What is Shopify and is it right for your store

A product catalogue, a cart, and a checkout that already works and already converts well. That checkout is Shopify's real strength. It has been tested against millions of orders, it supports Apple Pay and Google Pay, and Shop Pay lets returning customers buy in one tap.

Hosting and security you never manage. No updates to install, no plugin that breaks the site at 2am.

An admin you can learn in an afternoon. Adding a product, changing a price, refunding an order, reading which product sells. Staff can be trained on it quickly.

An app store for the extras. Reviews, email, subscriptions, loyalty, accounting links. Some are free, most charge monthly, and this is where the real cost of Shopify hides.

The core plans run from about 25 pounds a month on the Basic tier up to 289 pounds on Advanced, with a mid plan around 65 pounds that most growing shops land on. Pay yearly and it drops.

Then there is the transaction cut. If you use Shopify Payments you pay card fees only, around 1.5% plus 25p for a standard UK card on the mid plan. If you use an outside gateway like PayPal as your main processor, Shopify adds its own extra fee on top, from 2% down to 0.6% depending on plan. That extra fee is the nudge to use Shopify Payments, and for most UK and Irish shops that is fine.

Then the apps. A serious store often runs five to ten paid apps. Reviews at 15 dollars, an email tool at 30, a subscription app at 40, and suddenly you have an extra 100 to 200 pounds a month on top of the plan. This is the line item people forget when they compare Shopify to "free" options.

You are launching fast and you want to run it yourself. If getting live this month matters more than pixel-perfect design, Shopify wins.

You have a straightforward catalogue. Products, variants, collections, a normal checkout. Shopify was built for exactly this and it does it very well.

You want reliability you never think about. Black Friday traffic, a viral post, a big email send. Shopify absorbs the spike so you do not have to.

You do not have a developer and do not want one. The whole point is that you can run the shop without technical help for a long time.

You want the store to look and feel like nothing else. Themes get you 80% of the way, and the last 20% either costs real developer money or stays slightly generic. If your brand is the product, that gap matters.

Your logic is unusual. Complex bundles, region-specific pricing rules, a booking flow bolted onto products, a multi-step configurator. You can force Shopify to do it with apps, but you end up paying monthly for something a custom build would own outright.

The app stack gets heavy and slow. Every app adds scripts. Ten apps can drag your page speed down, and slow pages cost sales, which is the thing the whole store exists to avoid.

You want to own the whole thing. On Shopify you rent the platform. That is the deal and it is a fair one, but some businesses would rather own their site outright and not answer to a monthly platform fee that grows with them.

Here is the honest split. If you want a proven checkout, fast setup, and a shop you run yourself, Shopify is a strong default and we will happily set it up properly. If you want a store that matches your brand exactly, loads fast without a stack of paid apps, and does something a theme cannot, a custom build pays for itself.

We build both. We build online stores that sell on Shopify and as custom sites, and we tell you which one fits before you commit, not after. Sites live in 3 days, fixed price, with an editable panel included so you are not stuck waiting on us for every text change.

If you already have a Shopify store that feels slow or is not converting, send it for a free store audit. Within 48 hours you get a short human report on what is dragging it down and what your competitors do better. No pitch.

Shopify is the right answer more often than not. It is not the right answer always, and anyone who tells you it is has one thing to sell.