Your ecommerce platform isn't a 'website choice' — it's the operating system for your entire commercial team. Get it right and your merchandisers, marketers and customer service team move twice as fast. Get it wrong and every campaign, integration and stock movement takes an extra week. We've built and migrated stores on every major platform. Here's how they compare in 2026 for UK and EU retailers turning over £500k to £50m a year.
Shopify Plus wins on speed, total cost of ownership and conversion for the vast majority of UK DTC brands turning over £2m–£30m. Choose BigCommerce if B2B is more than 40% of your revenue. Choose Centra if you're a fashion brand selling internationally. Choose Magento only if a custom-built case forces it.
Both can rank. Shopify has better defaults — clean URLs, fast hosting, good Core Web Vitals — out of the box. WooCommerce gives you more granular control but you have to do the work. In our experience, a well-built Shopify store outranks a poorly-built WooCommerce store every time, and a well-built WooCommerce store outranks a poorly-built Shopify store.
A standard migration for a UK retailer with under 5,000 SKUs typically runs £8,000–£25,000 depending on theme work, app re-implementation and 301 redirect mapping. The bigger cost is execution risk — get the migration wrong and you lose 30–60% of organic traffic for months. We've run dozens of these; happy to scope yours.
Probably not. Headless makes sense if you have a real reason — extreme performance needs, a content-first brand with editorial-grade storytelling, or multi-channel commerce across web, app and in-store. Otherwise the added complexity costs more than it earns.
Shopify Basic at £29/month plus a free theme and Shopify Payments. You can be live in a weekend. The real cost shows up later — apps, paid ads, content. Budget at least £2,000–£5,000 a month for marketing once you launch, or the store will sit there.