Best Shopify Alternatives
for UK Sellers

SellKit is an all-in-one online store builder designed to undercut Shopify on cost without cutting corners on capability. The headline number — £8.49/month (billed at €9.99, converted at current rates) — is the real number. There is no separate SEO app, no email marketing add-on, no attribution tool sold separately. Everything is in the box.

For UK sellers, this matters practically. SellKit includes VAT-compliant invoice generation, Stripe UK integration with no additional transaction fee, Royal Mail Click and Drop compatibility, and Consumer Contracts Regulations-ready order confirmation emails. These are things Shopify requires paid apps or custom development to deliver. On SellKit, they're defaults.

The platform also includes seven free training courses — covering paid ads, Instagram, dropshipping, copywriting, and conversion funnels — accessible directly from your dashboard. No other platform in this list includes anything like it. For first-time sellers building their first UK store, this is a material advantage.

WooCommerce is the world's most-used ecommerce platform — and with good reason. Built on WordPress, it gives technically confident sellers complete control over every aspect of their store. The plugin itself is open-source and free. What isn't free is everything you need to make it run reliably: managed WordPress hosting (SiteGround, Kinsta, and WP Engine are the most popular UK choices), a premium theme, Yoast or Rank Math for SEO, a backup plugin, and security monitoring.

For UK compliance, you'll want a dedicated WooCommerce plugin for VAT invoicing (WooCommerce EU/UK VAT Compliance by WP Overnight is the standard choice, from £69/year). Consumer Contracts Regulations notices require a plugin or custom code. These are solvable problems — but they require time and some technical competence to solve correctly.

The honest all-in monthly cost for a properly maintained WooCommerce store in the UK runs from around £25 at the bare minimum to £50+ once you account for managed hosting, premium plugins, and the occasional developer fix. That's still cheaper than a realistic Shopify setup — but it's not free, and it requires ongoing maintenance. If you're comfortable with WordPress and want maximum flexibility, WooCommerce is excellent. If you'd rather not think about server updates, it isn't.

Wix has improved its ecommerce offering substantially in recent years. The drag-and-drop editor is genuinely the easiest of any platform on this list — if you've never built a website before, you can have a presentable Wix store online in an afternoon without any technical knowledge. No hosting to configure, no plugins to install, no database to manage.

The Core plan (£17/month) removes Wix branding and enables online selling. The Business plan (£25/month) unlocks subscriptions, loyalty programmes, and advanced shipping. Both include no transaction fees, which is a genuine advantage over Shopify's Basic plan. Wix also has a good mobile editor — stores look decent on smartphones without additional effort.

Where Wix struggles is catalogue depth and serious ecommerce features. If you're selling more than a hundred products with variants, Wix's inventory management feels underpowered. B2B pricing, wholesale features, and complex shipping rules are limited or absent. It's the best platform for someone selling handmade jewellery or a modest range of physical products to a primarily UK audience. It's not the right choice for a growing product business.

Squarespace is the platform of choice for designers, photographers, artists, and brand-led businesses. Its templates are genuinely beautiful — among the best available on any hosted platform. The editing experience is clean and well-thought-out, and the result looks professional without requiring design skills. For a UK seller whose brand identity is the product, Squarespace is hard to beat on aesthetics.

The Basic Commerce plan (£17/month, billed annually in GBP) includes zero transaction fees, product pages, inventory, and checkout. The Advanced Commerce plan (£35/month) adds abandoned cart recovery, subscriptions, and advanced shipping. Note that the £17 price is annual — month-to-month rates are higher. Squarespace does not offer a free trial without a card, which some find off-putting.

The limitations are real. Squarespace's SEO control is less granular than WooCommerce or SellKit — you have limited access to technical SEO settings, structured data, and URL customisation. The blog is good but the broader content marketing toolkit is thin. And while the templates are beautiful, they're also templates — standing out from other Squarespace stores requires design work beyond what the editor allows.

Ecwid occupies a different niche to the other platforms on this list. Rather than replacing your existing website, it embeds a shop widget into whatever site you already have — a WordPress site, a Wix site, a Squarespace site, or even just a simple HTML page. If you have an existing web presence and simply need to add ecommerce capability without rebuilding from scratch, Ecwid is the cleanest solution.

The free plan is genuinely free — up to 5 products, a checkout, and basic inventory management, with no transaction fees beyond the payment gateway. For most UK sellers starting out with a small product range, this is a legitimate zero-cost way to begin selling online. The Venture plan (£17/month) scales to 100 products and adds a mobile shopping app. Business (£35/month) allows up to 2,500 products and adds abandoned cart emails and Google Shopping integration.

The trade-off is that Ecwid is not a complete store builder — it's a shop layer on top of something else. Your SEO strategy, content, and brand all live in the host platform, not in Ecwid. For sellers who want a single, integrated ecommerce platform, Ecwid is too fragmented. But for a UK sole trader who already has a WordPress portfolio and wants to add a few products without rebuilding everything, it's genuinely useful.