Wix vs Shopify (2026): A Site That Sells, or a Store That Has Pages

Wix vs Shopify decides on one question, and it is not a close one once the question is put properly: Wix for a site that also sells, Shopify for a store that also has pages. A disclosure the record demands before anything else. This court's evidence on Wix is extensive and its evidence on Shopify is thin — Shopify's plan prices, transaction fees and catalogue limits appear nowhere in our filings, so they are not printed here and no figure has been invented to fill the gap. Where a Shopify number decides your case, take it from the vendor's own pricing page and hold it against the Wix figures below, which are ours.

The question underneath the matchup

Wix vs Shopify, argued honestly, reduces to where the center of gravity sits. On Wix, the store is a capability added to a website: you build pages, and one of them takes money. On a dedicated commerce platform, the catalogue is the product and the pages exist to support it. Both arrangements sell things. They fail differently, and the failure mode is what you are really choosing between.

A Wix store fails by ceiling. The plan ladder is short and legible — Core at $29/mo on annual billing is the first tier that processes payments, Business at $39/mo adds automated sales tax, advanced shipping and multi-currency — and above that the questions stop being about plans and start being about operations. A commerce-first platform fails the other way, by asking a five-product seller to run infrastructure built for five thousand, and charging for the privilege of capacity they will not use this year.

There is one asymmetry the bench considers decisive and few comparisons mention. Wix has no full site export: design, templates and layout run only on Wix, and what leaves the premises is data — products, customers, orders and invoices through dashboard exports, blog content via RSS, page text copied by hand. That is not fatal, but it prices the mistake. Choosing Wix for a business that will plainly be a serious store in two years means paying for a rebuild later, and the exit procedure is documented in our filing on when to leave Wix.

What the record actually holds

The table sets out what this court can evidence and what it cannot. The Wix column is drawn from our own published filings; the Shopify column says see vendor wherever our record is silent, which is nearly everywhere. A comparison that filled those cells with plausible numbers would be a better-looking table and a worse document.

Read the empty column as evidence in itself. This is a single-vendor court: we publish on Wix continuously and hold Wix to figures we can cite. Anyone printing a fee-by-fee Wix versus Shopify table has either done the same work on the other side or filled the cells from a press page. Ask which, before you budget from it.

Deciding it: fees, catalogue and what happens as you scale

Start with fees, because they are the only part of this comparison we can price on both halves of the sentence. On Wix, selling begins at Core, $29/mo on annual billing, with Wix Payments at 2.9% plus 30 cents per transaction in the US and no extra platform commission on top. That last clause is the one to carry into any comparison: some platforms add a surcharge when you process through a third party, and where a rival does, its headline plan price is not the number to compare against Wix's.

Then the catalogue. Our record establishes no product ceiling for either platform, so anyone quoting you a threshold is quoting something other than evidence. What the record does establish is where the work goes as a catalogue grows: variants, tax rules, shipping bands and multi-currency, all of which sit on the $39/mo Business plan at Wix. If your answer to how many products, how many variants and how many countries is small, small and one, the honest recommendation is to start selling on the Wix Core plan and spend the difference on photography.

If the answers run the other way — hundreds of SKUs with variants, inventory that must reconcile, fulfilment integrations, wholesale alongside retail — the sensible move is to price a dedicated commerce platform such as Shopify directly, on its own pricing page, and to weigh the rebuild cost of arriving there later against the convenience of starting on a builder now. The upgrade triggers on the Wix side, and the point at which each one fires, are set out in our free versus premium hearing.

Who should not follow this ruling

The store is the business, and always was

If you are opening a shop rather than adding a shop, the fit argument decides it before any fee does. Nothing in Wix's favor here — the editor, the template library, the single bill — outweighs building a catalogue business on a platform whose entire product is catalogue businesses. Our own guidance on outgrowing Wix names a dedicated commerce platform as the destination in exactly this case.

You are comparing on price alone

Plan price is not the bill on either side. On Wix the record is explicit: no plan includes business email, which runs $6 per user per month through Google Workspace, the domain renews at around $19.35 a year for a .com after the first-year voucher, and paid apps typically run $3 to $20 each per month. The full ledger is in our accounting of the real cost of a Wix site, and any Shopify quote deserves the same treatment before the two are compared.

Your real comparison is not with Shopify at all

A great many people arriving at this matchup are not choosing a commerce platform; they are choosing a website and have been told a store might be needed someday. If that is the position, the useful comparison is between managed builders, which we heard in Wix versus Squarespace, and the sensible course is to open on Wix Core at $29/mo annual and let the store prove it deserves a platform of its own.