Shopify vs WooCommerce UK: The Real 3-Year Cost (2026)

This piece walks through five concrete UK scenarios, each with a clear recommendation and the reasoning behind it. The numbers come from the Shopify vs WooCommerce 3-Year Cost Calculator, which uses pricing verified against live vendor pages (last refreshed 2026-05-13) and is rerun quarterly.

The framing both platforms get wrong

Marketing pages on both sides flatten the comparison to “monthly plan + transaction fee,” which understates Shopify’s third-party gateway skim and WooCommerce’s true total cost of ownership (TCO). To compare honestly you have to look at:

Platform fee — Shopify’s monthly plan (from £1900/mo on Basic) vs WooCommerce hosting + domain (from £1399/mo).
Payment processing — Shopify Payments vs Stripe direct on WooCommerce, both before and after PayPal mix. Shopify adds a third-party gateway skim on non-Shopify-Payments volume (2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced).
Feature add-ons — the app stack on Shopify or the plugin stack on Woo. For a store that needs subscriptions, loyalty, multi-currency, etc., the add-on stack often costs more than the platform itself.
Build + ongoing maintenance — labour, not licence. Self-built or freelance-built? Hours per month for updates?
Time-to-launch opportunity cost — not in the calculator headline, but real. Shopify reaches “open for business” faster on every profile we tested.

The calculator computes lines 1–4 in GBP from your inputs. The rest of this post walks through what those numbers mean for five common UK profiles.

/ scenario 1 — 200→600 orders/mo, £60 AOV

Small UK fashion brand

verdict Shopify wins comfortably.

A direct-to-consumer fashion brand starting at 200 orders/mo, growing to 600 by year 3, sits inside Shopify Basic’s order capacity for the entire window. The third-party gateway skim is real but small: at 75% card / 20% PayPal mix the skim adds ~£1,700 over three years — meaningful but dwarfed by the absence of WooCommerce dev-time inflation.

Run the calculator with these inputs and Shopify lands 10–15% cheaper than WooCommerce for the same scope. The reasons:

Reviews are free on WooCommerce, paid on Shopify (Loox £37/mo ), but the rest of the brand-essential stack — multi-currency, basic shipment tracking, basic security, backups — is native and free on Shopify, and paid extras on WooCommerce. A fashion brand toggling those features pays roughly £150–200/year of WooCommerce-side licences just to reach parity.
Build cost. A reasonable WooCommerce build for a fashion brand (theme, products, payments, shipping rules, GDPR, basic perf hardening) is 15–20 freelance days at £500/day in 2026, i.e. £7,500–10,000 in year 1. Shopify reaches the same launch state in 3–5 days using a paid Shopify theme and the platform’s defaults.
Ongoing maintenance. WooCommerce wants ~4 hours/month of updates, plugin compat checks, and security patching. Shopify’s equivalent is zero — that’s the platform’s job.

Pick Shopify unless the fashion brand specifically wants ownership of their codebase, plans to do something Shopify Liquid can’t reach easily (highly custom checkout, deep multi-store, etc.), or values self-hosting for principled reasons. For typical “I want to sell t-shirts and dresses online” merchants in the UK, the Shopify TCO is lower and the time-to-launch is faster.

Run Small fashion brand in the calculator

/ scenario 2 — low-volume, high-AOV, custom pricing per customer

UK B2B distributor

verdict WooCommerce wins, decisively — unless you can stomach Shopify Plus.

B2B is where the comparison flips hardest. Shopify’s B2B features (account-tied pricing, draft orders for quotes, NET payment terms) live on Plus — published floor £1,800/mo , with negotiated annual minimums. That’s ~£21,600/year of platform fee before any plugins, theme work, or payment processing. The B2B toggle in the calculator accounts for this by forcing the Plus plan when on.

On WooCommerce, B2B is a £221/yr Wholesale Suite All Access bundle plus the standard hosting. Even with a more substantial 30-day-payment-terms build and tighter ERP integration, you reach feature parity for under £5,000/year all-in. The dev time required is higher than a B2C Woo build — call it 25–30 days of skilled work for proper B2B — but Plus’s annual minimum still buries it.

Pick WooCommerce for any UK B2B distributor doing under ~£3M/year in revenue and not committed to a global enterprise rollout. The flexibility on custom pricing, role-based catalogues, multi-currency invoicing, and tax handling is significantly cheaper to build on Woo with Wholesale Suite (or its competitors — B2BKing, Wholesale for WooCommerce) than to license on Plus.

