Wix vs Shopify

Wix vs Shopify: a website builder that sells, or a commerce platform that builds websites

Wix is the better fit for a business whose website is mainly about the brand, the content or booked services, with a modest product range on the side. Shopify is the better fit when selling products is the business: larger or more complex catalogs, several sales channels, wholesale, retail stores and growth you expect to keep going. For a small store with simple products, either platform works, and moving is not always worth the effort. We should say plainly that we are a Shopify Plus Partner and migrate stores to Shopify for a living, including many from Wix; we have tried to keep this comparison fair all the same.

At a glance

Comparison point	Wix	Shopify
Pricing	Light about $17, Core about $29, Business about $39 and Business Elite about $159 a month, billed yearly; monthly billing costs more and is shown at checkout. Core is the cheapest plan that can sell.	Basic $39, Grow $105, Advanced $399 a month billed monthly ($29, $79 and $299 billed yearly); Plus from $2,300 a month
Transaction fees	No Wix transaction fee, with Wix Payments or a third-party provider	None with Shopify Payments; 2%, 1%, 0.6% or 0.2% by plan with a third-party gateway
Hosting and maintenance	Fully hosted; nothing to update	Fully hosted; nothing to update
Ease of use	Very easy to start; free-form drag-and-drop editor	Easy to start; structured admin built around products and orders
Design and themes	Over 2,000 templates; place any element anywhere; template cannot be swapped once a site is built	Free and paid themes built from sections and blocks; themes can be swapped and code edited
Apps and extensions	Wix App Market plus many built-in business apps	Thousands of apps in the Shopify App Store; commerce-focused
SEO	Strong built-in tools and editable URL structures	Solid technical defaults; fixed URL prefixes
Speed	Good on a lean build; heavy pages slow down	Good on a lean theme; too many apps slow it down
Payments	Wix Payments (2.9% + 30 cents for US cards) or other providers	Shopify Payments (2.9% + 30 cents on Basic, lower on higher plans), Shop Pay, many gateways
B2B	Through apps	Built in on all plans; 3 catalogs on non-Plus plans
POS	Wix POS for US stores selling in USD, with hardware sold separately	POS Lite free; POS Pro $89 per location per month
Scalability	Up to 50,000 products; 1,000 variants per product	No product cap; 3 options and up to 2,048 variants per product
Ownership and control	Site must run on Wix; design cannot be exported; store data exports to CSV	Theme code can be downloaded; products, customers and orders export to CSV
Support	24/7 customer care	24/7 support

Prices checked September 2026. Wix notes that its prices vary by location and that the displayed prices are for yearly subscriptions paid up front.

Pricing and total cost of ownership

Wix publishes five plans: Free, Light, Core, Business and Business Elite. The prices on its plans page are for yearly subscriptions paid in full, at about $17, $29, $39 and $159 a month for the four paid plans. Monthly billing is available but costs more, and Wix shows that price at checkout rather than on the plans page. The important line is which plans can take money: Light cannot, so Core is the entry point for a store. Wix groups its commerce features as basic on Core, standard on Business and advanced on Business Elite, with storage rising from 50 GB on Core to 100 GB on Business and unlimited on Business Elite.

Shopify’s plans are Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus. Billed monthly, they are $39, $105 and $399, and billed yearly they drop to $29, $79 and $299 a month. Plus starts at $2,300 a month. Every Shopify plan is built to sell, so the comparison that matters is Wix Core or Business against Shopify Basic.

The subscription is rarely the biggest cost. Payment processing is, and after that, apps.

A worked monthly example

Take a store selling $10,000 a month online across 150 orders, all paid by card in the US, on annual billing.

Cost line	Wix Business with Wix Payments	Shopify Basic with Shopify Payments
Plan	$39	$29
Card processing (2.9% of $10,000 plus 30 cents on 150 orders)	$335	$335
Platform transaction fee	$0	$0
Total before apps	$374	$364

At this size the two are almost level. Three things move the numbers. First, on Shopify, using a third-party gateway instead of Shopify Payments adds 2% on Basic, which here would be another $200 a month; Wix adds no fee of its own when you use another provider. Second, American Express costs 3.7% plus 30 cents through Wix Payments, so a store with many Amex customers pays more there. Third, apps: Wix bundles more tools into the plan (email marketing, bookings, events), while a Shopify store usually adds a few paid apps for reviews, subscriptions or email, which can add $20 to $100 or more a month. As sales grow, Shopify’s higher plans lower the card rate (2.7% plus 30 cents on Grow, 2.5% plus 30 cents on Advanced), which starts to matter at a few hundred thousand dollars a year.

Ease of use and maintenance

Both platforms are hosted, so there is no server, no security patching and no software upgrade to plan. The difference is in how each one thinks.

Wix is a website builder first. You open a template in a visual editor and drag text, images, buttons and whole sections wherever you want them. For someone who has never built a site, it is one of the fastest routes to something that looks finished. Wix also adds AI site generation, so you can start from a prompt and then refine by hand. The store is one of several business apps you add to the site, alongside bookings, events, a blog and pricing plans.

