E-commerce Software: How to Choose the Right Platform and Tools

Direct answer: For most UK sellers, the choice comes down to Shopify (fastest to launch, highest ongoing platform cost), WooCommerce (lowest platform cost, most setup responsibility, self-hosted on WordPress), or BigCommerce (Shopify-like plans with no forced app-store lock-in for advanced features). Squarespace and Wix suit small, design-led stores with modest catalogues rather than businesses planning to scale past a few hundred SKUs. Which one is right depends less on brand reputation and more on four numbers: your card-processing rate, your catalogue size, your order volume, and how much developer time you’re willing to pay for.

What “e-commerce software” actually covers

E-commerce isn’t one purchase, it’s a stack. A working online store needs a platform to hold products and process checkout, a payment processor to move money, and usually a handful of supporting tools bolted around it: email marketing to bring customers back, reviews to build trust on the product page, shipping software to get orders out the door without manual label printing, and, once the catalogue or order volume grows, inventory or multichannel software to stop stock counts drifting out of sync across channels.

Get the platform choice wrong and you’re either migrating a live store later (expensive, disruptive, genuinely painful for SEO) or paying for enterprise capacity you don’t need. Get it right and the supporting tools slot in with minimal friction because the platforms named below all have mature app ecosystems.

Who needs this

This category matters if you sell physical or digital products directly to customers and need a checkout, not just a marketing website. That includes:

• Small brands and solo sellers launching a first online store
• Retailers moving from a marketplace-only presence (Amazon, eBay, Etsy) to their own site
• Agencies building and maintaining stores for multiple clients
• Established WooCommerce or Magento merchants evaluating whether to migrate
• Wholesale/B2B sellers who need catalogue and pricing logic beyond a simple storefront

It doesn’t matter much if you’re purely a services business, a content publisher monetising through ads or affiliate links, or a marketplace-only seller with no plans to run an owned storefront, in those cases hosting or marketing software is the more relevant category.

Category types

Dedicated e-commerce platforms, built around the store first, everything else second.

• Shopify, hosted, SaaS, largest app ecosystem
• BigCommerce, hosted, SaaS, more native functionality before you need paid apps
• WooCommerce, free, open-source plugin on top of self-hosted WordPress

Website builders with commerce added, built around the website first, checkout bolted on.

• Squarespace, design-first, commerce available from its entry paid plan upward
• Wix, design-first, commerce via dedicated Business/eCommerce plans

Supporting tools, the layer around the platform that most stores eventually need.

• Email/SMS marketing: Klaviyo, Omnisend
• Reviews and social proof: Judge.me, Yotpo, Trustpilot Business
• Shipping and fulfilment: ShipStation, Royal Mail Click & Drop
• Inventory and multichannel: Linnworks, Cin7
• Dropshipping/product sourcing: Spocket, DSers
• Conversion optimisation: Contentsquare (formerly Hotjar. See note below), VWO

Key attributes that actually matter

Store features, Product variants, digital products, subscriptions, B2B/wholesale catalogues, POS integration. Shopify and BigCommerce cover all of this natively at mid-tier plans; WooCommerce covers it through free or paid plugins; Squarespace and Wix are weaker on wholesale/B2B logic.

Payments, Two separate costs: the platform’s own transaction fee (if any) and the card-processing rate. This is the single most commonly misunderstood cost in e-commerce software. See the pricing section below.

Inventory, Native multi-location stock tracking (Shopify, BigCommerce), versus needing a third-party tool once you sell across more than one channel (WooCommerce, Squarespace, Wix generally need this sooner).

Shipping, Built-in carrier rate calculation vs relying on flat rates or a separate shipping app. Real-time third-party rates are gated to higher-tier plans on Shopify (Advanced and above) and are usage-based add-ons elsewhere.

Automation, Abandoned cart recovery, back-in-stock alerts, automated discounting. Native on Shopify/BigCommerce; usually plugin-dependent on WooCommerce; more limited on Squarespace/Wix.

Marketing, Built-in SEO controls, blog, discount codes, and how easily the platform connects to dedicated email/SMS tools like Klaviyo or Omnisend.

Scalability, What happens as order volume grows: does the plan force an upgrade (BigCommerce’s GMV thresholds), does the transaction fee shrink at higher tiers (Shopify), or is the ceiling really about your hosting and your own developer capacity (WooCommerce)?

Pricing, Not just the monthly subscription. Total cost of ownership includes apps/extensions, payment processing, hosting (for WooCommerce), and any developer time to customise the theme or checkout.

Top products

Shopify, UK pricing (official, annual billing): Basic £19/month, Grow £49/month, Advanced £259/month, Plus from £1,800/month (monthly billing: £25, £65, £344). UK online card rates step down by plan: 2% + 25p (Basic), 1.7% + 25p (Grow), 1.5% + 25p (Advanced). Using a payment provider other than Shopify Payments adds a further 2%/1%/0.6%/0.2% by plan on top of that processor’s own fee, why almost nobody on Shopify uses a third-party processor. Staff accounts are capped on lower plans (none extra on Basic, up to 5 on Grow, up to 15 on Advanced) and unlimited on Plus. Source: shopify.com/uk/pricing.

