Shopify and Wix are two of the most recognisable names in website building, and both offer ecommerce functionality. But they approach online selling from very different starting points. Shopify was built specifically for ecommerce. Wix was built as a general-purpose website builder that later added ecommerce capabilities.
This distinction matters more than most comparisons acknowledge. When your primary goal is selling products online, the platform's core architecture shapes everything from your checkout experience to your ability to scale. When you need a beautiful website that also happens to sell a few products, your priorities are different.
I have built stores on both platforms and helped brands migrate between them. This comparison is based on hands-on experience, not marketing materials. Both platforms have genuine strengths, and the right choice depends entirely on your specific needs.
Platform philosophy
Understanding the fundamental philosophy behind each platform helps explain almost every feature difference you will encounter.
Shopify is an ecommerce platform. Every feature, every design decision, every update is filtered through the lens of helping merchants sell more effectively. The admin panel is built around products, orders, and customers. Analytics focus on sales metrics. The theme architecture prioritises conversion. Even Shopify's AI features are geared towards generating product descriptions and marketing copy.
Wix is a website builder with ecommerce capabilities. It was originally designed to make it easy for anyone to create a professional-looking website without coding knowledge. Ecommerce was added as one of many capabilities alongside bookings, restaurants, events, and portfolio sites. The admin panel covers a much broader range of website management tasks, with ecommerce as one section among many.
Neither approach is inherently better. But if your business is primarily ecommerce, a platform built from the ground up for selling will serve you better than one where ecommerce is one feature among many.
Pricing and plans
Both platforms operate on monthly subscription models, but their pricing structures reflect their different priorities.
Shopify pricing
Shopify offers three main plans: Basic (£25/month), Shopify (£65/month), and Advanced (£399/month). There is also Shopify Starter at £5/month for social media selling without a full storefront, and Shopify Plus starting at approximately £1,750/month for enterprise brands. All plans include hosting, SSL, and unlimited products.
Transaction fees decrease as you move up the plan tiers, and using Shopify Payments eliminates the additional platform transaction fee entirely. For more detail on how the plans compare against each other, see our guide to Shopify Basic vs Shopify vs Advanced.
Wix pricing
Wix's ecommerce-capable plans include Business (from approximately £17/month), Business Unlimited (from approximately £22/month), and Business VIP (from approximately £29/month). Lower-tier Wix plans do not support ecommerce at all, so you cannot sell products on the free plan or the basic website plans.
Wix Payments is available in the UK and eliminates additional Wix transaction fees. Payment processor fees still apply on both platforms.
The real cost comparison
On paper, Wix appears cheaper. In practice, the cost difference is smaller than the headline prices suggest. Shopify includes more ecommerce-specific features at its base price — abandoned cart recovery, gift cards, discount codes, and professional reporting are all included. On Wix, some equivalent features require higher-tier plans or third-party apps.
For a store doing £100k-£500k in annual revenue, the monthly subscription difference between platforms is negligible compared to the revenue impact of better checkout conversion, more robust inventory management, and stronger analytics. When considering what a Shopify build should cost, the platform subscription is only one component of total investment.
Design and flexibility
Wix: the design leader
This is genuinely where Wix excels. The Wix Editor provides drag-and-drop design freedom that is unmatched by any ecommerce platform. You can place elements anywhere on the page, adjust spacing pixel by pixel, and create layouts that feel completely custom without touching code.
Wix also offers Wix Studio (formerly Editor X) for more advanced responsive design, and the Wix ADI (Artificial Design Intelligence) that can generate a website based on your answers to a few questions. The template library is extensive and covers a wide range of industries and aesthetics.
For brands where visual design and creative expression are paramount — photographers, artists, creative agencies — Wix's design tools are genuinely superior.
Shopify: purpose-built for ecommerce
Shopify's design approach is more structured. The Online Store 2.0 architecture uses sections and blocks that provide flexibility within a defined framework. You can customise layouts, but you work within a grid-based system rather than placing elements freely.
This structure is intentional. Ecommerce design is not about pixel-perfect creative freedom — it is about conversion. Product grids, collection pages, cart drawers, and checkout flows follow established patterns because they work. Shopify's theme architecture is designed around these conversion-optimised patterns.
The Shopify Theme Store offers both free and premium themes. Custom theme development through Shopify development gives you complete control over the design within the Liquid templating framework. For brands considering deeper customisation, our article on custom Shopify theme development covers when this investment makes sense.
Ecommerce features
This is where the platform philosophy difference becomes most apparent.
