Shopify vs Wix for a small business ends in a tie on price and a split. Wix Core and Shopify Basic both cost $29 on annual billing. Wix wins when selling is a side job next to a service or a blog. Shopify wins when selling is the business and once you scale past hundreds of orders a month.
The short answer: what are you actually selling?
Start with the business, not the builder. If you sell a service and a few products on the side, a coach with a course, a photographer with prints, a salon with gift sets, Wix fits better, because the site, the blog, and the bookings live in one place. If you sell products all day and your store is the business, Shopify fits better, because its checkout, app store, and sales channels are built for volume.
Catalogue size is a quick test. Under about 50 products, with content doing much of the selling, Wix is comfortable. Past a few hundred orders a month, or a catalogue that keeps growing, Shopify pulls ahead.
Pricing: the $29 tie, and what year one really costs
Entry selling tier is a tie. Wix Core is $29 a month and Shopify Basic is $29 a month on annual billing, or $39 month to month for Shopify. Wix Light is $17 a month but cannot sell. Wix Business is $39 a month, though one source lists $36, so check the vendor page for the current figure. Wix Business Elite is $159. Shopify Starter is $5 a month, but it is checkout and link-in-bio only, with a 5% fee per sale. Shopify Grow is $79 a month annual ($105 monthly) and Advanced is $299 annual ($399 monthly), while Plus starts from $2,300 a month. Shopify gives a 3-day free trial, then $1 a month for 3 months.
Year one is where the tie breaks. Wix annual pricing can jump once introductory rates expire, so ask for the renewal price before you sign, not the first-year price. Shopify month-to-month billing is $39 against $29 annual, so paying yearly saves $120 a year on Basic alone. Add the apps you will actually need, and the plan price stops being the whole bill. That is the next section, and it matters more than the $29 headline.
Transaction fees on real sales
Wix charges a 0% platform transaction fee, and card processing runs about 2.9% plus 30 cents through Wix Payments. Shopify charges 0% on Shopify Payments, and 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, and 0.6% on Advanced if you use a third-party gateway. Card rates run 2.9% plus 30 cents on Basic down to 2.5% plus 30 cents on Advanced.
Run the maths on your own sales. At $1,000 a month in sales, the card fee is about $29 plus 30 cents per order on either platform, and the gateway fee is the difference: $20 on Shopify Basic with a third-party gateway, $0 on Wix. At $5,000 a month, that gateway fee is $100 on Shopify Basic, still $0 on Wix. At $20,000 a month, it is $400 on Basic, $200 on Grow, and $120 on Advanced. If you use Shopify Payments, the gateway fee is zero on every plan, so the fee gap only bites when you need a gateway Shopify Payments does not cover. Put your real monthly sales into that maths before you pick.
| Monthly sales | Wix Core ($29) | Shopify Basic ($29) with Shopify Payments | Shopify Basic with third-party gateway |
|---|---|---|---|
| $1,000 | About $29 card fees | About $29 card fees | About $29 plus $20 gateway fee |
| $5,000 | About $145 card fees | About $145 card fees | About $145 plus $100 gateway fee |
| $20,000 | About $580 card fees | About $580 card fees | About $580 plus $400 gateway fee |
AI: Shopify Magic vs Wix AI Site Builder
Shopify Magic is built into the admin on all plans. It writes product descriptions, edits product images and removes backgrounds, drafts email copy, and creates discount codes. Sidekick is the AI assistant that helps with setup, suggests SEO fixes, and works in 20 languages. Wix AI Site Builder builds a full starter site from a single prompt, and the editor adds AI text and image generation as you work. Neither charges extra for its headline AI, based on the sources checked for this post.
Neither one writes ranking content for you. Magic can draft a product description in seconds, and the Wix builder can draft a homepage, but a page that ranks needs your own research, your own angle, and your own words about the product. Use the AI for first drafts and image clean-up, then edit the result until it sounds like you. A store full of unedited AI text reads the same as every other store full of unedited AI text, and customers can tell.
SEO and blogging: Wix has the edge, Shopify is enough
Both platforms cover the SEO basics: custom URLs, meta titles and descriptions, alt text, sitemaps, and structured data. Wix has the meaningfully stronger blog, which makes sense given its content-first roots. It also ships an SEO setup checklist and a learning hub that walks a new owner through the basics. Shopify has a functional blog, but it is secondary to the store, with no native blog analytics, so you use GA4 for that. Shopify has more advanced technical SEO control, such as redirects and schema, per G2.
For a content-heavy business, a coach writing weekly guides or a shop that sells through articles, Wix is the easier pick. For a product business where search visits come from product pages and ads, Shopify is enough. Either way, the platform does not rank your pages. Your pages rank when they answer a real question better than the page above them. If you want the wider software cost picture, see how much small business software costs in 2026.
Apps and the hidden monthly stack
Shopify apps commonly add $50 to $150 a month to a small store, and Wix apps run $10 to $100 a month. Shopify has more than 8,000 apps, abandoned-cart recovery on all plans, and sales channels for Instagram, TikTok, Amazon, and eBay. Wix has fewer apps, but the ones a service business needs are often built in. The gap is not the count. It is the monthly total for the apps you actually need.
List your apps before you pick. Reviews, email marketing, bookings, subscriptions, and a loyalty program can each cost $10 to $30 a month. A Shopify store at $29 plus $100 in apps costs $129 a month. A Wix store at $29 plus $30 in apps costs $59. That $70 monthly gap is $840 a year, which is real money for a small business. Do the list, add the prices, and compare the totals, not the plan prices. Our Shopify vs Squarespace comparison runs the same test on the other big rival, if you want a second opinion.
Service business vs product business: the bookings test
Wix Bookings is built into Core at $29 a month, so a salon, coach, or consultant can take bookings without buying an app. Shopify has no native booking, so the same business buys an app and pays for it every month. That one difference can settle the choice for a service business. If bookings are core to how you earn, Wix starts ahead by one app, one login, and one monthly fee.
The reverse holds for a product business. Shopify Flow automation, multi-channel selling, and the depth of its app store matter more as order volume grows. Wix has a reported scalability ceiling near $500,000 a year in revenue, from a single third-party claim, so treat that as a flag to check, not a fact. Shopify has no such ceiling in practice. If your plan is to grow past a few hundred orders a month, start on Shopify and skip a migration later. For the social side of selling, see AI tools for small business social media without hiring someone.
When you will have to migrate, and what it costs
You migrate when the platform starts costing you sales, not when a new feature looks nice. On Wix, that looks like a catalogue that has outgrown its tools, order volume that needs deeper automation, or sales channels Wix does not reach. On Shopify, that looks like a store that never needed its depth, with $100 a month in apps doing what Wix includes. Migration means rebuilding the store, moving products and customer records, redirecting URLs, and re-checking payment and tax settings. It takes days for a small store and weeks for a large one, so picking right the first time is worth an hour of honest thought now.
The bottom line on Shopify vs Wix for a small business
Shopify vs Wix for a small business is a tie at $29 a month and a split after that. Pick Wix if selling is secondary, your catalogue sits under about 50 products, and you want a strong blog with bookings built in. Pick Shopify if ecommerce is the business, or if you expect to grow past a few hundred orders a month. Check the renewal price on Wix, count your apps on Shopify, and run your own sales through the fee maths. Prices here were checked against October 2026 sources, including this Wix vs Shopify comparison, and re-checked on 11 November 2026. If a price on a vendor page differs, trust the vendor page.