The UK-based Shopify alternative
Orbit Commerce vs Shopify.
Looking for a Shopify alternative built for UK stores? Shopify's defaults come with assumptions — caps on product media, features sold back as apps, checkout customisation reserved for the £1,800-a-month tier, and successive UK price rises. Orbit is the newer platform, built UK-first without the legacy: the essentials in the plan, and switching from Shopify takes an afternoon, not a rebuild.
| Orbit Commerce | Shopify | |
|---|---|---|
| Entry plan | Solo — £25/mo (£19/mo billed yearly) | Basic — £25/mo (£19/mo billed yearly) |
| Mid plan | Team — £85/mo (£64/mo yearly) | Grow — £65/mo (£49/mo yearly) |
| Top standard plan | Pro — £249/mo (£187/mo yearly) | Advanced — £344/mo (£259/mo yearly) |
| Staff accounts | 1 / 10 / 40 by plan | 0 (owner only) / 5 / 15 by plan |
| Media per product | No fixed cap — storage-bounded | 250 total (images, videos and 3D combined) |
| 3D models on product pages | GLB, glTF and USDZ — hosted by Orbit, AR-ready | GLB and USDZ only; other files capped at 20MB, linked manually |
| Payment surcharges | None — one published card rate per plan | +2% (Basic), +1% (Grow), +0.6% (Advanced) per order on third-party gateways |
| Subscriptions & recurring billing | Included (Team and up) | Paid apps — typically $25–$99+/mo plus per-order fees |
| Checkout | Conversion-optimised checkout on every plan | Customising core checkout steps requires Plus (from ~£1,800/mo) |
| Custom development & account management | In-house team, dedicated account manager on enterprise | Via third-party agencies and the app ecosystem |
| Inventory operations (Stocky) | Operations suite built in on Enterprise, imports Stocky CSVs | Stocky retires on 31 August 2026 |
| Free trial | 14 days, full platform, no card required | 3 days free, then £1/mo for 3 months |
The limits you hit later.
Shopify's ceilings don't show up in the demo. They show up six months in, when your catalogue gets serious.
Every product on Shopify is capped at 250 media items — images, videos and 3D models combined. Shopify raised its variant ceiling to 2,048 in late 2025, but kept the media cap, so a product with hundreds of variants can't even carry an image for each one — and its own docs warn that themes and apps still on the old APIs face a "downgraded or broken experience" beyond 100 variants. Products also remain limited to three options (size, colour, and one more — pick carefully). Orbit puts no fixed media cap on a product — your photos are bounded by your plan's storage, not a per-product number — and it doesn't make you choose which three things your product is allowed to vary by.
Selling furniture, parts or anything customers want to see in their space? Orbit hosts GLB, glTF and USDZ models on the product page, viewable in AR on supported phones, on every plan. Shopify product media accepts only GLB and USDZ, and anything else goes through its file manager — capped at 20MB per file and linked by hand.
And if you're importing a big catalogue: once a Shopify store passes 50,000 variants, product imports are throttled to 1,000 new variants a day unless you're on Plus. Orbit's bulk import takes your CSV or Excel file as fast as you can supply it, on every plan.
Where the money actually goes.
Both platforms look similar at the entry price. The difference is what happens to your bill as the business grows.
Shopify's UK plans are Basic at £25, Grow at £65 and Advanced at £344 a month, with Shopify Plus from around £1,800 a month. Orbit's equivalents are Solo at £25, Team at £85 and Pro at £249. Entry level is a tie, and in the middle Orbit asks £20 a month more than Grow — which is the honest place to start, because the plan price isn't the bill.
Worth naming the trend, too: Shopify has raised its plan prices more than once in recent years, and existing stores were moved to the new rates. If you searched for a Shopify pricing increase and landed here, that's why. Orbit's published pounds pricing is the whole story — no usage escalators waiting behind it.
On Shopify, subscriptions, reviews and advanced reporting live in the app store as separate monthly bills: a lean stack adds £40–£100 a month, and established merchants commonly report more than £150 a month in apps alone, plus $100–$450 for a paid theme. Add one subscriptions app to Grow and you are past Team before you have hired anyone. On Orbit, subscriptions with failed-payment recovery, gift cards, abandoned-cart recovery and reporting are part of the plan. Staff accounts tell the same story: Shopify Basic includes no staff accounts whatsoever, Grow gives you five, and the sixth means Advanced at £344 — where Team gives you ten at £85.