Product management
Shopify supports up to 100 variants per product, comprehensive inventory tracking across multiple locations, bulk editing tools, product metafields for custom data, and automated collections based on product tags, type, price, and other attributes. Product organisation is sophisticated and scales well.
Wix supports product variants but with fewer options per product. Inventory tracking is available but less granular. Bulk editing capabilities are more limited. For stores with simple catalogues of under 500 products, Wix is adequate. For larger or more complex catalogues, Shopify's product management tools are substantially more capable.
Checkout experience
Shopify's checkout is one of the highest-converting in ecommerce. It has been optimised across billions of transactions, and Shop Pay — the accelerated checkout — stores customer payment and shipping details for one-tap purchasing. Every Shopify merchant benefits from ongoing checkout optimisation that the platform conducts at scale.
Wix's checkout is functional but less optimised. It does not have an equivalent to Shop Pay's network effect, where saved customer details from one Shopify store carry across to others. The checkout flow is clean and works well, but it has not been subjected to the same scale of conversion optimisation.
Shipping and fulfilment
Shopify offers calculated shipping rates from major carriers, shipping label printing, carrier-specific discounts, and integration with fulfilment networks. The shipping infrastructure is built for businesses that ship regularly.
Wix supports flat-rate, weight-based, and price-based shipping rules. Real-time carrier-calculated rates are available but less integrated. For businesses with straightforward shipping needs, Wix covers the basics. For businesses with complex shipping requirements, Shopify provides more flexibility.
Multi-channel selling
Shopify integrates with Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Google Shopping, Amazon, and eBay as native sales channels. You manage inventory and orders from a single admin panel. Multi-channel selling is a core Shopify feature, and the integrations are deep and well-maintained.
Wix supports social media selling and Google Shopping integration, but the multi-channel capabilities are less extensive. If selling across multiple channels is central to your strategy, Shopify provides a more robust foundation.
SEO and marketing
SEO capabilities
Both platforms have made significant SEO improvements in recent years. Shopify generates clean URLs, supports meta tag customisation, creates XML sitemaps automatically, and handles canonical tags. Product schema markup is built into most themes, supporting rich results in search.
Wix has addressed many of its historical SEO limitations. The platform now supports custom URLs (previously a major weakness), provides SEO meta controls, generates sitemaps, and includes the Wix SEO Wiz tool that guides users through basic SEO setup. Server-side rendering has improved page crawlability.
For ecommerce SEO specifically — product page optimisation, collection page optimisation, and technical SEO — Shopify has a slight edge due to its ecommerce-native URL structure and product schema support. For general website SEO, both platforms are now competent.
Email marketing
Shopify integrates with specialist email marketing platforms like Klaviyo, which is the industry standard for ecommerce email. These integrations provide advanced segmentation, automated flows based on purchase behaviour, and predictive analytics.
Wix has its own built-in email marketing tool, Wix Email Marketing, which covers basic campaigns and automations. For brands that need sophisticated email marketing, third-party integrations are available but the ecosystem is smaller than Shopify's.
Payment processing
Both platforms offer their own payment processing solutions — Shopify Payments and Wix Payments — which are available in the UK.
Shopify Payments uses Stripe's infrastructure and offers competitive rates that decrease with higher-tier plans. If you use a third-party payment gateway instead of Shopify Payments, Shopify charges an additional transaction fee (0.5%-2% depending on plan). This is a legitimate criticism of Shopify's model.
Wix Payments does not charge additional platform transaction fees on ecommerce plans. Third-party payment gateways are supported without additional Wix fees. Payment processor rates are comparable to Shopify's.
Both platforms support PayPal, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. Shopify additionally supports Shop Pay, which has a significant network advantage for checkout conversion.
Scalability
Scalability is where the platform difference becomes most consequential for growing businesses.
Shopify scales smoothly from a startup to enterprise level. The upgrade path from Basic to Shopify to Advanced to Shopify Plus is seamless — your store, data, apps, and theme carry over. Shopify Plus adds features like checkout customisation, dedicated support, higher API limits, and advanced automation through Shopify Flow. Many UK brands doing eight figures in annual revenue run on Shopify.
Wix is designed primarily for small to medium-sized businesses. While it can handle moderate growth, the platform's ecommerce features plateau at a certain scale. Inventory management, order processing, and analytics tools are less sophisticated than what growing ecommerce brands need. Wix does not have an enterprise-tier equivalent to Shopify Plus.
If you are building a brand with ambitions to scale significantly — multiple product lines, thousands of SKUs, high order volumes — Shopify provides a platform that grows with you. If your ecommerce operation will remain relatively small, Wix can serve you well without the complexity of a dedicated ecommerce platform.
