Shopify vs Wix (2026): The Store-Math Showdown

In every shopify vs wix matchup we audit, the opening entry is a coincidence: both platforms sell their cheapest real store plan for $29 a month on annual billing, both process standard US cards at 2.9% + $0.30 through their in-house gateways, and both charge 0% platform commission on top. Same sticker, same per-sale cost, to the cent. They are nonetheless entirely different machines. Shopify is a commerce engine with a website attached; Wix is a website builder with a serious store module bolted on.

We priced both the way we price everything: plan fee, processing, surcharges, and the costs that only surface after month three. All figures below were verified in August 2026. The interesting ledger is not the entry price — it is where the machines diverge as revenue grows.

The sticker: $29 either way

Shopify Basic bills $29 a month on annual billing and $39 month-to-month — a 25% spread, which is Shopify pricing your commitment. Wix Core is $29 annual and $36 month-to-month. Mind what sits below each entry plan: Wix's $17 Light plan cannot accept payments at all, so Core is the true floor for a Wix store, and Shopify's $5 Starter sells only through links and social channels with no full storefront. For an actual store, $29 is where both ledgers open.

Shopify sweetens its entry with a 3-day free trial and then $1 a month for the first three months — against the annual rate, roughly $84 of plan fee left in your till. Wix has no equivalent promotion in our notes; its $29 is the $29 from day one.

The per-sale math: identical at the bottom

Run the standard CartCraft example — $2,000 a month in sales, 40 orders, $50 average order. Processing on either platform: $2,000 × 2.9% = $58.00, plus 40 × $0.30 = $12.00, totalling $70.00. Add the $29 plan fee and both receipts print $99.00 a month. Cost per $50 order: $1.75 on either machine, an effective 3.50% take. At the entry tier there is no spread to arbitrage — the store-math showdown is a dead heat until you look past the standard card.

The identity holds only on standard cards through the house gateways. Wix Payments bills AmEx at 3.7% + $0.30, PayPal at 3.49% + $0.49, and buy-now-pay-later at 6% + $0.30. Shopify Payments bills premium and AmEx cards at 3.5% + $0.30 on Basic. And Shopify charges a 2.0% surcharge on Basic if you process through a third-party gateway, on top of that gateway's own fees — Wix charges no surcharge whichever gateway you connect.

A few 2026 roundups still claim Wix takes a 4% commission on Core and 2% on Business. Wix's own fee schedule lists no plan commission on any paid plan. We book the official schedule and treat the 4% claim as an error.

Where Shopify pulls ahead

Checkout is the till, and Shopify's is the best-documented in the business. A Big-Three-consultancy study puts Shopify checkout at up to 36% better conversion than competing platforms and about 15% better on average. Two caveats belong on the same line: Shopify commissioned the study, and even a fraction of that lift swamps every fee in this comparison — a 5% conversion lift on a $2,000 month is $100 of extra revenue, more than the entire monthly bill.

The app catalog runs to roughly 13,000+ apps by most counts — the largest of any builder by a wide margin, though we have not audited the count ourselves. More measurable: Shopify's rates fall as you climb. Grow ($79 a month annual) processes at 2.7% + $0.30; Advanced ($299) at 2.5% + $0.30. Bookkeeper's rule: Grow pays for itself at $25,000 a month, where the 0.2-point rate saving equals the $50 plan-fee difference. Wix's rate never falls.

In person, Shopify POS processes at 2.6% + $0.10 on Basic, with POS Pro at $89 a month per location for retail depth, and shipping discounts run up to 77% on Basic. Add 200+ built-in reports and the pattern is clear: when commerce is the whole business, the ecosystem depth is the product.

Where Wix wins

Ease, first. Wix remains the gentler build: one editor produces the store, the blog, the booking page, and the brochure pages, with a design latitude on content pages that Shopify's theme system does not attempt. If the catalog is one department of a broader site, that consolidation is worth real money — it is a second platform you never have to buy, integrate, or reconcile.

And the store module is no toy. Core includes marketplace and social sales channels, abandoned-cart recovery, and product reviews. Business ($39 a month annual) adds automated sales tax and shipping label printing; Business Elite ($159) adds multi-currency selling — primary plus ten — and Smile.io loyalty. The limits show at the edges: dropshipping caps at 25 products on Core and 250 on Business, reaching 50,000 only on Elite. A catalog-plus-content site rarely meets those edges.

The growth crossover

Our audit line: Wix eCommerce is excellent to roughly mid five figures a month and thins out past it. The tell is in each platform's ceiling. Wix tops out at Business Elite, $159 a month, still processing at 2.9% + $0.30. Shopify continues to Advanced — $299, 2.5% + $0.30, up to 15 staff accounts, live carrier-calculated shipping rates — and then to Plus from $2,300 for the enterprise tier. At $40,000 a month in sales, the 0.4-point rate gap between those ceilings is worth $160 a month before a single feature enters the discussion.

This is why our best ecommerce website builders ranking scores Shopify 9.3 and Wix eCommerce 8.4. It is not that the Wix machine is 0.9 points worse today — it is that Shopify's ledger keeps improving with volume, and Wix's does not.

Lock-in: read the exit clause

Both machines hold you, differently. Wix does not export site design — re-platforming means rebuilding, which is why we tell anyone who suspects they will outgrow it to start elsewhere. Shopify's holds are softer but priced: the 2.0% surcharge on Basic makes leaving Shopify Payments expensive ($40 a month on our standard example — more than the plan fee), and an app stack accumulated at $50–$150 a month migrates nowhere. Neither exit is free; Wix's is merely paid in rebuild hours rather than percentage points.

The balance

Commerce-first: take Shopify Basic — the same $29 buys the stronger checkout, the deeper ecosystem, and a rate that falls as you grow. Site-first with a store attached: take Wix Core — more site per dollar, identical per-sale cost, and store features a catalog-plus-content business will actually use. The stickers match; the trajectories do not.