You’ve decided to sell online. Good. Now: Shopify, WooCommerce, or “I’ll just build something custom”? The headline prices for these three options range from “free” to “£259/month” — but the headline is rarely the actual cost. What you really pay depends on your turnover, because two of the three take a percentage of every sale.
Here’s the maths for a UK small shop, with sources at the bottom and assumptions spelled out so you can plug in your own numbers.
The short answer
If you’re hiring someone to build a small UK shop and host it for the first year, costs run from around £950 (low-end Shopify Expert + platform) to £4,500+ (high-end WooCommerce developer). Our managed shop is £2,340 in Year 1 — middle of the range, and the only one with a flat ongoing cost from Year 2 onwards.
Doing it yourself is genuinely cheaper if you’ve got the time and the technical confidence — Shopify DIY runs about £228 in Year 1, WooCommerce DIY £368–£588. We cover that route below, but most of this post is aimed at owners who’d rather pay someone to do it properly than spend their evenings on plugin updates.
The four options
1. Shopify Basic. The hosted-platform default. £19/month billed yearly, plus 2% + 25p on every UK card sale via Shopify Payments. You don’t run a server, you don’t manage updates, you don’t host anything — Shopify does all of it. You also can’t really leave: your products, customer list, and theme live on Shopify’s platform.
2. WooCommerce DIY. The “free” option, which is free in the same sense that a self-build house is free. WooCommerce is a free WordPress plugin. You pay for: WordPress hosting (around £25–£50/month if managed, less if you self-manage), a paid theme (around £80–£300 one-off), and your own time for setup and ongoing maintenance. Card fees are whatever your processor charges (we’ll use Stripe at 1.5% + 20p UK domestic).
3. Managed WooCommerce build. A custom shop built on WooCommerce, hosted on professional cloud servers that we (or another agency) look after for you. You pay a one-off build fee plus a monthly. We charge £1,800 one-off plus £45/month Self-Managed Shop hosting, or £75/month Business Growth if you want us managing products and content. Card fees are whatever your card processor charges.
4. Squarespace Commerce / Wix. The all-in-one website-builder route. Roughly £20–£40/month plus card fees. A reasonable option for very small operations or hobby shops, but the platform constraints get tighter as you scale, and you don’t own the underlying code. We’ll come back to this briefly at the end.
What does it actually cost to build the shop?
The recurring fees in the next section are only half the picture. Before any of that, you have to get the shop set up — products listed, payments tested, theme configured, domain pointed at the right place. Here’s what each option realistically costs to build, and what you get for the money.
Shopify Basic — free to set up, but rarely free in practice. Shopify’s setup process is genuinely straightforward: you sign up, pick a design (Shopify’s free themes are fine; premium themes run £150–£350 one-off), upload your products, and you’re live the same day if your assets are ready. If you’re happy doing your own product photography, writing your own descriptions, and setting up your shipping costs and tax rules, the build cost is £0 — just your time, realistically 10–30 hours for a 20-product shop. If you’d rather hand it to a Shopify Expert, UK rates typically run £25/hr (junior) to £120/hr (senior) for freelancers, with agencies at £90–£150/hr. Project pricing for a basic launch usually lands at £500–£3,000, climbing to £1,000–£5,000+ if you want any custom design work. Shopify gives you: hosting, the shop engine, the checkout, the back-office where you manage products, and a way to take payments. You provide: products, photos, words, brand assets, decisions about which paid apps to add.
WooCommerce DIY — free plugin, real-money build. The WooCommerce plugin itself is free, but a working WooCommerce shop needs WordPress installed and set up, a design, the WooCommerce setup wizard run, the bits that connect Stripe and PayPal so people can pay you, extras for shipping costs and tax rules, security configured properly, and someone who knows what to do when a software update breaks the cart at the worst possible moment. If you’re doing it yourself, expect 20–60 hours for a first-time setup. If you’re hiring a WordPress developer, mid-level UK freelancers cluster around £40–£80/hr; senior WooCommerce specialists charge £80–£150+/hr. Project pricing for a small-shop WooCommerce build typically runs £800–£4,000, with custom features (subscriptions, complex shipping rules, international currencies, connecting to other systems) pushing higher. WooCommerce gives you: a powerful shop engine and almost endless room to add features. You provide: hosting, design, configuration decisions, ongoing maintenance, and the labour to wire it all together — and you keep providing those forever.
Squarespace / Wix — free to set up, but you pay for it in flexibility. The website-builder pitch: drag, drop, you’re live. For a true beginner with a tiny catalogue this is genuinely the fastest path. Build cost is £0 plus your time (typically 5–15 hours). If you outgrow the visual editor, there’s no escape — you can’t take the design with you when you move. Worth it for hobby shops; not worth it once the shop is the main game.
