The Shopify alternative that is free until you sell

Shopify is a mature, capable platform, and for a lot of shops it is the right choice. We would rather say that up front than pretend otherwise.

The people who look elsewhere tend to name the same three things. A monthly fee that starts before the first sale. An extra fee on every order when they pay through a provider other than Shopify Payments. And a bill that grows as they add apps for things they assumed were included.

WhizzyCommerce is built around a different deal. Below is what that deal is, where Shopify is still the better fit, and how to decide.

• No monthly fee on Free. €0 a month and 2% of each paid order. When you sell more, Pro is €49 a month and 0.5%, and the whole bill is never more than €499 in a month. The details are on pricing.
• Your own payment provider, with no penalty. The checkout charges your own Stripe, PayPal or Mollie account, or ifthenpay for Multibanco and MB WAY. The money goes straight to you. Our fee arrives on one invoice a month and is never taken out of your payouts.
• Included, not added on. Discount codes, gift cards, abandoned checkout emails, several currencies, a blog, translations and your own domain come with both plans. Unlimited products, customers and orders.
• An assistant that does the work. Tell the shop what to change in one sentence. Claude proposes it, shows you exactly what would change, and nothing happens until you confirm. Every change has a receipt and an undo. More on the AI e-commerce platform page.
• Built for Europe. A dashboard in English, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian and French, prices in euro, and certified invoices in Portugal through your InvoiceXpress or Moloni account.
• No lock-in. No contract and no notice period. Export products, customers and orders as CSV whenever you like.

Sometimes, and it depends on how much you sell and how you take payments. Here is the honest version.

While you are starting out, Free costs less, because there is nothing to pay until an order is paid. A shop selling €500 a month pays about €20 here in total, our fee plus Stripe's, against about €39 on Shopify Basic with Shopify Payments.

If you want to use your own provider, say Mollie, PayPal or ifthenpay, the gap widens, because Shopify adds its own fee on top of that provider's.

With Shopify Payments and steady sales of a few thousand euro a month or more, the two land close together, and Shopify Basic or Grow can come out a little cheaper. The month-by-month figures, with every assumption written down, are on WhizzyCommerce vs Shopify.

• You sell in a physical shop and need point of sale. We do not have it yet.
• You rely on particular apps from a very large ecosystem, or an agency that only builds for Shopify.
• You sell on marketplaces, or sell subscriptions as a product type. Neither is built here yet.
• You want a platform with a long track record. We are in open beta, and our home page lists what is built and what is not.

There is no Shopify importer, and no spreadsheet importer yet either, so be clear on what that means before you start. Products go in by hand, or the shop's assistant adds them one preview at a time and can take the pictures from a web address. Customers and orders do not come across; export them from Shopify and keep them. The free hands-on move we offer is for Magento shops. See importing a shop.

1. 1

   Keep your Shopify export

   Download your products, customers and orders as CSV files from the Shopify admin. They are your records; nothing here reads them yet.

2. 2

   Add your products

   Type them in on the Products screen, where options become real variants, or describe them to the assistant, which adds a few at a time as a preview you confirm and can fetch each product's pictures from a web address.

3. 3

   Pick a look and connect payments

   Install a theme from the theme catalogue, and paste the keys of your own payment provider.

4. 4

   Point your domain

   Attach your own domain, three on Free and ten on Pro, and open the shop.