WhizzyCommerce vs Shopify: fees, features and fit

Shopify charges a monthly plan. If you take cards through Shopify Payments, the card rate covers processing and there is no extra transaction fee. If you use another provider, Shopify adds a transaction fee on top of what that provider charges.

Shopify's help centre says third-party transaction fees apply on all third-party and alternate payment gateways, even when Shopify Payments is switched on. The exceptions are PayPal and manual payments, which are not charged that fee while Shopify Payments is active. Shopify Payments is available in Portugal and most of the EU.

Two plans. Free is €0 a month and 2% of each paid order. Pro is €49 a month and 0.5%, and the plan and fee together never pass €499 in a month. That ceiling is reached at €90,000 of sales; every sale after it that month carries no fee from us.

The fee is added up as orders are paid and billed on one invoice a month. It is never taken out of your payouts, because the checkout charges your own Stripe, PayPal or Mollie account, or ifthenpay in Portugal. Your provider charges its own processing fee, which you agree with them directly: Stripe's standard rate for European cards in Portugal is 1.5% + €0.25. See payments and pricing.

Fees in percentages are hard to compare in your head, so here is the total for a month, card processing included, at four levels of sales. The cheapest column is not always ours, and we have not adjusted the assumptions to make it so.

• Starting out, Free costs less. Below roughly €1,700 a month, paying nothing until you sell beats a monthly plan.
• With Shopify Payments and steady sales, Shopify can be a little cheaper. From a couple of thousand euro a month, Basic or Grow on Shopify Payments comes out a few percent below us under these assumptions. Yearly billing widens that.
• With your own provider, we cost less. If you want Mollie, PayPal or ifthenpay for Multibanco and MB WAY, Shopify's extra fee on Basic is 2%, and our total is lower at every level in the table.
• At high volume the ceiling matters. Past €90,000 a month our fee stops growing, so the gap narrows again as you sell more.

Shopify is stronger on breadth and track record: point of sale, a very large app and theme ecosystem, marketplaces and subscriptions through apps, and many years of running shops at every size. If you need any of that today, it is the safer choice.

WhizzyCommerce is stronger when you want to start without a monthly fee, keep your own payment provider without a penalty, and run the shop by telling it what to change. Every change the assistant makes is previewed first, confirmed by you on a page we draw, and comes with a receipt and an undo. Agents can work on the shop over MCP with named, scoped access. In Portugal, certified invoices go through your InvoiceXpress or Moloni account. And we are in open beta: the home page lists what is not built yet, so you can judge for yourself.

If price is what brought you here, the short version is on Shopify alternative. If you are also weighing a self-hosted option, see WhizzyCommerce vs WooCommerce.