Shopify is a commerce system first. The admin is organized around products, orders, customers, inventory, discounts and markets, and the online store is one sales channel among several. Setting up the look of the site is more structured, but running the store day to day is usually quicker: bulk editing, inventory across locations, fulfillment, returns and reporting are deeper, and Shopify Flow automates routine work at no extra cost.

In our experience, merchants who like Wix most are the ones who spend most of their time on the website. Merchants who spend most of their time on orders tend to prefer Shopify’s admin.

Design: drag and drop versus themes

Wix offers more than 2,000 templates, and its classic editor lets you place an element anywhere on the page. That freedom is the main reason designers and small businesses choose it. The tradeoffs are real, though. Freely positioned layouts need care on mobile, and larger sites become slower to edit. Wix’s help center is also clear that you cannot switch an existing site to a different template; to change templates, you build a new site and reassign the domain.

Wix Studio is Wix’s platform for agencies and designers. It adds responsive layout tools, custom breakpoints, reusable design assets, client management and developer tools, and each site is billed on its own plan. It runs the same Wix business apps, including Wix Stores, so it improves the design side more than the commerce side.

Shopify themes are built from sections and blocks. You rearrange, add and configure them in the theme editor rather than dragging elements to exact positions, which keeps layouts consistent across screen sizes. Shopify’s free themes, including Horizon, are capable enough for most stores, and paid themes are a one-time purchase. You can install a new theme, preview it with your products and publish it when ready, and a developer can edit the Liquid code directly.

Apps and extensions

Wix builds a large share of its features in-house: Wix Stores, Wix Bookings, Wix Events, Wix Blog, email marketing, pricing plans and more. The Wix App Market adds third-party apps for things like reviews, multichannel listing and wholesale pricing.

The Shopify App Store is much larger and almost entirely about commerce: subscriptions, bundles, product options, loyalty, reviews, ERP and 3PL connectors, advanced search and marketplace sync. The cost is that a Shopify store often relies on several paid apps, and each one adds a monthly fee and some weight to the storefront. We audit the app list on every build and replace apps with native features where Shopify now offers them.

SEO and content

Wix’s SEO reputation dates from its early years, when sites built on Flash and later heavy JavaScript with hash-based URLs were hard for search engines to read. That is no longer an accurate picture. Wix now renders pages on the server, provides an SEO setup checklist, editable titles, descriptions and structured data, an editable robots.txt, automatic sitemaps, a redirect manager and SEO settings that let you change the URL structure for page types. Product pages use /product-page/ by default, and that prefix can be customized; Wix creates redirects automatically when you do.

Shopify covers the technical basics well: automatic sitemaps, canonical tags, editable titles and descriptions, structured data in modern themes, an editable robots.txt and a built-in redirect manager. Its main limitation is fixed URL prefixes such as /products/, /collections/ and /blogs/news/, which you cannot remove. Shopify’s blog is simpler than Wix’s well-regarded blog, which matters to content-heavy brands. For multilingual and multi-country stores, Shopify Markets handles translated URLs and hreflang natively.

Neither platform will rank a store on its own. Rankings come from content, links and product data.

Performance

Both platforms serve pages from global infrastructure and handle traffic spikes without you doing anything. Real-world speed depends mostly on the build. On Wix, pages packed with animations, video backgrounds and many app widgets load slowly, especially on phones. On Shopify, a modern theme loads quickly until too many apps inject scripts. We would not choose between them on speed alone; we would keep either build lean and test it with real product pages.

Payments and checkout

Wix Payments is Wix’s own processor. In the US it charges 2.9% plus 30 cents for cards, Apple Pay and Google Pay, 3.7% plus 30 cents for American Express, 3.49% plus 49 cents for PayPal, and 2.6% for in-person payments through Wix POS. Chargebacks cost 15 dollars (20 for PayPal). Wix also supports other payment providers and does not add its own transaction fee when you use them.

Shopify Payments charges 2.9% plus 30 cents on Basic, 2.7% plus 30 cents on Grow, 2.5% plus 30 cents on Advanced and 2.25% plus 30 cents on Plus, for online cards in the US. It includes Shop Pay, Shopify’s accelerated checkout, which remembers returning buyers across Shopify stores. If you use a third-party gateway instead, Shopify adds 2%, 1%, 0.6% or 0.2% by plan, which is the most common surprise in Shopify pricing. Shopify’s checkout is standardized and can be extended with apps and, on Plus, checkout extensions; Wix’s checkout also follows a fixed pattern with limited customization.

Selling in person, on other channels and to businesses

In person. Wix POS is available to US stores selling in US dollars, with card readers and registers bought from Wix. Shopify POS runs on iPhone, iPad and Android with Shopify’s hardware. POS Lite is included free, and POS Pro, at $89 per location per month, adds staff roles, advanced inventory, exchanges and retail reporting. Shopify POS is the more developed of the two for shops with several locations or staff.

