Shopify vs Wix for a small online shop

Shopify is a shop that happens to have a website attached. Wix is a website that happens to have a shop attached. That is not a criticism of either. It is the whole decision, and it comes down to one question: is selling online the business, or a sideline to it?

A ceramicist I know sells maybe forty pieces a year through her site alongside teaching classes. Shopify would have been machinery she never used. Meanwhile a homeware seller shifting sixty parcels a week on Wix was fighting her own platform daily. Both had chosen on price.

The honest split

What will it cost to run?

Both publish plan prices that shift with promotions and tiers, so check their own pages rather than any figure printed in an article. Broadly, Shopify’s entry plans sit above a Wix business plan, and the gap widens as you add apps, which most Shopify shops do.

The line people miss is not the subscription. It is what comes off each sale.

On a small catalogue, the app bill is what surprises people. A review app, a shipping app, an upsell app, a stock app. Each one modest, all of them together often more than the platform itself. Wix has fewer apps available, which is a limitation and also a form of cost control.

When Wix is genuinely the right answer

I say this more often than people expect.

If you are a service business with a small product line, a florist taking a handful of online orders alongside walk ins, a gym selling supplements, a baker with a dozen items, Wix handles it comfortably. You get one platform for the whole site, one bill, one editor to learn.

Paying for a full ecommerce platform to sell fifteen products is buying a van to do the weekly shop. It works, it costs more, and you spend time managing capacity you do not use.

The practical limit is roughly this: simple products, simple postage, orders you could still count by hand at the end of a week. Above that the cracks show.

When Shopify is worth the extra

Once selling is how the business makes its money, Shopify stops looking expensive and starts looking cheap.

Real stock control across variants and sizes. Shipping rules that reflect actual weights and zones rather than a flat rate that quietly loses you money. Abandoned cart recovery. Proper tax handling. Reporting that tells you which products actually pay.

You also get a serious app ecosystem and a large pool of people who know the platform, which matters when something breaks at 8pm on a Friday in December.

If you are handling payments for the first time either way, taking payments on your website and what a payment gateway is are worth reading before you commit to either.

Getting found is harder than either platform admits

A local plumber competes with the plumbers in his town. An online shop competes with everyone in the country selling the same thing, plus Amazon.

Neither Shopify nor Wix does anything about that. Both will happily host a shop that nobody visits. The visibility comes from product pages written properly, category pages that answer real searches, content, and usually some paid advertising while the organic side builds.

Anyone telling you a particular platform ranks better for ecommerce is selling something. Nobody can promise you rankings or sales on either, and the shops that succeed are almost always the ones that treated traffic as a separate job from the shop build.

So which one

Shopify if online selling is the business, if you have more than a handful of products, if variants and shipping are complicated, or if you expect volume to grow.

Wix if the shop supports a business that makes its money another way, your catalogue is small and postage is simple. Cheaper to run and one less system to learn.

Neither if you have not sold anything yet. Test demand first, on a marketplace or even by taking orders manually, before you commit to a platform and a monthly fee. Plenty of shops get built for products nobody had bought yet.

If the website side of this is the part you would rather not deal with, our plans start at £49 a month and cover the site, hosting and the work of being found, though for a serious shop we would usually tell you Shopify plus your own effort on traffic is the better fit. The pricing page is honest about what each tier does and does not include, and if you describe what you sell we will tell you straight which of these is right, including when the answer is neither of our plans.