Shopify vs WooCommerce vs BigCommerce for a UK DTC Brand: VAT, GBP Pricing, and Real Transaction Costs

For a UK direct-to-consumer brand that wants to be selling within the week and does not have a developer on the team, Shopify is the right starting point — accept that you will pay more per transaction and more for apps as you grow. If you have someone comfortable with WordPress and want to keep long-term running costs as low as possible, WooCommerce gives you the greatest control for the least recurring spend. BigCommerce is the strongest option if you need built-in features without app bloat and your product catalogue is large enough to justify the higher monthly subscription — but its UK presence is thinner than the other two, and finding a local agency for support takes more effort.

What You Will Actually Pay Each Month in GBP

Shopify's UK pricing runs at three tiers: Basic at £25 per month, Grow (formerly Shopify) at £65 per month, and Advanced at £259 per month. All prices assume annual billing — monthly billing adds roughly 25 per cent. The Starter plan at £5 per month lets you sell through social media and messaging apps but does not give you a full online store.

WooCommerce itself is free. The costs come from everything around it. Hosting from a provider like SiteGround, Starter or GrowBig, runs £3 to £25 per month for a small store. A domain costs £10 to £15 per year. An SSL certificate is included with all decent modern hosts. A professional theme costs £40 to £80 as a one-off. The essential plugins — payment gateway, shipping calculator, backup — add £100 to £300 per year. A realistic first-year budget for a small WooCommerce store is £400 to £800, dropping to £250 to £500 in subsequent years.

BigCommerce prices in US dollars and converts at checkout. The Standard plan is approximately £24 per month, Plus is approximately £59 per month, and Pro is approximately £239 per month (all converted at current rates and billed annually). Enterprise pricing is custom. BigCommerce imposes annual revenue thresholds on each plan: Standard caps at around £38,000, Plus at around £118,000, and Pro at around £315,000. Cross the threshold and you are bumped to the next tier automatically.

The Transaction Fees That Actually Matter

This is where the platforms diverge sharply and where UK sellers get caught out.

Shopify charges card processing fees through Shopify Payments: 2 per cent plus 25p per transaction on Basic, 1.7 per cent plus 25p on Grow, and 1.5 per cent plus 25p on Advanced. If you use a third-party payment gateway instead of Shopify Payments, Shopify adds a surcharge on top: 2 per cent on Basic, 1 per cent on Grow, and 0.6 per cent on Advanced. This surcharge is in addition to whatever the gateway itself charges. For a store doing £10,000 per month on the Basic plan with Shopify Payments, card fees alone cost roughly £225 per month.

WooCommerce does not charge any platform transaction fees. You pay only what your payment processor charges. Stripe in the UK charges 1.5 per cent plus 20p for UK cards and 2.5 per cent plus 20p for European cards. PayPal charges 1.2 per cent plus a fixed fee for domestic transactions on its standard commercial rate. For that same £10,000 monthly store using Stripe, card fees come to roughly £170 — around £55 per month less than Shopify Basic.

BigCommerce charges zero platform transaction fees regardless of which payment provider you use. This is its clearest advantage. Payment processing through PayPal powered by Braintree starts at 1.2 per cent plus 30p on the Standard plan, dropping to lower rates on higher tiers. For the £10,000 per month store, processing fees come to roughly £150, making BigCommerce the cheapest on pure transaction costs.

VAT Handling: Where the Pain Actually Lives

All three platforms can display VAT-inclusive prices to UK customers, which is a legal requirement under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 and the Price Marking Order 2004 for B2C sales. The differences are in how much work falls on you.

Shopify handles UK VAT well out of the box. Prices can be set as VAT-inclusive for UK customers, and Shopify Tax provides threshold tracking and automated calculations. Shopify generates VAT invoices, though you will need an app like Sufio or Order Printer for invoices that meet the full HMRC specification. VAT registration is required once turnover exceeds £90,000 — Shopify does not file returns for you, so you still need to connect to an MTD-compatible tool like Xero or FreeAgent.

WooCommerce requires manual configuration. The built-in tax system lets you set rates by country and region, display VAT-inclusive prices, and apply different rates for digital and physical goods. It works, but you are responsible for keeping rates current. Plugins like WooCommerce Tax or TaxJar automate rate lookups. For Making Tax Digital compliance, you need a bridge — typically through your accounting software. If your business sells digital products to EU customers, you will need a plugin that handles the One Stop Shop rules.

BigCommerce supports VAT display pricing and can be configured for inclusive or exclusive pricing by customer group. Its tax configuration is solid but slightly less intuitive than Shopify's for UK-specific setups. BigCommerce integrates with Avalara for automated tax calculation, though the Avalara licence is an additional cost. For a UK-only DTC brand, the built-in tax tools are sufficient.

Built-in Features vs App and Plugin Costs

This is where the headline subscription price becomes misleading. Shopify's app store is enormous — over 8,000 apps — but a typical UK DTC store ends up paying for email marketing (£15 to £50 per month), reviews (£15 to £40 per month), loyalty programmes (£20 to £200 per month), advanced reporting (£10 to £50 per month), and subscription billing (£30 to £100 per month). A mid-range DTC brand on Shopify commonly spends £100 to £300 per month on apps alone, sometimes more. The app marketplace is a strength and a cost centre simultaneously.

