down to 0.2% on Plus. For most small shops, using Shopify Payments is simply cheaper. For larger ones with a negotiated rate elsewhere, run the numbers before assuming you can bring it with you.

What WooCommerce costs

WooCommerce is free, open-source software that runs on WordPress. There’s no platform fee and no revenue share. You pay instead for the things Shopify bundles in.

• Hosting. WooCommerce puts typical hosting at $25 to $350 a month for most stores, scaling with traffic. Cheap shared hosting is a false economy for a shop.
• Extensions. WooCommerce lists paid extensions at roughly $29 to $299 a year each. For example, Product Bundles is $79 a year. The annual fee pays for updates and support, so letting it lapse isn’t a saving.
• Card fees. WooPayments charges 1.5% + 25p on UK card payments, with an extra 2% for cards from outside Europe and 2% for currency conversion; WooCommerce notes 20% VAT applies to those fees. Stripe’s standard rate is 1.5% + 20p for standard UK cards and 2.8% + 20p for premium UK cards.
• Upkeep. WordPress, WooCommerce and plugins need regular updates, tested on a copy of the site first, plus backups and security monitoring. Either you do it, or you pay someone.

Three-year cost: a worked example

This is an example, not a quote. It uses published platform and card prices, and my own assumptions for everything else, set out below so you can swap in your own figures.

Assumptions

• Small shop: £60,000 a year in online sales, £40 average order, 1,500 orders a year.
• Growing shop: £500,000 a year, £60 average order, 8,333 orders a year.
• Shopify: annual billing; Basic for the small shop, Grow for the growing one; Shopify Payments; apps of £30 a month (small) and £150 a month (growing).
• WooCommerce: hosting of £25 a month (small) and £100 a month (growing); paid plugins of £250 a year (small) and £800 a year (growing); Stripe at its standard UK card rate.
• Upkeep: priced at say £50 an hour. Shopify 1 hour a month (small) and 3 (growing); WooCommerce 3 hours a month (small) and 6 (growing).
• All card payments at the standard online rate. Premium, commercial and international cards cost more on both platforms. Build cost, domain, email and marketing excluded.

Card fees: Shopify small is 2% of £60,000 plus 25p on 1,500 orders, a year, times three. Shopify growing uses Grow’s 1.7% + 25p on 8,333 orders. WooCommerce uses Stripe’s 1.5% + 20p.

What the example shows

For the small shop, Shopify comes out cheaper, mostly because there’s less upkeep. If you’re happy to run WooCommerce updates yourself, that flips. For the growing shop, the two are within a few pounds over three years. Lower card fees on WooCommerce are cancelled out by more hosting and upkeep.

Two other things fall out of the numbers. Card fees dwarf the plan price on both platforms, so a better card rate saves more than a cheaper plan. And on Shopify, moving from Grow to Advanced saves 0.2% on card fees but costs £2,520 more a year in plan fees, so on these rates it only pays for itself above roughly £1.26 million a year in card sales.

The task cost calculator is useful for the upkeep line: put in the hours your team actually spends on the shop each month.

Costs people forget

These don’t show up on either platform’s pricing page, and they’re where budgets usually go wrong.

• App and plugin creep. Each one solves a small problem for a small fee. Review the list once a year and cancel what nobody uses.
• Premium and international cards. Business cards, premium cards and overseas cards cost more to process. If you sell abroad or to trade customers, your average card fee will be higher than the headline rate.
• Refunds and chargebacks. Check how each provider treats fees on refunded orders and what it charges for a disputed payment.
• Theme and design changes. A new homepage layout or product page change costs developer time on either platform.
• Your own time. Product uploads, stock checks and order admin take hours every week whatever the platform. Integrations that remove manual steps often save more than switching platforms would.
• Getting it wrong. A broken update on a busy weekend, or an expired plugin licence that leaves a security hole, costs more than a year of careful upkeep.

Ownership and lock-in

This is the difference the cost table doesn’t show. On WooCommerce you own the code, the data and the hosting account. You can move host, change developer or customise checkout without anyone’s permission, and no one takes a cut for choosing your own payment provider. You also own the responsibility: if a plugin update breaks the shop, it’s yours to fix.

On Shopify you rent the platform. Shopify handles hosting, security and upgrades, which is a genuine saving in time and risk. In return, checkout customisation is limited below Plus, your features live in apps you don’t control, and leaving means rebuilding the theme and replacing every app. Your product, customer and order data can be exported; the shop itself can’t.

The platform comparison covers this trade-off, and Magento and Adobe Commerce, in more depth.

Who each suits

Neither is the cheap option by default. Both are cheap when they suit the business and expensive when they don’t. I led a WooCommerce relaunch for a Cornish food brand, and the platform was right there because the content and the shop belonged together.

Where to start

Write down three things: your expected annual sales and order count, the features you need beyond a basic shop, and who will look after the site each month. Put those into the assumptions above and the answer is usually clear.

If you’d like help, I build on both. Online shops start from £5,000 on my builds page, and care plans for keeping a site updated start at £65 a month for Shopify, £95 for WordPress and £135 for WooCommerce; the care plan chooser shows which fits. I don’t take referral fees from either platform, so I’ve no reason to push one.