For brands already experiencing growth constraints, our article on signs your ecommerce platform is holding you back covers the warning signs.
App ecosystem
Shopify App Store
The Shopify App Store contains over 10,000 apps built specifically for ecommerce. This includes specialist tools for reviews, subscriptions, loyalty programmes, upselling, analytics, shipping, and virtually every other ecommerce function. The ecosystem is mature, competitive, and continually improving.
Shopify enforces performance and quality standards for apps, which helps maintain a baseline quality level. The depth of the ecommerce app ecosystem is one of Shopify's strongest competitive advantages.
Wix App Market
The Wix App Market offers hundreds of apps covering a broad range of website functionality — not just ecommerce. Ecommerce-specific apps are available but the selection is smaller than Shopify's. For niche ecommerce requirements (like specific subscription models or advanced product customisation), you may find fewer options on Wix.
Wix's app ecosystem is adequate for common ecommerce needs but cannot match Shopify's depth in specialist ecommerce tooling.
Performance and speed
Both platforms are hosted solutions, so you do not need to manage server infrastructure. However, performance differs.
Shopify's infrastructure is built for ecommerce workloads. The platform's global CDN, optimised hosting, and performance standards for themes result in consistently fast page loads. Most well-built Shopify stores score 70-90+ on Google PageSpeed Insights mobile.
Wix has historically struggled with performance, particularly on mobile. The platform has made significant improvements, including server-side rendering and code optimisation, but page load times can still be slower than Shopify's, especially on complex pages with many design elements.
For ecommerce, page speed directly impacts conversion rates and choosing the best platform for your UK brand involves weighing performance against other factors.
Support and community
Shopify offers 24/7 support via chat, email, and phone. The Shopify Community forum is active and well-moderated. Shopify also has extensive documentation, a partner ecosystem with thousands of experts and agencies, and Shopify Academy for educational content.
Wix provides support via chat, email, and phone during business hours. The Wix Help Centre is comprehensive, and the Wix community forum is active. Wix's partner ecosystem (Wix Marketplace) is smaller than Shopify's but growing.
For ecommerce-specific support, Shopify's community and partner ecosystem is substantially larger. Finding a specialist developer or agency for Shopify is easier than finding one for Wix ecommerce.
UK-specific considerations
VAT and tax
Shopify handles UK VAT natively, including VAT-inclusive pricing display, automatic VAT calculations for domestic and international orders, and VAT reporting. For brands selling to EU customers post-Brexit, Shopify's tax handling is comprehensive.
Wix supports UK VAT configuration but the setup is more manual. VAT-inclusive pricing is available, but multi-region tax configurations require more attention.
Payment methods
Both platforms support the payment methods UK consumers expect — Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, Apple Pay, Google Pay. Shopify Payments and Wix Payments are both available to UK businesses.
Shipping carriers
Shopify integrates with major UK carriers including Royal Mail, DPD, Evri, and DHL. Carrier-calculated rates are available on higher-tier plans. Wix supports UK shipping configurations but real-time carrier integration is less developed.
GDPR compliance
Both platforms provide tools for GDPR compliance including cookie consent, privacy policy management, and data deletion capabilities. Neither platform handles GDPR compliance entirely automatically — you need to configure privacy settings and ensure your website design meets regulatory requirements.
The verdict
The choice between Shopify and Wix for ecommerce comes down to your primary business need.
Choose Shopify if:
- Ecommerce is your primary business, not a secondary feature of your website
- You plan to scale beyond a small product catalogue and modest order volumes
- Checkout conversion and cart optimisation are priorities
- You need multi-channel selling across social media and marketplaces
- You want access to a deep ecosystem of ecommerce-specific apps and integrations
- You need robust inventory management across multiple locations
Choose Wix if:
- You need a beautiful website that also sells some products
- Visual design and creative expression are more important than ecommerce depth
- Your product catalogue is small (under 200 products) and your order volume is moderate
- You are on a tight budget and need the lowest possible monthly cost
- Your business model combines ecommerce with other services like bookings, events, or content
- You want the easiest possible drag-and-drop design experience
For most UK brands where ecommerce is the core business, Shopify is the stronger choice. It was built for selling, and that architectural advantage compounds over time as your business grows. But Wix is a legitimate option for smaller operations where design flexibility matters more than ecommerce depth.
If you are weighing your options or considering a move from Wix to Shopify, get in touch. We will give you an honest assessment based on your specific situation — including telling you if Wix is actually the right platform for your needs.