Shopify vs Wix: which one fits the store you run?

Wix lets one product carry up to 1,000 variants across six options. A variant is one version a customer can buy, such as a medium in blue. An option is the choice behind it, such as size or colour. Shopify allows 2,048 variants but only three options. That pair of numbers sums up each platform. Wix is built as a site with a shop attached. Shopify is built as a shop with a site attached.

You are probably picking a first store builder, or your Wix shop has started to feel small. If the website is the business and products are a side line, Wix is often the better buy. If your Wix shop is already straining, our Wix to Shopify migration work starts from the limits below.

The short answer. Choose Wix if you sell services, bookings or a small catalogue of roughly under 50 products, and one person runs the site. Choose Shopify once your day runs on stock in several places, wholesale buyers, more than one currency or an ERP. An ERP (enterprise resource planning system) runs stock, purchasing and accounts.

Who this is for. Founders choosing a first store builder, and owners of a Wix shop who wonder whether they have outgrown it. Who it is not for. Teams weighing two commerce platforms at scale. That trade is in Shopify vs BigCommerce.

Sources for every cell:

• Shopify pricing, Wix plans, Wix Payments service fees
• Wix Stores limits, Shopify variant limits
• Wix multi-currency, Shopify checkout extensibility, Wix checkout settings
• Shopify B2B by plan, Wix wholesale with SparkLayer
• Wix URL structure, Shopify domains, Shopify’s Wix migration guide

What each platform charges you to sell

Shopify publishes one price list. On Shopify’s pricing page, Basic is $19 a month billed yearly, or $25 billed monthly. Grow is $49 or $65. Advanced is $299 or $399. Plus starts at $2,300 a month.

Wix lists its plans on its upgrade page. Only three of them accept payments: Core, Business and Business Elite. The prices on that page change with your region and billing term. We loaded it twice on 6 October 2026 and saw two different sets of figures. So we do not quote a Wix price here. Open the page from your own country and read the yearly price. That is the one you will pay.

The bigger difference is the fee on each sale. A payment provider is the company that processes the card. A transaction fee is a cut the platform takes on each sale, on top of card processing. Shopify charges a third-party transaction fee when you use another provider, and “the rate depends on your plan”. It waives that fee for Shopify Payments, Shop Pay, Shop Pay Installments and PayPal Express (Shopify payment fees).

Wix’s service fees page lists card processing for Wix Payments at 2.9% plus 30 cents in the US. We found no separate platform fee on it.

Where Wix is the better choice

A comparison that never picks the other side is a pitch. Here are four cases where we would tell you to stay on Wix.

Service businesses. A salon, a studio, a clinic or a consultant sells time first and products second. Wix includes scheduling and services on the same plans that sell products (Wix plans). They sit in the same editor as the site. On Shopify, bookings come from an app, and the store stays at the centre of the dashboard you run the shop from.

Portfolio plus shop. A photographer selling prints needs the portfolio to look right more than the cart. So does an illustrator with a small run of merchandise. In our judgement, Wix’s drag and drop editor gives a design-led owner more freedom than a Shopify theme does without code.

Under roughly 50 products. That number is our judgement, not a vendor limit. Below it, most of Shopify’s strengths go unused: selling country by country, wholesale price lists, a larger app store and links to an ERP. Wix also allows six options per product against Shopify’s three. That suits made-to-order work with many choices.

One person runs everything. Sometimes the owner is also the designer, the copywriter and the shipper. Then one editor for site, blog, bookings and shop is worth more than room to grow.

Where Shopify is the better choice

Shopify wins once the shop, not the site, is what you manage every day.

Selling in more than one country. Wix lets customers pay in a local currency. That works through Wix Payments, PayPal or Stripe, and only for Wix Stores (Wix multi-currency). Shopify goes further with Markets, its built-in tool for selling country by country. Each market can have its own language. It can also have its own address: a subfolder such as /fr/, a subdomain such as fr.yourstore.com, or its own domain (Shopify domains and languages).

Trade buyers. B2B (business to business) means selling to shops and dealers rather than the public. Shopify puts B2B tools on Basic, Grow and Advanced. You get companies with their own locations, minimum order quantities and lower prices for larger quantities. You also get net terms, which let the buyer pay 30 or 60 days after the invoice. A B2B catalogue is a set of products and prices for a group of buyers. Below Plus, the cap is “up to 3 active catalogs across all your B2B markets” (Shopify B2B by plan).

Wix points wholesale sellers to SparkLayer. It is a third-party app with its own billing plan (Wix help).

Large variant counts. A product sold in many sizes and colours hits Wix’s 1,000-variant cap before Shopify’s 2,048.

Apps and people. In our judgement, Shopify has the deeper app catalogue and the larger pool of developers. When you need a ready-made link to a warehouse or an accounting system, it usually already exists.

Checkout and SEO controls are close, with one Wix edge

Both platforms limit how far you can change the checkout, the pages where the buyer pays. On Wix you can change colours, the header, form fields, extra questions for the buyer and added fees. You cannot remove email, name or delivery details (Wix checkout settings).

Shopify gives every plan the checkout and accounts editor. Checkout extensibility is Shopify’s name for apps that change the checkout. Apps that change “the information, shipping, and payments pages” are “available only on the Shopify Plus plan” (Shopify checkout extensibility).

On SEO (search engine optimisation), Wix has the edge in one place. You can change the URL structure of all product pages, prefix included. The prefix is the folder before the product name, such as /product-page/. Wix then sets up redirects, rules that send old addresses to the new ones (Wix URL structure).

Shopify lets you edit page titles, meta descriptions and each URL handle. A meta description is the summary line under a search result. A handle is the last part of a page address. But “You can’t edit subdirectory names”, so /products and /collections stay (Shopify domains). Neither platform ranks you. Your content and links do.

When a Wix store outgrows Wix: four signs

Most Wix shops never need to move. The ones that do show the same four signs.

The common thread is that the shop stops being one person’s tool. A warehouse, an accountant or a sales rep starts to depend on the order data. From then on, the links between systems matter more than the editor. That is where Shopify’s ecosystem pays for itself. Our Shopify ERP integration guide covers who should own each record.

Check your shop against the four rows today. If no row applies, stay on Wix. If one does, use the rule in the right-hand column to time the move.

What a Wix to Shopify move involves

Shopify publishes a Wix migration guide. Products, customers, historical orders and reviews can come across. Its Store Migration app, still in early access, moves products and customers. The guide notes two limits. “Prices by location aren’t supported”, and products “can have a maximum of 3 options”. So a Wix product using six options has to be restructured before the move.

CSV export also covers products and customers. A CSV is a plain spreadsheet file. The guide warns that “some data can’t be migrated this way”. Order matters too. Import products first, then customers, then historical orders, or the records do not link (Shopify migration overview).

Then the addresses. Wix product pages sit under /product-page/ by default. Shopify’s sit under /products/. Every old address needs a redirect to its new page. Set them up before the domain moves. Our Shopify migration checklist lists the tests to run before the switch. When the move is more than a weekend job, our migrations team scopes that work.

Our bias, and how to check us

Autonomous Technologies builds and runs the systems behind Shopify stores. We work for ecommerce founders and the operators who own the store after launch. We work on Shopify, so weigh what we say with that in mind. Every plan fact above links to the vendor page it came from. Check them rather than take our word. On staying power, we have 54 consecutive months of work on one client’s Shopify platform, April 2022 to September 2026. That shows we stay on Shopify. It does not show that Shopify beats Wix for your shop.

Facts checked October 2026, re-check by 6 April 2027. Every Shopify and Wix fact above was read from the linked vendor page on 6 October 2026.