People rarely search for a Shopify alternative because Shopify is bad. They search because the £25 store somehow became a £200 store — an app here, a surcharge there, a plan upgrade because a second person needed a login — or because they'd simply rather deal with a UK company, in pounds, with UK support hours. Whatever brought you here, this is the honest version of the comparison: every price below comes from the platform's own pricing page, checked on 21 July 2026, and one disclosure up front — we build Orbit, one of the platforms on this list. Read with that in mind; the numbers don't care who wrote them down.
What actually separates the alternatives
Sticker prices won't help you choose — most of these platforms cost £16–£35 a month at entry level and the difference buys a coffee. Four things actually separate them, and none sits on the front of a pricing page: what happens to card fees when you don't use the platform's own payment system, what's included versus sold back to you as apps, where the caps are (turnover, products, staff, storage), and who picks up the phone when checkout breaks on a Saturday. That's how we've compared them.
The list, honestly annotated
1. Orbit Commerce — UK-first, everything in the plan
Ours, so we'll keep it factual. Orbit's plans are £25 (Solo), £85 (Team) and £249 (Pro) a month — £19, £64 and £187 billed yearly — priced in pounds, with unlimited products on every plan and storage from 100GB to 1TB. The pitch is that the things Shopify sells as apps are in the plan: subscriptions with failed-payment recovery, gift cards, abandoned-cart recovery, discounts and reporting, plus a drag-and-drop page builder instead of a theme you pay for. UK online card rates are published per plan — 2% + 25p on Solo, 1.7% + 25p on Team, 1.5% + 25p on Pro — identical tier-for-tier to Shopify's own rates, so the card fees are a wash and the decision comes down to the plan and the app bill. Migration tools import products, customers and order history from Shopify with redirects set up as part of the import. The honest other column: Orbit is the newest platform here, and there's no third-party app store measured in thousands — if your operation depends on one specific Shopify app, check that first. The full Orbit vs Shopify comparison goes feature by feature.
2. ShopWired — UK-based, capped by turnover
ShopWired is the most direct UK-native competitor, based in the West Midlands, with a 14-day trial and a genuinely strong feature list: unlimited products, subscriptions, trade accounts and abandoned-basket recovery, plus 0% platform fees on more than 40 external payment gateways. The catch is structural: plans are capped by turnover. Essentials at £34.95 + VAT a month covers you to £50,000 a year; past that you're on Advanced at £79.95, then Premium at £149.95 to £500,000, then Enterprise from £299.95. Selling more is the trigger for paying more, which is worth pricing into any success you're planning. Essentials also charges small add-ons (£5–£10/month) for unlimited users and trade accounts that higher tiers include, and the theme catalogue is a modest 20.
3. Bluepark — small, UK, unlimited staff
Bluepark has run since 2004, hosts around 4,500 stores, and is the quiet cousin on this list: £29.99 + VAT (Retail), £44.99 (Business) and £64.99 (Enterprise) a month, no transaction fees on any plan, unlimited staff accounts everywhere, and UK phone support from a small team. The caps here are products and storage rather than turnover: Retail allows 500 products and 500MB of storage, Business 2,000 and 1GB, and even Enterprise's 2GB expandable allowance is tight if your product photography is any good. B2B and marketing features sit on Business and above. It's a sensible choice for a compact, stable catalogue; less so for media-heavy or fast-growing stores.
4. EKM — no longer the platform you remember
EKM was the default UK-native answer for two decades — but as of our July 2026 check, its self-serve tiered plans are gone. The current offer is a single managed-service plan at £327 + VAT a month (half price for the first three months), where EKM's team builds and runs the store for you with a dedicated ecommerce manager. No platform transaction fees, and their in-house EKMPay processing starts at 1.4% + 20p (plus VAT). If you want a done-for-you service and the budget fits, that's a real offer. If you were comparing it against £30-a-month platforms, it no longer plays in that market — which reshuffles the UK-native field considerably. The three-way breakdown is in our EKM vs ShopWired vs Bluepark comparison.
