The Shopify alternatives for a small shop

What you really pay with Shopify

The Basic plan, the one that fits a single shop, costs 36 € a month paid monthly and 27 € a month paid a year in advance, on the Italian price list read on 23 October 2026. On top comes the payment fee: with Shopify Payments every online card sale costs 2.1% of the amount plus 0.30 €. If you would rather take payments through another provider, Shopify still keeps an extra 2% of every order. The Basic plan includes no additional staff accounts: whoever works with you uses your login.

The free trial lasts 3 days and the first 3 months cost 1 € a month: an entry price, not the price. The sum worth doing is the one from month four onwards, because that is what you will pay for years.

Then there is what the price list does not say. You pick and adapt the theme yourself, or pay someone to. The pages the law requires to sell in Italy, the privacy notice, the terms of sale and the withdrawal form, you write yourself. Many functions you would expect included, from electronic invoicing to reviews, are separate apps with a subscription of its own. None of this is hidden: it is simply outside the price.

WooCommerce: the software is free, the shop is not

WooCommerce is a free extension for WordPress, and the official site says so plainly: no subscription, no share of your takings. The same site then lists the rest of the bill, in dollars: hosting that for most shops runs from 25 to 350 dollars a month, paid extensions from 29 to 299 dollars a year each, and the fees of whichever payment provider you choose. Add the domain, the security updates and the time of whoever keeps it all standing.

It is the right choice if you already have a WordPress site and somebody who looks after it, or if you want control over every detail and are willing to pay for it in hours. It is the wrong choice if the thought of updating a plugin makes you anxious: a WooCommerce shop left behind on updates is the most common way a small site ends up compromised.

Wix, Squarespace and the rest: site and shop in one subscription

Template platforms sell the site and the shop together, for a monthly fee and an editor in which you do everything yourself. On the Wix list the plans that accept payments are not the entry ones but the middle ones, so the price shown large is rarely the one a seller pays. Squarespace charges a 2% fee on shop sales on its base plan, which disappears on the plans above. Ecwid does something different: it adds a cart to a site you already have, with no fee on sales and an entry plan limited to a handful of products.

The exact euro figures change by country and by promotion, so we do not copy them here: the price lists are in the sources at the foot of the page, with the date we read them. What does not change is the model: you pay little, you do everything, and the shop is as polished as the time you manage to give it.

The shop inside a site that somebody else runs

It is the model we chose, and it should be said at once that it is not the lowest on the price tag. The site costs €29.99 a month and the online shop adds €25 a month: €54.99 in total. Activation is a one-off €150. Inside are things that elsewhere are your work or a separate cost: we build the site and we change it when you write to us, domain and hosting are included, the legal pages for selling in Italy are generated and kept current, the site is in Italian and English, and we take no commission on orders.

On payments you pay only the card fee, which is the payment provider Stripe's: for standard European cards 1.5% of the amount plus 0.25 €, on the Italian price list read on 23 October 2026. The money reaches your bank account in automatic payouts, not a balance you have to request. You load the catalogue yourself from the dashboard, with photos, colour and size variants, stock, sale prices and discount codes; shipping labels print from the order or through your own courier; the emails to customers go out under your name.

The bill at the end of the month, with the numbers in hand

The honest way to compare is to add subscription and fees on your real volume, not to read the home-page price. Take an average order of 50 €. With Shopify Payments the fee is 1.35 € (2.1% plus 0.30 €); with a card on a FlashWeb shop it is 1.00 € (1.5% plus 0.25 €). The difference, 35 cents an order, is small on one order and becomes a real line on a hundred orders a month. The subscription leans the other way, and the table shows it without rounding: those are the two sides of the scale, and which weighs more depends on how many orders you take and what your time is worth.

The questions to ask before choosing, whoever you ask

Whichever road you take, five questions spare you the most expensive surprises, and they are worth asking in writing before you sign or type in a card. Whoever answers all five clearly is a supplier you can work with; whoever hedges on one is telling you in advance where the problem will be, and it is usually also the line that will cost the most.

• Is the domain registered to me? If I change supplier, the address customers know has to come with me.
• Can I export products, customers and orders to a file, at any time?
• Who writes the legal pages for selling in Italy, and who updates them when the law changes?
• What does the next change to the site cost, and in how many days does it arrive?
• Free trials and first-quarter prices aside, what do I pay in month thirteen?

When Shopify remains the right choice

We are not writing this page to tell you Shopify is wrong. If you sell in several currencies, if you need customer accounts with order history, gift cards, selling on Instagram and on marketplaces from the same catalogue, or if you expect staff to run the shop with logins of its own, it is a mature platform with an app ecosystem no small alternative matches. Our shop is built for a business with a contained catalogue that wants to sell online without also becoming its own IT department. Those are two different needs, and the right choice is the one that looks like yours.