Shopify vs custom ecommerce: the short answer
For most UK and EU shops, Shopify is the right choice. If your products and prices look like most shops', Shopify gives you hosting, card security, a tested checkout and an admin built for people who aren't developers. It also keeps all of that updated. A custom online shop pays off when the way you sell is the business itself: your pricing, your checkout, or the systems behind the shop.
Shopify is a hosted platform: you rent the software, and Shopify runs it. A custom shop is software built for your business, which you own and have to look after. This guide is for founders and managing directors at UK and EU companies of 10 to 200 people. Some are opening a first shop; others suspect they've outgrown Shopify.
We design and build websites for companies across Europe, custom ones included, and our usual advice to a shop is still Shopify. What follows covers the limits that decide it, the five cases where building pays, and the middle paths most shops miss.
What Shopify does well for most shops
Shopify's strength is everything you never have to think about, from hosting to security fixes. It also runs one checkout for every store on the platform, so a checkout bug is likely to surface on someone else's shop before yours.
Card security is the clearest case. Shopify says it is certified Level 1 PCI DSS compliant, and that this covers every store on the platform by default. PCI DSS is the card industry's security standard for anyone who takes card payments. On Shopify, most of that work is done before you open.
The admin is the other half. Adding a product, running a promotion and refunding an order are standard jobs. Anyone who has worked in another Shopify shop already knows the screens, so new staff often arrive trained.
Apps fill most gaps, from reviews to subscriptions to translation. Each is another monthly bill and another company with access to your shop. Keep count. An app you can switch off is still cheaper to be wrong about than code you commissioned.
Say you sell 400 products at one price each, to consumers in the UK and a few EU countries. Nothing in that sentence needs custom software. Pick a good theme, put the effort into the catalogue and the product pages, and spend the rest on stock and marketing.
Where Shopify's limits sit
Shopify publishes its limits, which makes them easy to test against your own shop. These are the ones that most often decide the question, as Shopify documented them in September 2026.
| Your need | Shopify's rule | The effect on you |
|---|---|---|
| Changes to the checkout steps | Checkout extensions on the information, shipping and payment steps are for Shopify Plus stores only | A different checkout flow means Plus, or leaving Shopify |
| Separate prices for trade customers | Up to 3 active B2B catalogues below Plus, unlimited on Plus | A price list per trade customer outgrows the lower plans quickly |
| Products with many options | Up to 2,048 variants per product | Plenty for sizes and colours; no fit for goods priced by the centimetre |
| Your own page addresses | Products and collections sit under fixed paths, /products and /collections | Fine for most shops; a limit if you want your own structure, such as translated paths |
| Your choice of payment provider | Shopify Payments works only in supported countries and business types; other providers carry an extra Shopify transaction fee | Check both first if you sell anything regulated |
| Links to your other systems | Whatever Shopify's API and its apps expose | A stock or accounting system with no connector turns into an integration project |
An API (application programming interface) is a documented way for one system to read and write another's data. Shopify's API decides how far you can stretch the platform before you have to leave it.
Two rows have a step in between. Shopify Plus, the top plan, opens the checkout steps and removes the catalogue limit. If one of those is your only gap, price Plus against a build over the same number of years before you decide.
Five cases where a custom shop pays off
A custom shop pays off when the thing Shopify can't do is the thing your customers buy from you for. In practice, that is one of five situations.
- Your pricing is the product. Made-to-measure goods priced by size, quotes that turn into orders, or a price list agreed with each trade customer. Variants can't hold made-to-measure pricing, and a price list per trade customer needs Plus. An app that approximates the rest puts your core pricing inside someone else's code.
- The shop is part of a bigger product. A marketplace, a booking platform or a subscription with its own rules takes payments, but it's a web application with a checkout attached. Guidoo puts holiday packages from licensed Albanian agencies into one search, with online payment in instalments. The hard part was making packages from different agencies comparable: a data problem before it's a shop.
- Your checkout has to work differently. A deposit now and the balance on delivery, an approval before the order goes through, or a step that asks what only your business needs to know. Plus covers some of this, such as deposits for trade orders. Below Plus, the checkout steps are Shopify's to design.
