Wix vs Shopify is the most-fought comparison in small-business ecommerce, and most versions of it are written by whichever affiliate programme pays better that month. Here's the UK-specific version with every number taken from the two companies' own pricing pages on 21 July 2026 — and, declared openly, a third option at the end, because we build a UK platform and think the honest comparison makes room for one. The first two-thirds of this article is a fair fight; you can stop before the sales pitch.
What each one actually is
Wix is a website builder that grew a shop. Its editor remains the best pure design tool in the mainstream market, and if your site is mostly pages — a portfolio, a restaurant, a services business — with products attached, that's a real advantage. Shopify is a shop that grew everything else. Its catalogue, checkout and order machinery are the deepest available at the price, and the app store fills any gap — at the app store's prices. The choice starts with which of those centres of gravity matches your business.
The UK prices, without the promo haze
Shopify's UK plans are Basic at £25, Grow at £65 and Advanced at £344 a month — £19, £49 and £259 if you pay the year up front — with Shopify Plus from around £1,800. The intro offer (three days free, then £1 a month for three months) is real but temporary; cost your decision at list price.
Wix's commerce plans are Core at £16, Business at £25 and Business Elite at £119 a month. Three pieces of small print matter more than the numbers. Those are annual-billing prices, paid up front in full — the £16 plan is a £192 invoice on day one. They're quoted excluding VAT, so a non-VAT-registered seller pays 20% more than the page suggests. And Wix doesn't publish its monthly-billing UK prices on the pricing page at all — they surface only at checkout, which tells you how they compare.
Card fees: where the comparison actually turns
Shopify Payments' UK online rates step down with your plan: 2% + 25p on Basic, 1.7% + 25p on Grow, 1.5% + 25p on Advanced. Use any other gateway and Shopify adds its famous surcharge — 2%, 1% or 0.6% of every order by plan — on top of that gateway's own fees.
Wix Payments charges a flat 2.1% + 20p on UK cards at every tier — there's no surcharge for third-party gateways, but the rate never improves as you grow. Run the arithmetic at £100,000 a year of sales (around 208 orders a month at a £40 average): roughly £216 a month in card fees on Wix against £194 on Shopify Grow — about £270 a year given away by the flat rate, and the gap widens every year your shop grows. At small volumes the difference is noise; the point is which direction it moves.
The caps each side doesn't advertise
On Shopify: Basic includes no staff accounts — the first hire who needs a login makes you a £65/month business — and every product is capped at 250 media items and three options. Subscriptions, memberships and most growth features are apps at £25–£99+ a month each; a lean stack adds £40–£100 monthly, and the numbers in our real cost of Shopify UK breakdown come from those pages.
On Wix: the catalogue caps at 50,000 products (fine for most), storage caps at 50GB on Core, automated sales-tax handling is metered by plan, and the memberships/paid-plans feature takes its own 4% cut on Core, 2% on Business, 0% only on the £119 Elite tier. Abandoned-cart recovery, to Wix's credit, is on every commerce plan.
The verdicts, fairly
Pick Wix if the website is the product and the shop is the sideline — up to a few hundred products, design-led, content-heavy — and pay annually with eyes open. Pick Shopify if commerce is the whole business and you'll genuinely use the app ecosystem and Shop Pay; cost it with the apps and the staff-account tier included, because you'll be paying for them. Both are excellent companies that will still exist in a decade; neither is a mistake at small scale.
The third option neither will mention
Both comparisons above quietly assume a US platform billing in a US shape. A UK shop has a third route: a platform built here, priced in pounds, with the growth features in the plan. Orbit's plans run £25/£85/£249 (£19/£64/£187 yearly) with unlimited products, 100GB–1TB storage, and subscriptions, gift cards, cart recovery and a full page builder included rather than sold back as apps or gated to a £119 tier. UK card rates are published per plan — 2%/1.7%/1.5% + 25p, matching Shopify tier-for-tier — with no surcharge layered on top. Where the honest caveats sit: our app ecosystem is young next to Shopify's thousands, and our design editor competes with Wix's on function rather than fame. The side-by-sides are at Orbit vs Shopify — and the true-cost comparison puts all three in one table at three shop sizes.
The questions people actually ask
Is Wix or Shopify cheaper in the UK?
At list price Wix's plans are cheaper (£16–£25 vs £25–£65) but its card rate is higher (2.1% + 20p flat vs 1.5–2% + 25p tiered) and its prices exclude VAT and bill annually up front. Below roughly £3,000 a month in sales Wix usually totals less; above it, Shopify's better card rates start paying for its dearer plans.
Is Wix good enough for a serious online shop?
Up to a few hundred products and moderate volume, genuinely yes — the commerce basics including cart recovery are all there. The strain shows in processing costs at scale, storage on lower tiers, and the absence of the deep operational tooling (multi-location inventory, advanced shipping) that shop-first platforms carry.
Can I move from Wix to Shopify later — or to something else?
Yes; products and customers export from Wix as CSV, and any serious platform imports them. Order history and URL structures move less cleanly, so plan redirects for whatever ranks. The same applies moving to Orbit — the migration guide's sequencing holds for any origin.
Does either charge transaction fees on top of card fees?
Shopify does when you use a third-party gateway (0.6–2% by plan). Wix doesn't list a platform fee on standard store sales, though its paid-plans/memberships feature takes 0–4% by tier. Orbit charges no platform surcharge — the published card rate is the whole line.