Shopify vs WooCommerce vs a custom build: choosing an e-commerce platform in 2026

If you're about to start an online shop, or move an existing one, the platform question is the one that keeps you up at night. Shopify, WooCommerce, or something built from scratch? Every agency seems to have a favourite, every forum thread ends in an argument, and the honest answer — that it depends on your shop — feels like a cop-out. So let's do the opposite of a cop-out. Here's what each option actually is, what it costs a UK business in 2026, where each one quietly hurts, and how to tell which is right for you.

The three options aren't really the same kind of thing

Before comparing them, it helps to see that these are three different categories of decision, not three flavours of the same product.

Shopify is a hosted subscription. You pay a monthly fee, and in return Shopify runs the servers, handles security and updates, keeps it fast, and gives you a large app store to bolt on extra features. You don't touch the plumbing — which is the whole point, and also the whole limitation.

WooCommerce is a free, open-source plugin that turns a WordPress site into a shop. Nothing about it is hosted for you. You (or someone you pay) choose the hosting, install it, keep it updated, secure it, and take responsibility when something breaks. In exchange you get near-total control over how it works and what it costs.

A custom build is exactly that: an e-commerce site engineered from the ground up, usually on a framework like Next.js, with the storefront, cart and checkout built to your specification. Maximum control, maximum cost, and maximum ongoing responsibility. It's a serious commitment, and most shops don't need it — more on that below.

What each one actually costs in the UK

Headline prices are misleading, so let's be specific. Shopify's entry plan sits at roughly £19-25 a month in 2026 depending on billing, which sounds cheap until you remember the transaction fee: unless you use Shopify Payments, Shopify takes a percentage of every sale on top of your card processor's cut. That fee is trivial at £2,000 a month of sales and painful at £20,000.

WooCommerce has no licence fee and no platform transaction fee at all. What you pay instead is hosting (a bare-bones store can run on £10-30 a month; a properly resourced one that stays fast under load is more like £40-80), plus a handful of paid plugins for things Shopify includes as standard, plus — the cost everyone forgets — your time or a developer's to keep it patched and working. A realistic first-year figure for a well-built WooCommerce shop is £1,500-4,000 once you count setup and a maintenance arrangement.

A custom build starts, for anything worth having, at around £20,000 and climbs steeply with complexity. You're paying for engineering time, and you'll keep paying it — every new feature, every security update, every integration is yours to fund. That's not a reason to avoid it; it's a reason to be sure you need it. If you want to understand where these figures come from in general, our guide to what a website actually costs in the UK breaks the numbers down honestly.

The cheapest platform to start on is rarely the cheapest to run at scale — and the reverse is just as true. Match the cost curve to where your business is heading, not just where it is today.

Where the real trade-offs live

Cost is the easy part. The differences that actually shape your day-to-day are these:

• Time to launch. Shopify wins outright. If your catalogue is small, you can sign up, pick a theme, add products, connect a payment method and be genuinely live in a day. WooCommerce and a custom build are measured in weeks.
• Who fixes it at 11pm. On Shopify, Shopify does. On WooCommerce and a custom site, you do — or the agency you keep on retainer does. This single fact decides the platform for a lot of businesses.
• Ceiling on customisation. WooCommerce and custom builds have essentially none. Shopify's checkout and core behaviour are more constrained; you work within its model rather than around it.
• Complex logic. Bespoke trade pricing, unusual subscriptions, bundles with their own rules — these get awkward or expensive on Shopify, are workable on WooCommerce, and are exactly what a custom build exists for.
• Reliability under pressure. Shopify handles a Black Friday spike without you thinking about it. A WooCommerce store needs to be built and hosted properly to do the same, and a bad host will fall over at the worst moment.

The SEO question everyone asks

"Which is better for SEO, Shopify or WooCommerce?" — it comes up in every one of these conversations, so here's the straight answer. WooCommerce gives you more control over the technical foundations that influence rankings, because you own the entire stack: URL structure, templates, how content is served, server response time. Shopify imposes a few structural constraints — a fixed URL pattern for products and collections is the classic one — that you can't remove, only work around.

But control is not the same as results. Shopify shops rank at the top of competitive UK search results every day. In our experience the platform is almost never the thing holding a store back. What holds stores back is thin category pages with no words on them, duplicate manufacturer product copy, and a checkout-heavy site that's slow on a phone. Those are content and structure problems, and they exist on every platform. We've written specifically about how to fix them in our piece on structuring collection and product pages that rank, and the principles carry across to WooCommerce almost unchanged. Whichever platform you choose, the technical SEO groundwork — clean URLs, server-rendered content, correct canonicals, fast pages — is what actually earns the rankings.

So which should you choose?

Here's how we'd steer it, honestly and without a horse in the race.

Choose Shopify if you want to be selling quickly, nobody on your team wants to be a part-time sysadmin, and your requirements are fairly standard — a catalogue of physical products, normal variants, ordinary checkout. For most first-time and small-to-mid UK retailers, this is the sensible default. The monthly fee buys you the enormous luxury of never thinking about servers. Our Shopify e-commerce work is built around getting exactly this right.

Choose WooCommerce if you already run on WordPress, you want to avoid platform transaction fees as you scale, or you need more control over pricing, bundling or content than Shopify comfortably allows — and you're prepared to fund proper hosting and ongoing care and maintenance. It rewards the businesses that treat it as owned software, not a set-and-forget subscription.

Choose a custom build only when your business model genuinely can't be served by the first two — a real marketplace, bespoke subscription logic, deep integration with a custom back-office system. When that's the case, a considered custom development project is worth every penny. When it isn't, it's an expensive way to get something Shopify would have done better. The skill is telling those two situations apart, and a decent agency will talk you out of a custom build as readily as into one.

If you're weighing this up for a real shop and want a straight opinion rather than a sales pitch, tell us what you're selling and where you're heading — we'll tell you which of the three actually fits, even when the answer is the cheapest one.