- Your operations run on a system Shopify can't reach. Say your stock and prices live in an ERP, the software that runs stock and accounts, with no Shopify connector. Then most of the shop is the integration, and a custom shop lets you control both ends of it.
- Your team lives in the admin. Shopify's admin is designed for every merchant. If your staff spend the day approving trade orders, an admin built around their morning questions can be worth more than the storefront. Those questions are plain: what came in, what hasn't gone out, what's running low.
All five share one condition: someone owns the shop after launch. If nobody will, stay on Shopify. With custom software you're the vendor, so security fixes and payment provider changes become your jobs, or your supplier's under a contract.
Our guide to custom software vs off-the-shelf draws the same line: buy what works the same everywhere, and build only the part that sets you apart.
Farmaci Dua: the decisions that come before the platform
The platform decides less about a shop than most comparisons suggest. Farmaci Dua, an online pharmacy and wellness shop in Albania, shows why. The brief was a calm shop rather than a loud one, where a worried parent can find the right thing quickly.
The work that shaped it was catalogue work. Products are organised the way a customer asks for them, not the way a supplier ships them. Customers browse skin care, cold and flu, mother and baby, and daily wellness. Product pages are built for real pharmacy stock, including the brands customers arrive already searching for.
The checkout handles promotions without turning the shop into a sale board. The visual language stays restrained, because in a health purchase calm is the point.
Every one of those decisions is the same on Shopify or on custom code.
A catalogue arranged by supplier is hard to use on any platform, and no theme will write your category names for you. So decide the catalogue first: the words your customers use, the groups they'd look in, the brands they type. Once that list exists, the platform question gets easier.
In our experience, past a few dozen products most customers search rather than browse. The search box and the product names then do more work than the category grid.
What each path puts on your bill
We don't publish prices, and a market range would tell you less than two real quotes. What you can compare now is which lines each path adds to your bill, and who does the work behind them.
| Cost line | On Shopify | On a custom shop |
|---|---|---|
| Platform | A monthly plan, higher on Plus | Hosting you choose and pay for directly |
| Payments | Card fees, plus Shopify's extra fee if you use an outside provider | The payment provider's fees only |
| Features | Often one monthly app per feature | Built once, then maintained |
| Card security | Covered by Shopify's PCI certification | Shared between the payment provider and you, with a yearly attestation |
| Updates and fixes | Shopify patches the platform; you check your theme and apps | Yours, or your supplier's under a contract |
| Accessibility | Depends on your theme and every app on the page | Depends on the builder, so name WCAG 2.2 AA in the brief |
| Leaving | Export your data and rebuild the design elsewhere | Take the code, if your contract gives it to you |
Neither column is free, and fees alone are rarely a good reason to leave Shopify. Every shop pays card fees to someone, and Shopify's own charges are known in advance.
A custom shop's costs arrive later and in smaller pieces, such as a payment library that needs updating. Compare the two over five years, with upkeep and the person who owns it counted on the custom side.
Accessibility is now a legal duty for many shops. If you sell to consumers in the EU, the European Accessibility Act has covered online shops since 28 June 2025, with an exemption for microenterprises.
Our guide to what sets the price of a website in the UK lists what a proper quote should include. The same lines apply to a shop, with payments and stock added.
On a custom shop, the payment page is yours to guard
The risk that changes most between the two paths is card data. In 2018 an attacker got into British Airways' network and edited a JavaScript file on its website. From 21 August to 5 September, each card a customer entered on the site was also copied to the attacker's own domain. Bookings carried on as normal.
BA didn't spot it; a third party did. The ICO's penalty notice records that names, addresses, card numbers and security codes for 244,000 customers were potentially accessed, and the ICO fined BA.
BA is no small shop, but the mechanism works on any site that takes card details on its own page. Change one script and the checkout still looks finished.
On Shopify, guarding the checkout is Shopify's job. On a custom shop, keep card details off your pages altogether. Payment providers such as Stripe offer hosted payment pages and embedded card fields. Both send card details straight to the provider, never through your server, which reduces your PCI obligations.
