Wix or Squarespace ecommerce, or WooCommerce: which fits your shop?

Two different kinds of platform

Wix and Squarespace are hosted website builders that added ecommerce. You pay a subscription, design the site in their editor, and they handle hosting, security and updates. Everything lives inside their system.

WooCommerce is a free, open source ecommerce plugin for WordPress. You, or a hosting company, run it on a server. You can change almost anything, add from a huge range of extensions, and take the whole shop with you if you move. In exchange, someone has to look after hosting, updates and backups.

That basic difference, a rented all-in-one system versus software you own, drives most of the comparison below. If you are also weighing Shopify, our WooCommerce vs Shopify guide for the UK covers that separately.

Side by side

Question	Wix or Squarespace	WooCommerce
Getting started	Very quick, all in one editor	Needs hosting and setup, quicker with managed hosting
Design	Polished templates, drag and drop	Any theme, plus page builders such as Elementor
Who maintains it	The platform	You or your host
Product and checkout flexibility	Good for standard shops, limited beyond that	Very high, through extensions or custom code
Extensions	Smaller app markets, often billed monthly	Very large choice, free and paid
Ownership and moving	Site design stays on the platform; product data can usually be exported	Open source: the shop and its data are yours
B2B and trade features	Limited	Wide range of wholesale and trade extensions

How the costs are structured

Plan prices change, so check each platform's current pricing page rather than trusting figures in articles. The structure, though, is worth understanding:

• Wix and Squarespace: selling online usually requires one of the higher-tier business or commerce plans rather than the basic website plans. Some plans add transaction fees on top of payment processing, and higher tiers often unlock features such as abandoned basket emails or advanced shipping. Apps from their marketplaces can add monthly charges.
• WooCommerce: the plugin is free. You pay for hosting, a domain, payment processing and any premium extensions or themes. Costs depend heavily on choices: a lean shop on good hosting can be economical, while a shop with many paid extensions adds up.

Compare the total for your shop, not headline plan prices: the plan or hosting, the extras you actually need, and the fees on a typical month of orders. Our guide to how much a webshop costs in the UK walks through the full list.

When Wix or Squarespace is the better fit

• You sell a small range of straightforward products, perhaps alongside a portfolio or service business.
• Design and speed of setup matter more than flexibility.
• You want no involvement at all with hosting, updates or plugins.
• Your shop is unlikely to need unusual product options, trade pricing or complex shipping rules.
• You are testing an idea and may change direction soon.

Photographers selling prints, a studio selling a few workshops, or a designer selling a handful of products often fit this description well.

When WooCommerce is the better fit

• You have a larger catalogue, many variations or products with custom options.
• You sell to trade customers as well as consumers and need separate prices, approval and order lists.
• You need specific integrations: couriers, accounting software, stock systems, marketplaces.
• Content matters to you, such as buying guides, recipes or detailed category pages for SEO, since WordPress is a strong publishing platform.
• You want to own the shop and its data outright, with freedom to change host or developer.
• You expect to grow and do not want to rebuild later.

The hidden questions people forget to ask

What happens if I want to leave?

With hosted builders, products, customers and orders can usually be exported in some form, but the design and page structure generally cannot be moved to another platform. You would rebuild the site. With WooCommerce, the entire site can move to another host intact.

Who fixes it when something breaks?

Hosted builders take care of the platform but not your content or settings. With WooCommerce, the answer depends on your hosting: on basic hosting, plugin conflicts and updates are your problem; on managed hosting, much of that is handled for you.

Will it handle my odd requirement?

List anything unusual before choosing: personalisation, made-to-order items, rental, subscriptions, delivery by postcode, minimum order values, gift wrapping. Check each one is genuinely supported, not just theoretically possible with a workaround.

Which payment methods can I offer?

Hosted builders support a set list of payment providers, which may or may not include the one you already use or the methods your customers prefer. WooCommerce works with almost every mainstream payment provider through official plugins, so you can choose on fees, payout speed and checkout experience. Our guide to WooCommerce payment options in the UK compares the usual choices.

How much control do I have over SEO?

All three let you edit page titles, descriptions and URLs. WooCommerce goes further: full control over category page content, structured data, redirects and how filter pages are indexed, which matters more as your catalogue grows. For a shop of a dozen products the difference is small; for a shop of several hundred it can be significant.

Moving between them later

Plenty of shops start on Wix or Squarespace and move to WooCommerce once they outgrow the builder. That is a reasonable path, but plan it: export products and customers, list every URL so you can set up redirects and keep search traffic, and rebuild the design rather than trying to copy it pixel for pixel. Moving the other way, from WooCommerce to a builder, usually means accepting fewer features.

If WooCommerce sounds right but the upkeep does not, managed hosting closes most of the gap. Retail Web Hosting provides managed WooCommerce hosting with Elementor included, so you get a drag and drop editor, automatic WordPress, WooCommerce and plugin updates, regular backups and SSL, while the shop and its data stay yours.

Frequently asked