Pick Shopify Plus if you’re a B2B distributor already over ~£10M/year, with a clear ERP/CRM integration story Plus’s APIs handle well, and you’ve put a number on how much you’d pay to make B2B someone else’s problem. At that scale Plus’s annual minimum stops being the dominant cost line.

Run UK B2B distributor in the calculator

/ scenario 3 — recurring billing, ~300 orders/mo, £35 AOV

Subscription box

verdict Tied, and the decider is your tolerance for transaction-fee scaling.

Subscription stores have a calculator quirk we deliberately surface as a footnote rather than in the headline: Recharge (the dominant Shopify subscriptions app) charges $99/mo base — fine — plus 1.49% + $0.19 per subscription transaction. At 300 orders/mo and £35 AOV that’s another £80–120/mo in fees we don’t model in iteration 2 of the calculator. WooCommerce Subscriptions (£208/yr) takes a fixed licence and no per-transaction skim.

So:

Year 1: Shopify edges ahead because the Woo build cost is heavier (subscription flows need solid testing).
Year 3: WooCommerce pulls ahead because Recharge’s per-transaction fees grow with order volume while Woo Subscriptions stays flat.

The crossover is roughly at 200 orders/mo. Below that, Shopify is simpler and cheaper. Above it, the transaction-fee scaling on Recharge starts to bite — by 500 orders/mo it’s adding £180–250/mo on top of the base.

Pick Shopify for subscription stores under ~200 orders/mo, especially if the catalogue is small and the marketing relies on Klaviyo flows. Pick WooCommerce for subscription stores expecting to scale past 300 orders/mo, particularly if AOV is below £40 — the per-transaction fee compounds against you. Either way, set a calendar reminder to re-evaluate at the 12-month mark when Recharge’s pricing decision goes from theoretical to financial.

Run Subscription box in the calculator

/ scenario 4 — UK base, EU + US customers, 400 orders/mo

Multi-currency global brand

verdict Shopify wins, but the gap is smaller than vendor marketing claims.

Cross-border is a category where Shopify’s “Markets” feature (free, native, every plan) is the underrated star. Multi-currency presentment, local payment methods, and currency-by-region pricing rules are all included with no add-on cost. WooCommerce needs Aelia Currency Switcher ( £69/yr ex-VAT) at minimum — and once you add proper multi-language coverage (WPML at £83/yr) and the operational overhead of running an EU VAT-compliant Woo store, the savings the calculator shows on hosting evaporate.

The places where Shopify’s win narrows:

Cross-border tax/duty/customs. Shopify Markets handles VAT collection well for B2C inside the UK and EU (IOSS-compatible since 2021), but Shopify’s “Markets Pro” for full DDP customs handling is paid, regional, and not always available. WooCommerce + a proper tax-handling plugin (TaxJar, Avalara, or Quaderno) gives you finer control if your tax position is complicated.
Currency-specific pricing strategy. Shopify allows manual rate overrides per market, but only in Plus tier. If you want to charge $89 in the US for the same item you charge £79 in the UK (rather than letting FX decide), you need Plus.

Pick Shopify for any global brand under ~£2M/year that wants multi-currency to work out of the box and isn’t doing DDP customs at scale. Pick WooCommerce only when your tax/currency strategy is unusual enough that a custom build is cheaper than fighting Shopify’s defaults — which is rare under £5M/year.

Run Multi-currency global brand in the calculator

/ scenario 5 — 1,000+ products, 200 orders/mo, £25 AOV

High-SKU dropshipper

verdict WooCommerce wins on cost, but Shopify wins on time-to-launch — and time matters more than money for most dropshippers.

Dropshipping is the one scenario where Shopify’s app ecosystem (DSers/AliExpress, Spocket, Zendrop) hands you the entire fulfilment story for £20–40/mo. The equivalent WooCommerce stack (AliDropship, WooDropship, or a custom integration) is cheaper in licence terms but more brittle in operation — the failure mode is “stock or pricing got out of sync” rather than “the licence expired.”

The calculator will show WooCommerce £2–4k cheaper over three years on this profile, mostly because the dropshipping app stack doesn’t appear in our default feature toggles (it would, in iteration 3). Add £300–400/year of dropshipping apps and the gap narrows to roughly even.

The other factor: dropshippers tend to be one-person operations testing ideas fast. Shopify’s 1-day-to-store-live wins against WooCommerce’s 2-week build for anything you’re not sure will work. Pick Shopify for any new dropshipping venture. Pick WooCommerce only if you’re scaling an established dropshipping operation past 500 orders/mo and the per-order Shopify fees have started to matter.

