Shopify is the dominant e-commerce platform globally and the right choice for many UK brands. The honest question is which UK brands. The Shopify pricing structure — £19/month Basic, plus £120-£400/month typical app stack, plus payments fees — adds up to £1,668-£5,028 a year before any order volume is considered. For operations that use the depth, that is good value. For operations that do not, it is a quiet tax on every order.
What Shopify is good at
Four things Shopify does materially better than the alternatives. Operational depth — inventory management, multi-location, customer accounts, order management, fulfillment integration, abandoned-cart, customer winback. The Shopify admin is the operations centre for the brand. App ecosystem — Klaviyo flows, Recharge subscriptions, ShipStation integration, advanced shipping rules, accounting connectors (Xero, QuickBooks, Sage), tax handling (Avalara, TaxJar) — most of what a brand needs already exists. International selling — Shopify Markets handles multi-currency, multi-language, regional tax and duty calculation, customer-facing localisation in a way that custom builds have to specifically implement. Theme ecosystem — well-designed themes are available across price tiers.
What Shopify is not good at
Three things Shopify does worse than a focused custom build. Core Web Vitals — most Shopify themes ship 70-85 on PageSpeed mobile because the theme JS plus the app stack plus the Liquid runtime adds up to substantial main-thread load. Going from a 3-second Shopify LCP to a 1.5-second custom-build LCP routinely lifts conversion 15-25% on paid traffic. Cost at small scale — the platform makes more economic sense at 200+ orders per month than at 30 orders per month; smaller operations subsidise the platform feature set they do not use. Ownership — you cannot leave Shopify with the front-end; everything Liquid-templated is platform-bound. The catalogue and customer data export cleanly; the storefront does not.
The honest cost picture for UK SMBs
A typical UK Shopify Basic merchant: Shopify subscription £228/year, Klaviyo at the 1,500-contact tier £15/month = £180/year, Recharge or Bold subscriptions £60-£120/month if running subscriptions, accounting connector £20-£40/month, premium theme £130-£300 one-off, app extras (reviews, loyalty, returns) £50-£150/month combined. All-in: £1,200-£3,500 per year ignoring payment fees. Across five years: £6,000-£17,500. Same-day Growth tier + Stripe direct: £899 + £180/year hosting × 4 = £1,619 across five years. The £4,500-£15,000 differential pays back the rebuild many times over for brands whose order volume does not justify the operational features Shopify subsidises.
When Shopify is the right answer
Two scenarios where Shopify is clearly the better economic and operational choice. First: you ship 200+ orders per month with a 100+-SKU catalogue and the Shopify operational depth is doing real work — inventory, fulfilment integration, customer-account complexity, abandoned-cart recovery, multi-location, returns management. The platform saves the operator hours per week that a custom build would not. Second: you sell internationally with meaningful complexity — multi-currency display, regional tax handling, duty calculation, multi-language storefronts — and Shopify Markets covers this cleanly. Custom builds can replicate it but the engineering cost is significant.
When the custom build wins
Pattern that almost always points to migration. Order volume under 100/month, catalogue under 50 SKUs, app stack drifted past £200/month, paid-media Quality Score affected by Core Web Vitals on theme baseline. The operational features Shopify subsidises are not earning their cost; the brand is paying for depth it does not use. A focused Stripe-direct custom build with the brand-specific essentials (the actual product gallery, the actual checkout flow, the actual email automation that earns its cost) reliably out-converts the templated Shopify equivalent because the page is purpose-built rather than configured around platform constraints.
The migration sequence
Same overall shape as the broader ecommerce migrations. Full crawl of the existing Shopify store for URL inventory. Catalogue export via Shopify’s built-in CSV. Customer and order history export where the destination supports the import. Product URL preservation (Shopify slugs typically carry forward cleanly). Redirect map written into the new host’s config. Stripe products configured to match the existing catalogue. Klaviyo flows reconstructed in the new platform with the same triggers, same content, same UTM tracking. Tax configuration for UK VAT (Stripe Tax handles this natively). Customer accounts re-created via the email-based magic-link pattern (passwords cannot migrate cleanly). Search Console handover. Day 7, 14, 30 health checks confirming order volume holds steady through the cutover.
A realistic decision framework
If three of these apply to you, Shopify is the right call: 200+ orders/month consistently, 100+ active SKUs, app stack earning its £200+/month cost, multi-location or multi-language complexity. If three or more apply, the custom build is the better call: under 100 orders/month, catalogue under 50 SKUs, app stack creeping past £200/month with most apps duplicating native features, Core Web Vitals affecting paid-media economics, ownership and cost-per-order matter more than configuration depth.