BigCommerce, Core $29/month, Growth $79/month, Scale $299/month (annual billing; USD, prices exclude VAT per BigCommerce’s own page, UK buyers should treat these as estimates pending checkout-time conversion). Unlike Shopify, BigCommerce charges no extra platform fee on “embedded” payment providers (Stripe, PayPal, Adyen, Klarna), the fee applies only to “open” providers, at 2% (Core), 1% (Growth) or 0.6% (Scale) of GMV. BigCommerce also auto-upgrades a store to the next plan if it crosses an annual sales threshold (roughly $30K on Core, $100K on Growth), worth knowing before choosing a tier on price alone. Source: bigcommerce.com/pricing.

WooCommerce, The plugin itself is free and open-source, with “no monthly subscription” and no platform revenue share, by WooCommerce’s own description. Real costs are hosting (third-party estimates put typical WooCommerce hosting roughly $25–$350+ a month depending on traffic, not a WooCommerce-published figure, treat as a rough guide), your chosen payment gateway’s rate (WooPayments lists approximately 2.5–2.9% + 30¢ per transaction; other gateways vary), and premium extensions, typically $29–$299/year each. It’s the only platform here with no ceiling imposed by the platform itself, the ceiling is your hosting and development budget. Source: woocommerce.com/pricing.

Squarespace, Four plans, commonly cited as Basic $19/month, Core $29/month, Plus $49/month and Advanced $99/month on annual billing (USD; GBP figures were not retrievable from Squarespace’s own pricing page during research. Treat as indicative and verify at checkout). Confirmed directly from Squarespace: the entry-level plan carries a 2% online-store transaction fee on top of payment processing, while every plan above it charges 0%, a meaningful difference at real sales volume on the cheapest tier. Sources: squarespace.com/pricing (fee structure, confirmed); websitebuilderexpert.com/website-builders/squarespace-pricing (price points, secondary source).

Wix, Official plans: Free ($0), Light ($17.77/month), Core ($29.77/month), Business ($39.77/month, Wix’s recommended tier), Business Elite ($159.77/month), USD on the page fetched, noted as varying by location. Wix charges no separate platform transaction fee on top of Wix Payments; you pay only its processing rate (roughly 2.9% + $0.30 in the US, lower published rates for EU cards, and an unspecified UK-specific structure). Sources: wix.com/pricing; support.wix.com/en/article/wix-payments-service-fees.

Omnisend (email/SMS marketing), Free plan: 250 contacts, 500 emails/month. Standard: from $11.20/month, 500 contacts, 6,000 emails/month. Pro: from $41.30/month, 2,500 contacts, unlimited emails, plus SMS from roughly $0.007/message. Custom pricing above 150,000 contacts. Pricing scales primarily with contact list size, not send volume, on the paid tiers. Source: omnisend.com/pricing.

Judge.me (reviews), Genuinely simple: Free (unlimited reviews, photo/video reviews, Google Rich Snippets) or Awesome at a flat $15/month (adds AI review summaries/responses, social and Google Shopping integration, referral programs). Judge.me states explicitly that $15/month is the maximum you’ll ever pay, regardless of store size, a rare flat-fee model in a category usually priced by review volume. Source: judge.me/pricing.

ShipStation (shipping), UK pricing, confirmed on ShipStation’s own help centre: Starter £10/month, Standard £25/month, Premium £270/month, with the plans differentiated mainly by user seats (3–15) and access to automation, inventory features and API access rather than a hard shipment cap. Source: help.shipstation.com.

Comparisons, coming soon

• Shopify vs BigCommerce. Plan-for-plan pricing and transaction-fee comparison
• Shopify vs WooCommerce, hosted convenience vs self-hosted control and total cost of ownership
• BigCommerce vs WooCommerce, for merchants who specifically want to avoid Shopify’s app-tax model
• Squarespace vs Wix, for design-led stores under roughly 100 SKUs

Use cases

A solo seller launching their first store, under 50 products, low order volume. Wix or Squarespace’s entry commerce tier is usually enough, the design tools are strong and the 2% Squarespace fee or Wix processing rate is immaterial at low volume. Moving to Shopify or BigCommerce this early usually just adds cost without adding capability you’ll use yet.

A growing DTC brand doing consistent five-figure monthly revenue. Shopify Grow or BigCommerce Growth is the realistic starting point, both give you native abandoned-cart recovery, discount automation, and multi-location inventory, and both have deep app ecosystems for the email, reviews and shipping tools above. Watch BigCommerce’s GMV threshold if you’re near it.