Card rates won't move the decision: identical tier-for-tier (2% + 25p down to 1.5% + 25p online), and on Orbit the rate on the pricing page is the whole story. What will move it: use any gateway other than Shopify Payments and Shopify adds 0.6–2% of every order on top of your gateway's own fees — a surcharge Orbit simply doesn't have.
A worked example: £5,000/month in sales, small team, selling subscriptions
Shopify (Grow, annual)
- Plan — £49/mo (Basic won't do: no staff accounts)
- Subscriptions app — ~£78/mo + per-order fees
- Card fees (1.7% + 25p, ~200 orders) — ~£135/mo
≈ £262/month
Orbit (Team, annual)
- Plan — £64/mo (10 staff accounts included)
- Subscriptions & dunning — included
- Card fees (1.7% + 25p, ~200 orders) — ~£135/mo
≈ £199/month
Illustrative, using published prices at the time of checking and typical app-tier costs.
A modern platform, with people attached.
Being newer is an advantage when the older platform spends its time deprecating things.
Orbit is the newer platform, and that's a feature. Shopify's last few years have been a rolling programme of deprecations its merchants had to absorb — checkout.liquid sunset, REST product APIs retired, apps and themes forced through migrations. Orbit was built recently, UK-first, on one modern architecture: the page builder, checkout, subscriptions and inventory were designed together, not acquired or bolted on — and none of it is rationed by tier the way Shopify reserves checkout customisation for Plus.
The bigger difference is who you can actually talk to. Enterprise customers get a dedicated account manager and custom development done in-house — ERP, PIM and OMS integrations, bespoke workflows and storefront components, built by the same engineers who build Orbit and handed over documented, with you owning the code. Agencies get a partner programme, and every plan gets email and live chat with the team that runs the platform. Shopify at the same moments hands you an AI chat bot, a partner directory and a Plus quote.
Stocky is the latest casualty.
Shopify retires Stocky on 31 August 2026. Orbit imports your Stocky CSVs and keeps purchasing, picking and packing inside the platform.
Stocky has been the default answer to purchase orders and stocktakes on Shopify for years. Shopify has announced it retires on 31 August 2026, and merchants who rely on it are being pointed back at the app store to reassemble their back office from scratch.
Orbit's answer is the Operations suite, built into Enterprise: reorder planning with safety stock, purchase orders with suppliers and receiving, bin locations with consolidated pick lists, cycle counts with a variance report, and a batch fulfilment workbench with scan-to-verify packing. An import wizard carries your Stocky suppliers and purchase orders across: open POs become drafts you keep working, and completed ones become closed history, so your records survive the shutdown.
Who should pick which.
Different businesses, different right answers. Here's our honest take.
Choose Orbit Commerce if…
- Your catalogue is serious — lots of images per product, 3D models, big imports — and you don’t want platform ceilings deciding your merchandising.
- You want subscriptions, gift cards and cart recovery in the plan, not as £100+/month of app subscriptions.
- Your team is bigger than your plan — Team includes 10 staff accounts at £85, where Shopify’s sixth staff account means Advanced at £344 (and Basic gives you none).
- You want enterprise-grade custom work — integrations, bespoke features — from an in-house team with a dedicated account manager, without a Plus-sized invoice.
- You want UK-first: pounds, UK VAT handling, and a team in your timezone.
Shopify may fit better if…
- Your operation depends on a specific app that only exists in Shopify’s ecosystem.
- You run physical retail at scale and need its POS hardware estate.
- Shop Pay is central to your conversion strategy.
- You’re at genuine Plus scale and the £1,800+/month buys infrastructure you’d otherwise build yourself.
Moving from Shopify, without losing your rankings.
Switching platforms sounds scarier than it is. Here's what actually moves.
Orbit's migration tools import your products (with variants and images), customers and order history directly from Shopify. URL redirects are set up as part of the import, so links that rank on Google today keep resolving after the switch — the part of replatforming that most often goes wrong.
Run the import from your dashboard and point your domain when you're ready — or, for larger moves, have our team handle it: enterprise migrations come with hands-on assistance and a dedicated account manager from day one. Email and live chat support are included on every plan; see pricing for what each plan includes.
Two companion reads if you're still weighing it: the real cost of a Shopify store in the UK itemises the app stack and surcharges in pounds, and the migration guide walks the move step by step with honest timings.
Questions, answered.
Straight answers from the team building it. If we don't know, we'll tell you.
Shopify pricing and features checked 10 June 2026 against shopify.com/uk/pricing & help.shopify.com and other published sources, and reviewed regularly. Shopify is a trademark of its respective owner; all figures exclude VAT unless stated. Spotted something out of date? Tell us.
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