Run High-SKU dropshipper in the calculator

What changes when a developer is in the picture

Every scenario above assumes the merchant is buying defaults — picking a theme from the marketplace, installing apps or plugins, and running the store through the platform’s standard interfaces. That’s the common case, and it’s the case the calculator’s default day rate (£500/day freelance help) is calibrated for. When an in-house developer or a serious agency build is in the picture, the cost and capability story shifts on both platforms — in different directions.

On Shopify, a developer unlocks the Dawn-fork path and the Functions / Hydrogen / App Bridge ecosystem. Dawn is Shopify’s open-source reference theme; a dev can fork it, restructure the Liquid templates, and ship a brand-specific theme without paying for a premium marketplace one. Beyond theming, Shopify Functions lets you write custom checkout logic (discounts, delivery options, payment customisations) in JavaScript or Rust. Hydrogen gives you a React-based headless storefront with Oxygen hosting. The Storefront API powers any custom integration; App Bridge lets you build custom admin apps that live inside the Shopify admin UI. The constraint is that everything still happens inside Shopify’s allowed extension points — you cannot replace checkout below Plus, and you cannot change the underlying ecommerce data model.

On WooCommerce, a developer unlocks essentially the entire WordPress dev surface. Custom themes — block-based, classic, or hybrid — are the norm rather than the exception for serious stores; most UK agencies running production Woo sites ship their own rather than fight a marketplace theme into compliance. Custom plugins let you integrate any third-party API, extend WP’s REST API with bespoke endpoints, hook into the cart/checkout/order lifecycle, build custom Gutenberg blocks for the content team, or wire WooCommerce into an ERP or warehouse system. Headless WooCommerce (via the WP REST API or the WPGraphQL plugin, paired with a Next.js or Astro frontend) is a credible pattern — slower to set up than Hydrogen, but with no API rate limits and no platform vendor in the loop.

The practical implication: dev time the standard calculator treats as a cost is treated as an asset by the merchant. A custom theme, a custom plugin, and a set of custom integrations are owned outright on WooCommerce — they relicense or relocate with the business. The equivalent hours sunk into Shopify produce extension code that runs inside Shopify’s platform, useful but not portable. For the same revenue scale and feature set, a dev-led WooCommerce build often lands materially cheaper over 5+ years and significantly more capable in the specific ways the business actually needs.

When dev-led WooCommerce wins decisively:

The store needs custom B2B logic — per-customer pricing rules, NET payment terms, role-based catalogues — that Shopify only solves at Plus.
The merchant has internal systems (ERP, warehouse, CRM, PIM) that need bidirectional integration beyond what Shopify’s app marketplace offers.
The customer journey has unusual requirements — product configurators, complex tax positions, mixed-currency invoicing, marketplace logic — that warrant bespoke code rather than apps.
The merchant wants ownership of the codebase and full control over the upgrade path.

When dev-led Shopify still wins:

The team is React-first and Shopify Hydrogen’s Oxygen hosting + Shopify-managed scaling is a feature, not a constraint.
The build is greenfield and time-to-launch beats long-term flexibility.
The merchant wants dev hours spent on storefront experience and marketing surface area, not infrastructure or maintenance.

The honest summary: default-merchant calculations favour Shopify; dev-led merchant calculations often favour WooCommerce. The calculator’s default day rate is right for a freelancer-built Woo store. For an in-house dev who’s building, not maintaining — i.e. the cost is salaried, not hourly — WooCommerce’s flexibility starts to dominate the comparison and the customisation budget compounds into long-term capability rather than recurring app fees.

The crossover patterns to remember

Across the five scenarios, three patterns recur:

Shopify wins when the platform’s built-in features cover your needs. Standard B2C, multi-currency, security, backups, shipment tracking, basic reviews — Shopify gives all of these for free. WooCommerce gets you the same end-state, but you assemble it from paid plugins and self-managed infrastructure, and you pay for the assembly in dev time you can’t reclaim.
WooCommerce wins when you need something Shopify charges separately for. B2B, subscriptions at scale, custom checkout, deep ERP integration, ownership of the codebase. The plugin model is much cheaper than Shopify Plus when the feature you need isn’t on Shopify’s lower tiers.
Build cost dominates the year-1 comparison. Self-build at honest UK rates (£500/day for competent freelance help) puts WooCommerce £8–12k behind Shopify in year 1 alone. The Woo case has to win that back through years 2 and 3 — which it does, for the right merchant profile, but it’s not automatic.

If you want my opinion on a specific profile that doesn’t fit the scenarios above, email me with the numbers and I’ll send a written take.