5. Wix — strong builder, read the billing small print
Wix's commerce plans are Core at £16, Business at £25 and Business Elite at £119 a month — but those are annual-billing prices, paid up front in full, quoted excluding VAT, and the monthly-billing prices aren't published on the pricing page at all. Card processing through Wix Payments is a flat 2.1% + 20p on UK cards regardless of plan — higher than the 1.5–1.7% the platforms above offer mid-tier — and the product catalogue caps at 50,000. The builder itself is genuinely excellent and the abandoned-cart and multichannel basics are on every commerce plan. For a content-led site with a small shop attached, it's a fair pick; as the main engine of a growing UK store, the processing rate and the upfront annual billing deserve a hard look.
6. WooCommerce — free software, real running costs
WooCommerce remains the honest answer if you want ownership and have the hands to maintain it: the plugin is free, and the store around it is not. Managed WordPress hosting runs £10–£25+ a month, official extensions renew annually (Subscriptions is £213 a year, bookings £190, memberships £152), and the maintenance — updates, backups, security, compatibility testing across 15–30 plugins — is yours or your retainer's. WooPayments charges 1.5% + 25p on UK cards, competitive with anything here. We've written the full sum up separately in when self-hosted stops being free, and the hosted-platform escape routes in WooCommerce alternatives for UK stores.
Side by side
| Platform | Entry plan | Mid plan | UK online card rate | Platform fee on sales | The cap to know about |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Orbit | £25/mo (£19 yearly) | £85/mo (£64 yearly) | 2% + 25p → 1.5% + 25p by plan | None | Storage by plan (100GB–1TB); unlimited products |
| Shopify | £25/mo (£19 yearly) | £65/mo (£49 yearly) | 2% + 25p → 1.5% + 25p by plan | 0.6–2% per order on third-party gateways | No staff accounts on Basic; 250 media/product |
| ShopWired | £34.95/mo + VAT | £79.95/mo + VAT | From 1.9% + 20p (own gateway) | 0% on external gateways | Turnover caps: £50k/£200k/£500k per year |
| Bluepark | £29.99/mo + VAT | £44.99/mo + VAT | Via Stripe/PayPal etc. (e.g. Stripe 1.5% + 20p) | None | 500–2,000 product caps; 500MB–2GB storage |
| EKM | £327/mo + VAT (single managed plan) | From 1.4% + 20p + VAT (EKMPay) | None | No self-serve option any more | |
| Wix | £16/mo + VAT (annual, upfront) | £25/mo + VAT (annual, upfront) | 2.1% + 20p (flat, all plans) | None listed | 50,000 products; monthly prices unpublished |
| WooCommerce | Free plugin + £10–£25/mo hosting + extensions | 1.5% + 25p (WooPayments) | None | You are the platform team | |
Prices from each vendor's pricing page, 21 July 2026. ShopWired, Bluepark, EKM and Wix quote prices excluding VAT; annual-billing rates shown where offered. Promotional first-term discounts (Wix's 50%-off offer, EKM's three months half price, Shopify's £1/month intro) are excluded on purpose — you'll pay the list price for years, not the promo.
The switching part, briefly
Whichever way you lean, test the move before you commit to it. Every platform above offers a trial; the useful test is always the same — import your real catalogue, rebuild your best-selling page, place a real order, and watch what happens to your URLs, because redirects are where replatforming rankings go to die. Our Shopify migration guide walks the whole sequence with honest timings, and it applies in spirit to any destination on this list.
Questions people ask us about Shopify alternatives
What is the best Shopify alternative in the UK?
It depends on the trap you're escaping. Leaving because of the app bill: Orbit or ShopWired, where subscriptions, carts and trade features are in the plan. Leaving for UK support on the phone: Bluepark or ShopWired. Wanting done-for-you: EKM, at a price. Wanting ownership: WooCommerce, with your own maintenance hours as the subscription.
Is there a genuinely cheaper alternative to Shopify?
At entry level, barely — most platforms cluster at £16–£35 a month and card fees are similar everywhere. The real savings appear at the app bill (a lean Shopify app stack adds £40–£100 a month that plan-inclusive platforms don't charge) and at the surcharge line if you use a third-party gateway on Shopify.
Can I move my store without losing my Google rankings?
Yes, if redirects are set up for every old URL — products, collections and the long tail of pages that rank. On Orbit, redirects are created as part of the Shopify import; on any platform, spot-check your top landing pages from Search Console after cutover.
How long does switching from Shopify actually take?
A small store — a couple of hundred products, a short app list — is a weekend of honest work plus a quiet hour for DNS. Large catalogues with deep variants are a couple of weeks of evenings, mostly in data QA and the app audit.