An agency building and maintaining stores for multiple clients with varying budgets. WooCommerce is common here because there’s no per-store platform subscription, cost is hosting plus the agency’s own build time, which is easier to price into a client contract than a recurring per-plan fee that scales with the client’s sales.

A merchant selling primarily wholesale/B2B alongside a retail storefront. Shopify Plus or BigCommerce’s higher tiers are built for this (custom pricing catalogues, unlimited B2B logic on Shopify Plus); WooCommerce can do it via plugins but with more implementation work; Squarespace and Wix are not built for this use case at all.

Pricing context

The subscription price on a platform’s homepage is rarely the whole story. Three costs compound:

1. The plan fee itself, monthly or annual, and annual billing consistently runs 20–35% cheaper than paying month to month across every platform checked here.
2. Payment processing, this is usually the largest ongoing cost once you have real sales volume, and it varies not just by platform but by which payment method the platform treats as “native” (Shopify Payments, BigCommerce’s embedded providers, Wix Payments) versus “third-party” (which often carries an extra platform surcharge, as on Shopify and BigCommerce’s open-provider tier).
3. Apps and extensions, Shopify and BigCommerce both rely on app marketplaces for functionality that isn’t native (advanced shipping rules, subscriptions, loyalty programs), and those apps typically carry their own monthly fee on top of the platform plan.

The practical takeaway: compare platforms on total cost at your actual order volume and average order value, not on the headline monthly price. A platform charging £49/month with a 1.7% card rate can be cheaper or more expensive than one charging £29/month with a 2.9% rate depending entirely on how much you’re processing.

How to choose

Work through these in order:

1. Estimate your monthly card-processing volume. At low volume, platform transaction-fee percentages barely matter. At high volume, a 0.5-percentage-point difference in card rate can outweigh the entire subscription cost.
2. Count your current and near-term SKU count and order volume. This rules platforms in or out faster than any feature comparison, Squarespace and Wix become harder to justify past a few hundred SKUs or meaningful B2B/wholesale needs.
3. Decide how much you want to manage yourself. WooCommerce trades a lower platform bill for hosting, security updates, and plugin maintenance being your responsibility (or your developer’s). Shopify and BigCommerce trade a higher bill for that being handled for you.
4. Check whether you’ll hit a plan’s built-in ceiling. BigCommerce’s GMV thresholds and Shopify’s staff-account and location limits are structural, not cosmetic, if you’re close to a limit now, price the tier above it, not the one you think you need today.
5. Map your supporting-tool budget before you commit to a platform. Email, reviews, and shipping tools are mostly platform-agnostic in their own pricing, but confirm each has a native or well-supported integration with the platform you’re choosing before assuming it will “just work.”

Common mistakes

• Comparing headline subscription prices without factoring in payment processing. This is the single biggest reason merchants think they’ve picked the “cheap” platform and then find their real monthly cost is higher than the alternative.
• Under-costing WooCommerce. “Free” refers to the plugin only, hosting, a theme, essential extensions, and someone’s time to maintain it all add up, and are easy to underestimate against a Shopify or BigCommerce all-in monthly fee.
• Choosing a platform based on app-store size alone. A large app ecosystem is only valuable if the apps you actually need exist, are well-reviewed, and don’t each add £20–£50/month you didn’t budget for.
• Ignoring plan-tier limits until you hit them. Discovering mid-launch that your plan caps staff accounts, locations, or annual GMV creates an unplanned, urgent upgrade at the worst possible time.
• Assuming USD pricing pages reflect what you’ll actually pay in GBP. BigCommerce, Squarespace and parts of Wix’s published pricing are dollar-denominated; your actual checkout price and ongoing card charges may differ once currency conversion and UK-specific processing rates apply. Shopify is the exception here, with dedicated UK GBP pricing and rates.

Related categories

• Marketing & SEO, email/SMS platforms, conversion optimisation and SEO tools that sit on top of any e-commerce platform
• Hosting, relevant specifically to WooCommerce merchants, who choose their own hosting independent of the store software
• Security, payment security, fraud prevention and backup considerations that apply across every platform in this category

Sources

• Shopify UK Pricing
• Shopify Pricing (global/US)
• BigCommerce Pricing and Plan Information
• BigCommerce UK Pricing
• WooCommerce Pricing
• Squarespace Pricing
• Squarespace Pricing Breakdown, Website Builder Expert (secondary source; specific dollar figures not independently confirmed on Squarespace’s own page at time of research)
• Wix Pricing
• Wix Payments: Service Fees, Wix Help Center
• Omnisend Pricing
• Judge.me Pricing
• ShipStation Subscription Plans, Help Center
• Linnworks Pricing
• Spocket Pricing
• Klaviyo: How Klaviyo billing works, Help Center
• Contentsquare acquires Hotjar, press release
• Hotjar is now part of Contentsquare, Plans and Pricing