Our managed shop — £1,800 one-off, and we do everything. The £1,800 covers the whole build: design, custom theme, up to 50 products entered for you, payments connected (Stripe by default), shipping rules set up, tax handling, security configured properly, fast hosting ready to go, the cookie consent banner the law requires, basic Google SEO, and visitor tracking from day one. We do the work; you send us your products list and brand assets. If you bring more than 50 products or want a bespoke checkout, we quote separately. The build is yours — every product, every customer record, every line of code — so if you ever leave us, you take all of it with you in plain files anyone can pick up.
The pattern: “free to set up” is real for Shopify and Squarespace if you genuinely have the time and the disposition. For WooCommerce DIY, “free” only applies if you’re already a WordPress developer; otherwise the labour cost is the cost. Our build fee buys you time — yours, not ours — plus a setup that doesn’t lock you to a platform.
Year 1 + ongoing: hiring help to build a shop
Most readers of this post aren’t planning to DIY. So here’s the comparison that matters: what does it actually cost to get a shop built, hosted for the first year, and kept running afterwards? Build figures are from current UK freelancer rates; platform/hosting figures are the public prices of the major options.
| Option | Year 1 build + hosting | Year 2+ ongoing |
|---|---|---|
| Shopify Expert build | £728–£3,228 | £228 platform + £30–£100/mo apps + per-sale fees |
| WooCommerce developer build | £1,088–£4,288 | £288 hosting + £30–£60/mo maintenance budget |
| Our managed shop — Self-Managed Shop | £2,340 | £540 — flat, fully managed |
| Our managed shop — Business Growth | £2,700 | £900 — flat, includes content updates + monthly reports |
A few things that fall out of that:
- At the lower end, the three options are similar. A £728 Shopify Expert build, a £1,088 WooCommerce developer build, and our £2,340 are roughly comparable in Year 1. The difference is what’s actually in the price.
- At the higher end, we’re the cheapest properly-supported option. £3,228 for a high-end Shopify Expert build buys you a launch and then a Shopify subscription with the apps tax and per-sale fees still to come. £4,288 for a high-end WooCommerce developer buys you a launch and then ongoing maintenance bills you have to source separately. Our £2,340 buys you the launch and a year of managed hosting and support from the engineer who built it.
- Year 2+ is where the picture really separates. Our £540 (or £900) is flat, regardless of how the shop grows. Every other option keeps charging you — Shopify takes a percentage of every sale forever and the apps tax compounds; a WooCommerce build still needs hosting and maintenance somewhere.
- Our Business Growth tier (£75/mo) doesn’t really have an equivalent on the other options. “We update content for you and send a monthly performance report” is something you’d hire an agency for separately on top of your Shopify or WooCommerce bill.
DIY rates aside (Shopify £228 / WooCommerce £368–£588 if you do it all yourself) — we covered the build cost for those above. The rest of this post is for readers who’d rather hire than DIY.
What the Year 1 total doesn’t show
The table above is what it costs to get to launch. It doesn’t capture the four things that bite you afterwards — and three of them get more painful as the shop grows.
1. The “apps tax” on Shopify. Shopify Basic comes with a deliberately limited feature set — they make their margin by selling you the missing pieces through the App Store. Email marketing (Klaviyo from around £15/mo on small lists), customer reviews on products (Judge.me from around £12/mo, Yotpo from around £29/mo), the “you forgot something in your basket” emails, advanced reporting, international currencies, returns management — these are mostly paid apps. A typical Shopify shop running properly spends £30–£100/month on apps. WooCommerce equivalents are mostly free or one-off-priced. Our managed build includes the common ones (newsletter signup, customer reviews, abandoned-basket emails, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, the basics of getting found on Google) at no extra. That’s another £360–£1,200/year on top of the Shopify Year 1 total once the shop is running properly.
2. The per-sale fee on Shopify. The Year 1 hosting figure of £228 is just the platform subscription. Shopify also takes a per-sale fee on every order, on top of the standard card processing every shop pays. The baseline is: Stripe UK charges 1.5% + 20p on domestic cards (3.25% + 20p international), and a WooCommerce or our build uses Stripe directly with no markup. Shopify Payments charges 2% + 25p UK domestic — a 0.5%+ markup over Stripe on every sale. And if you bring your own card processor instead of using Shopify Payments, Shopify adds a 2% gateway penalty on top, taking the effective rate to 3.5% + 20p per sale (you’d basically never do this). At £20k turnover the Shopify markup gap is around £400/yr; at £50k it’s £1,000/yr; at £100k it’s £2,000/yr. Our hosting is flat. Once the shop is doing real revenue, the £228 + Shopify markup line ends up well above our £540.
