Orbit Commerce vs Shopify.
Shopify is the default choice in hosted ecommerce — and defaults come with assumptions. Caps on product media, options and file types; features sold back to you as apps; checkout customisation reserved for the £1,800-a-month tier. Orbit is the newer platform, built UK-first without the legacy — with the essentials in the plan and real people behind it.
| Orbit Commerce | Shopify | |
|---|---|---|
| Entry plan | Solo — £25/mo (£19/mo billed yearly) | Basic — £25/mo (£19/mo billed yearly) |
| Mid plan | Team — £59/mo (£44/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 | Up to 2,000 images | 250 total (images, videos and 3D combined) |
| CAD & design files on product pages | Yes — hosted on the store, no platform cap | 3D limited to GLB/USDZ; 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 |
| 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 supports up to 2,000 images per product and doesn't make you choose which three things your product is allowed to vary by.
Selling parts, furniture, machinery or anything technical? Shopify product media accepts only GLB and USDZ 3D formats, and its file manager caps other uploads at 20MB per file — too small for serious CAD work. Its own community is full of merchants trying to offer a STEP or DWG download and ending up commissioning custom apps for it. On Orbit, CAD models and design files live on your product pages, hosted by the store, no format gymnastics and no platform cap.
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 £59 and Pro at £249. Similar on paper — until you count what each plan actually contains.
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. Shopify Basic includes no staff accounts whatsoever — your first hire needs a £65/month plan. On Orbit, subscriptions with failed-payment recovery, gift cards, abandoned-cart recovery and reporting are part of the plan, and a four-person team fits on Team at £59 where Shopify wants £344.
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 — £44/mo (10 staff accounts included)
- Subscriptions & dunning — included
- Card fees (1.7% + 25p, ~200 orders) — ~£135/mo
≈ £179/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.
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, technical files, CAD 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 — 10 staff accounts at £59 versus Shopify’s 5 at £65 (and none on Basic).
- 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.
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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