Other channels. Both platforms sell beyond the website. Wix connects to Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Google Shopping and YouTube from its dashboard, with inventory kept in sync. Shopify has native channels for Facebook and Instagram, Google and YouTube, and TikTok, and its Marketplace Connect app lists products on Amazon, eBay, Walmart and other marketplaces.

B2B and wholesale. Shopify’s B2B features run on all plans: company accounts, catalogs with their own prices, payment terms and quantity rules, with non-Plus plans limited to 3 catalogs. On Wix, wholesale pricing and business accounts come from App Market apps rather than a native feature.

Services and bookings. This is where Wix is stronger. Wix Bookings handles appointments, classes, courses, staff calendars and online payment for services, on a plan that accepts payments. Shopify has no native booking system; it relies on apps, which work well for simple appointments but are less integrated.

Scale

Wix Stores allows up to 50,000 products, 6 options per product with up to 100 choices each, and 1,000 variants per product. The practical ceiling is usually operational rather than numerical: bulk editing, multi-location inventory, complex fulfillment and integrations with ERP and warehouse systems are thinner than on Shopify.

Shopify has no cap on products and allows 3 options and up to 2,048 variants per product. Advanced adds third-party carrier-calculated shipping (also available on Grow with annual billing), and Plus adds expansion stores, checkout extensibility and higher API limits. A store can start on Basic and move up without changing platforms. Note that Wix allows more options per product than Shopify does, which matters when you migrate.

When Wix is the better choice

• Your website is mainly about content, a portfolio or a brand, and products are a small part of the business.
• You sell services, classes or appointments, and Wix Bookings covers what you need.
• You want complete visual freedom in the editor and are happy to manage the mobile layout.
• You want email marketing, events, a blog and a shop in one subscription with few add-ons.
• You use a third-party payment provider and want to avoid platform transaction fees.
• Your Wix store already works well, your catalog is small and stable, and nothing on this page is a real constraint. Staying put is a sound decision.

When Shopify is the better choice

• Selling products is the business, and the catalog is large, growing or complex.
• You sell to businesses as well as consumers and want wholesale pricing without an app.
• You run one or more physical shops and need POS with staff roles and shared inventory.
• You sell in several countries and want local currencies, languages and domains managed together.
• You depend on subscriptions, bundles, 3PLs, an ERP or marketplace sync, where the Shopify ecosystem is deeper.
• You expect to hire developers or agencies, and want the largest pool of them.

What switching actually involves

Moving from Wix to Shopify is one of the more common migrations we handle, and the parts that take time are rarely the ones merchants expect.

• The design does not move. Wix sites must run on Wix’s servers, and there is no way to export the design. The Shopify store is a new build, so budget for design decisions, not just data.
• Products move well, with exceptions. Wix exports products to CSV, up to 5,000 rows per file, and Shopify’s own Store Migration app supports Wix. Digital products do not export through the Wix CSV, so their files are re-uploaded. Products with more than 3 options have to be restructured, because Shopify allows 3; we split them into separate products or turn an option into a line item property.
• Custom text fields and modifiers. Wix custom text fields (engraving, gift messages) have no direct Shopify equivalent and are rebuilt in the theme or with an app, including any price they add.
• Orders and customers. Wix exports orders and contacts to CSV, but a CSV is not a Shopify order. We import orders as real Shopify orders with the original numbers, dates and totals so that customers see their history. Customer passwords never move; customers set a new one or use Shopify’s passwordless sign-in.
• Blog posts and reviews. Wix states that blog posts cannot be exported to other platforms, and Shopify’s help center says Wix reviews cannot be exported or migrated directly. Both are moved through the site itself or an app, and a long blog adds real time.
• Bookings, members and pricing plans. These do not transfer, and Shopify has no native equivalent. Each needs a replacement app or a decision to drop it.
• SEO. This is where migrations go wrong. Wix URLs such as /product-page/, /post/ and custom page slugs all change on Shopify. Every URL that has traffic or links needs a 301 redirect to its new address, and titles, descriptions and image alt text need to come across. We crawl the live site before launch and check the redirects after it.

A simple Wix store can be moved in a few weeks. A store with years of orders, a large blog, bookings or complex options takes longer, mostly because of decisions rather than data. Our Wix to Shopify migration guide sets out how we run the project, phase by phase.

Cost of switching

Our Wix to Shopify migrations start from $2,500 for stores under 500 products and 5,000 orders ($3,500 for larger stores), and typically take six to eight weeks for smaller stores. The price is fixed after the audit. Our terms are 50% to begin and 50% once the store is live and you are fully satisfied with the figures. As a Shopify Plus Partner, we build in a free Shopify development store, so you pay Shopify nothing until the store launches, and the Wix site stays live throughout.

If you would rather do it yourself, tools exist for the data side. Our comparison of Shopify migration tools explains what each one moves and what it leaves to you.

Frequently asked questions

If you are weighing a move, the migration survey takes about ten minutes, and we reply with an honest recommendation, including when staying on Wix makes more sense. You can also read our Wix to Shopify migration guide or compare every platform we migrate from on our Shopify migration platforms page.