You still attest to PCI compliance every year, and you still decide which scripts load at checkout, so keep that list short. Ask anyone quoting a custom shop how card details reach the payment provider. A good answer names the provider's hosted page or its card fields, in one sentence.
What you own on each, and how you'd leave
On Shopify, you own your data and rent everything else. Products, customers and orders export as spreadsheets (products, orders). The theme is written for Shopify and runs nowhere else. Apps stay behind too.
Customer passwords don't travel in a spreadsheet, as Shopify's help centre notes for shops moving in, so account holders set new ones after any move. Plan the page addresses as well: every product lives under Shopify's fixed paths, so either the new shop keeps them or each old address needs a permanent redirect.
On a custom shop, you own the code only if the contract says so. Under UK law an outside developer owns what they write until they assign it in writing. Our guide to whether you own your website sets out the five checks. Put the code repository, the hosting and the payment account in your company's name from the first day.
Our own standard is simple. The code, the hosting and the documentation sit in your accounts and are transferred at handover. You own the shop; our name appears as the studio that built it.
Middle paths between Shopify and a custom shop
Most shops that hit a limit don't need to leave Shopify. They need one piece built beside it, in one of two common shapes.
The first shape is a custom storefront on Shopify's back end. Shopify calls this headless commerce: you build the pages customers see, and Shopify keeps running the catalogue and the checkout behind them. It suits a brand whose content or product pages have outgrown themes. It's also a second codebase to maintain, so it's rarely where to start.
The second is an app beside the shop. Say you need a trade portal, a product configurator or a sync with your stock system. Each can run as a small web application that reads and writes through Shopify's API. The shop stays standard, and only the part that's yours is custom.
A third path runs the other way. Some businesses sell a handful of products from a site that matters more than the shop. A custom site can hand payment to a provider's hosted checkout page and skip a shop platform altogether.
WordPress with WooCommerce is the other common route. You host it and own it, and you look after the updates and plugins yourself. Our guide to WordPress vs a custom-built website covers that trade.
When to stay on Shopify
Stay where you are, or start on Shopify, in any of these cases:
- You're opening a first shop, or testing whether a product sells.
- Your products and prices are standard, and the real complaint is sales. Fix the catalogue and the product pages first; a new platform won't.
- Your only gap is checkout steps or trade price lists. Price Shopify Plus before anything else.
- You want to leave to save on fees. Do the five-year sum, with upkeep in it, first.
- Nobody will own custom code after launch.
You may not need a studio either. A good Shopify theme, set up by you or a Shopify partner, covers most shops on that list. If you can't tell which side of the line you're on, ask for an audit and a written recommendation. You can act on it without us.
Start with the list of workarounds
This week, ask the people who run your shop to list every job they do outside Shopify. Think of the spreadsheet of trade prices, or the orders someone types again into the stock system, and write beside each job how often it happens.
If the list is short and the jobs are monthly, stay on Shopify and put the effort into the catalogue. If one line happens every day and it's how you sell, that line is the brief for the custom piece. The rest of the list tells you whether you need one piece or a whole shop.
Questions
Is Shopify good for SEO?
Good enough for most shops. It handles the basics, including sitemaps and redirects, and the fixed /products/ and /collections/ paths are something to plan around, not a reason to leave. Speed matters more. On Shopify it depends on your theme and on every app that adds code to your pages. Test a product page on a phone before and after each app you install.
Is Shopify Plus worth it before going custom?
If your gap is exactly what Plus unlocks, changes to the checkout steps or more trade price lists, Plus is usually the smaller step. Compare its price with a build quote over the same number of years. If the gap is pricing logic, or a system Shopify can't reach, Plus won't close it.
Can we start on Shopify and move to a custom shop later?
Yes, and it's often the best order. A year on Shopify tells you what sells and where the workarounds are, and your data comes with you as spreadsheets. Keep the product data tidy and write down every workaround. When you do move, ask for the new shop to keep your old URL paths, so fewer pages need redirects.
How we wrote this: drafted with AI, then checked and edited by the people who build our projects. Figures come from our own work or from the linked sources.