3. Ongoing maintenance after the developer hands over. A WooCommerce developer build is a launch, not a service. Once they’ve handed it over, every WordPress update, every plugin patch, and every “the cart’s broken” issue is your problem — or another invoice. Either you do the maintenance yourself (2–6 hours/month, plus the actual technical confidence to do it) or you keep calling the developer back at £40–£100/hr for ad-hoc fixes. A reasonable industry budget is £30–£60/month for ongoing maintenance on a developer-built WooCommerce shop, on top of the £288/yr hosting. With our managed shop the maintenance is in the £540 hosting price.
4. The cost of moving when you outgrow the platform. Most growing shops eventually leave Shopify or Squarespace because the per-sale fees compound, the platform can’t do something specific you need, or the pricing changes underneath them. Shopify increased subscription prices around a third across plans in 2023 — the kind of move you have no recourse on. Moving off means exporting your products into Shopify’s own spreadsheet format (which needs cleanup), redoing all the web addresses of your product pages (or losing the search-ranking you’ve built), rebuilding the design on the new platform, and shifting customer accounts across. Typical cost: £2,000–£8,000 in agency fees plus weeks of disruption. With a build you own, there’s nothing to move.
Add those four to the Year 2+ figures in the table and the picture changes meaningfully. A £728 Shopify Expert build looks cheap on Year 1, but by the time the shop is doing real revenue you’re paying £228 platform + £400–£2,000/yr per-sale fees + £30–£100/mo in apps — plus a migration bill waiting if you ever leave. A £1,088 WooCommerce developer build looks cheap too, until the maintenance bills start arriving. Our £540/yr is flat. Sell £20k or £200k, you pay the same.
When each option makes sense
Managed WooCommerce (us) — for any shop where the owner takes the business seriously and wants to keep it. This is what we offer: £1,800 build, £45/month hosting where you manage products, or £75/month where we manage content and send a monthly performance one-pager. From Year 2 you’re paying £540 or £900/year flat, regardless of turnover. The case for paying us rather than self-hosting Shopify isn’t that we’re cheaper at every turnover — it’s that we’re cheaper at any turnover where you also count apps, time, and lock-in risk. You also get a shop you actually own, code you can take elsewhere, and a person at the other end of the phone. For shops £30k+ turnover or shops where the owner doesn’t want to spend their evenings on WooCommerce admin, this is the option that pays for itself within Year 1.
Shopify Basic — for shops under £20k turnover testing whether the business is even a business. Genuinely useful when you’re at “I’d like to see if anyone buys this” stage and don’t want to spend money before there’s revenue. The £19/month subscription is small, the setup is fast, and Shopify takes the technical worry off your plate. The trade-offs: the apps tax kicks in as you grow, the per-sale fee compounds, and migrating off later is a real cost. Treat Shopify Basic as a starting point, not a destination — the day your shop is consistently turning over £30k+ is the day you should be running the maths on moving.
WooCommerce DIY — for the rare owner who is genuinely a WordPress developer. Cheapest ongoing cost if you’re willing to maintain WordPress, WooCommerce, plugins, security, and backups yourself. “Genuinely technical” here means you’ve shipped WordPress sites before, you know what to do when an update breaks the cart, and you don’t mind giving up evenings to plugin debugging. If that’s not you, this is the option that ends in tears at 11pm on a Friday — and the labour cost when you eventually call someone to fix it usually wipes out the savings.
Squarespace Commerce / Wix — for shops under £15k turnover where the shop is a side-line to a service business. The website-builder route. Reasonable if you want one platform for both your service site and a small product catalogue. Less reasonable if the shop is the main game — you don’t own the code, you can’t move easily, and the per-sale maths is roughly Shopify-level without Shopify’s depth.
What you’re actually paying us for
The £540/year (Self-Managed Shop) or £900/year (Business Growth) is a higher line item than Shopify Basic’s £228/year subscription. Here’s what it buys you that Shopify Basic doesn’t, in concrete terms:
- No per-sale tax, ever. Shopify takes 2% on every sale and it never stops. At £100k turnover that’s roughly £2,000/yr just in their card-processing markup — every year, growing as you grow. Our hosting is flat. Sell £20k or £200k, you pay the same.
- The “apps tax” already included. The newsletter signup, the customer reviews on product pages, the “you forgot something in your basket” emails, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, the basics of getting found on Google, the cookie consent banner the law requires, fast worldwide page delivery — all in the build. On Shopify these are mostly paid apps that add £30–£100/mo on top of the subscription.