WooCommerce's plugin marketplace is just as large but the pricing model is different. The bulk of plugins charge annual licence fees rather than monthly subscriptions, and a good number have free alternatives. The trade-off is that you are responsible for compatibility, updates, and security patching. A store running ten plugins needs someone checking for conflicts after every WordPress update. If you are not comfortable doing that yourself, a WordPress maintenance service costs £50 to £150 per month.

BigCommerce includes more features in the base subscription than either competitor. Built-in features cover faceted search, product filtering, customer groups, price lists, and abandoned cart recovery (from the Plus plan). For DTC brands, this means fewer apps to buy, fewer connection points to maintain, and a more predictable monthly cost. The trade-off is a smaller app marketplace — around 1,000 apps compared with Shopify's 8,000+ — which matters if you need a niche tool.

Speed, Performance, and UK Hosting

Shopify hosts everything for you. UK stores are served from CDN nodes globally, and page load times are typically under two seconds for a well-built theme. You cannot choose your hosting location, but the CDN infrastructure means UK customers get fast responses regardless.

WooCommerce performance depends entirely on your hosting choice. A £3 per month shared host will deliver poor performance under any meaningful traffic. A managed WordPress host like Starter from Starter or WP Engine's Starter plan at £20 to £30 per month delivers acceptable performance for stores with up to a few hundred daily visitors. Beyond that, you need a dedicated or cloud hosting plan. Performance is your problem, and fixing a slow WooCommerce store often means hiring a developer.

BigCommerce is fully hosted with a global CDN, similar to Shopify. Performance is consistently good and predictable. UK merchants do not need to think about server configuration, caching, or scaling.

Shipping, Returns, and UK Consumer Law

All three platforms need to comply with the Consumer Rights Act 2015 and the Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013, which give UK online buyers a 14-day cooling-off period for returns. None of the platforms handle this compliance for you — it is your responsibility to display the correct cancellation rights, provide a returns address, and process refunds within 14 days of receiving returned goods.

Shopify's shipping tools are the slickest of the three. Shopify Shipping offers discounted Royal Mail and DPD rates for UK merchants, and the built-in label printing works well for small volumes. For DTC brands shipping 50 to 500 orders per month, the shipping discounts can save £50 to £200 per month compared with standard Royal Mail rates. Third-party apps like ShipStation or Shippo add multi-carrier comparison if you outgrow the built-in tools.

WooCommerce shipping depends on plugins. The free WooCommerce Shipping plugin provides USPS labels but UK sellers need Royal Mail or DPD integrations from the plugin marketplace. Royal Mail Click & Drop integrates through third-party plugins costing £30 to £100 per year. The flexibility is there, but the setup time is longer and you are patching together pieces that Shopify bundles by default.

BigCommerce includes real-time carrier quotes from Royal Mail, DPD, and other UK carriers on all plans. The shipping setup is straightforward and does not require additional apps for basic UK domestic shipping. For international shipping, BigCommerce connects to ShipperHQ and other rate calculators without extra platform fees.

For returns management, Shopify requires an app (Loop, Returnly, or similar) costing £20 to £100 per month. WooCommerce has free return request plugins but they require configuration. BigCommerce includes basic return request handling in the platform. None of the three automate the full UK returns compliance workflow — you still need to track the 14-day window and issue refunds manually or through your accounting software.

Design, Themes, and Brand Control

DTC brands live and die on brand presentation, so theme quality matters.

Shopify offers over 100 themes, roughly a dozen of which are free. Premium themes cost £250 to £350 as a one-off purchase. The theme editor is drag-and-drop with no coding required, and the quality of Shopify themes is consistently high. Customisation beyond what the editor allows requires Liquid (Shopify's templating language), which means hiring a Shopify developer at £50 to £150 per hour.

WooCommerce has the widest theme selection — thousands of WordPress themes work with it. Quality varies enormously. A premium WooCommerce theme from a reputable developer costs £40 to £80. Full design control is the trade-off for full design responsibility. You can change anything, but you need to know what you are doing or pay someone who does.

BigCommerce offers roughly 200 themes, with free options that are markedly better than the free themes on the other platforms. Premium themes cost £120 to £250. The page builder is capable but less intuitive than Shopify's. For deep customisation, BigCommerce uses the Stencil framework, which has a smaller developer community than Shopify's Liquid or WordPress's PHP developer community.

Who Should Choose What

Choose Shopify if you want to start selling quickly, your team is not technical, and you value a huge app marketplace. Accept that your total monthly cost will be the subscription plus £100 to £300 in apps plus transaction fees that are higher than the alternatives. Shopify is the right choice for a first-time DTC founder who wants to focus on product and marketing rather than platform management. Brands already exploring how Microsoft 365 Copilot supports small UK teams will appreciate Shopify's similar philosophy of managed simplicity.

Choose WooCommerce if you have someone on the team comfortable with WordPress, you want to keep recurring costs as low as possible, and you need full control over your store's code and data. The total cost of ownership is the lowest of the three for a well-managed store, but it carries the highest ongoing technical burden. WooCommerce suits brands that already run a WordPress content site and want to add commerce without switching platforms.

Choose BigCommerce if your product catalogue is large, you want strong built-in features without app bloat, and you want zero platform transaction fees. The monthly subscription is higher than Shopify's equivalent tier, but the total cost of ownership is often lower once you account for the apps you do not need to buy. BigCommerce is the least well-known of the three in the UK, which means fewer local agencies and a thinner community — factor that into your support planning.