- A shop you actually own. Every product, every customer, every line of code — yours. If we ever stop being a fit, we hand the lot over in plain files anyone can pick up. Try moving 200 products off Shopify the next time their pricing changes.
- A direct line to the person who built it. Same engineer picks up when you call. No ticket queue, no copy-paste responses, no time-zone roulette.
- Faster pages, better Google rankings. Our shop is built from scratch rather than assembled from a Shopify template — pages load noticeably quicker, which Google rewards with higher search rankings, which generally means more visitors who actually buy.
- An optional fully-managed tier. £75/mo Business Growth means we handle the product updates and send a monthly one-pager — what’s selling, how people are finding you, and whether anything’s slipping at checkout. That’s a level of service Shopify simply doesn’t offer; you’d pay an agency separately for it on top of your Shopify bill.
The Online Store option is on /website-build-design/, and the hosting tiers are on /managed-hosting/. Or tell us about your shop and we’ll come back with a tailored number.
The bottom line
If you have time and you’re testing whether the business is a business, DIY Shopify at £228 in Year 1 is fine. Don’t overthink it; ship something, see if it sells, come back when it does.
If you’re hiring help — a Shopify Expert, a WooCommerce developer, anyone — you’re already in our price bracket (£2,340 Year 1). At that point the question isn’t “what’s cheapest” but “what do I actually get for the money?” On a Shopify Expert build you get a launch and then a Shopify subscription, growing app costs, and a migration bill waiting. On a WooCommerce developer build you get a launch and then ongoing maintenance you have to source and pay for separately. On our managed shop you get the launch, the hosting, the apps-tax stuff baked in, ongoing support from the person who built it, and a shop you actually own.
The most expensive thing on a hosted platform isn’t the subscription — it’s the lock-in. The day you want to leave and find out what it costs. We’d rather sell you a shop you can keep.
Sources
Prices verified April 2026. These change — if a number is materially different by the time you read this, please tell us and we’ll update.
- Shopify UK pricing — Basic £19/mo billed yearly; Grow £49/mo; Advanced £259/mo. Card rates 2% + 25p / 1.7% + 25p / 1.5% + 25p UK online. Third-party gateway fees 2% / 1% / 0.6%. Source: shopify.com/uk/pricing.
- Shopify 2023 price increase — Subscription tiers raised by approximately one third across plans. Reported in the trade press at the time and visible in Shopify’s own pricing-change announcements; archived discussion on the Shopify community forum and reporting on retail-trade outlets like Modern Retail.
- Stripe UK card processing — 1.5% + 20p UK domestic; 2.5% + 20p EEA; 3.25% + 20p international (plus 2% currency conversion if applicable). No monthly fee. Source: stripe.com/gb/pricing.
- WP Engine Startup managed WordPress hosting — from $30/mo billed annually (roughly £24/mo at the $1.25 = £1 reference rate used here). Source: wpengine.com/plans.
- Kinsta Single 40GB managed WordPress hosting — $50/mo monthly billing or $42/mo annual (roughly £40 / £33). Source: kinsta.com/plans.
- WooCommerce plugin — free. Source: woocommerce.com.
- Shopify Expert / freelancer rates (UK) — Junior £25/hr to senior £120/hr; agencies £90–£150/hr; basic store launch £500–£3,000; theme customisation £1,000–£5,000. Source: Innovative Shopify — Cost to Hire Shopify Developers UK 2025, Storetasker — Shopify Developer Rates 2025.
- WooCommerce / WordPress developer rates (UK) — Mid-level UK freelancers cluster around £40–£80/hr; senior WooCommerce specialists £80–£150+/hr; small-shop project pricing £800–£4,000+. Source: Codeable — WordPress Developer Salary Data 2025, Fiverr — Cost to Hire a WordPress Developer 2025, Arc.dev — WordPress Developer Hourly Rate.
- Our Online Store pricing — £1,800 one-off + £45/mo or £75/mo. Source: /website-build-design/, /managed-hosting/.
Methodology: Year 1 totals in the table are build cost plus 12 months of hosting/platform fees. They exclude card processing fees (which are roughly comparable on every option) and exclude any paid apps you might add. Hosting figures use each platform’s annual-billing price. WooCommerce hosting uses WP Engine Startup at $30/mo billed annually as the benchmark managed WordPress option, converted at $1.25 = £1. The “apps tax” range (£30–£100/mo) and time-cost ranges are typical-shop estimates rather than measured averages — your numbers will vary with how feature-rich the shop needs to be and how much you DIY. Run your own numbers for your specific situation — happy to share the spreadsheet behind these figures on request.