Webflow vs Shopify: When A Marketing Site Has To Become A Store

If your brand started on Webflow, you probably chose it because you wanted a site that looked exactly the way you pictured it. When selling becomes the site’s main job, the Webflow vs Shopify decision moves to checkout, payments, apps and how you run orders.

Stay on Webflow if you sell a small catalog, in one currency, as one-time purchases, through Stripe or PayPal. Move to Shopify with a custom theme if you need subscriptions, more payment options, more than one currency, or a catalog that’s outgrowing Webflow’s limits.

Is Webflow cheaper than Shopify? Not at the entry level. Webflow’s Ecommerce Standard plan (opens in new tab) is $29 a month per site billed yearly, and Shopify’s Basic plan (opens in new tab) is also $29 a month billed yearly.

The plan names get confusing, because both platforms use some of the same words for very different things. Webflow Plus is $74 a month on yearly billing, and Shopify Plus starts at $2,300 a month. Webflow Advanced is $212 a month on yearly billing, and Shopify Advanced is $299.

The fee column is where the Webflow vs Shopify math starts to separate. Webflow Standard takes a 2% transaction fee (opens in new tab) on top of what Stripe or PayPal charges you to process the card. Webflow Plus and Advanced drop that fee to zero.

That gives you a clear point to move up on Webflow. Webflow Plus costs $45 more a month than Standard on yearly billing, so it pays for itself once you pass $2,250 a month in sales. At $5,000 a month in sales, Standard’s fee is $100, which leaves you $55 a month ahead on Webflow Plus.

Shopify’s fee works differently. Basic’s 2% applies to orders that go through a third-party or alternate gateway (opens in new tab), even when Shopify Payments is turned on. PayPal is the exception: with Shopify Payments as your main provider, PayPal orders don’t carry that fee. Shopify’s own online card rates (opens in new tab) run from 2.9% plus 30 cents on Basic to 2.5% plus 30 cents on Advanced.

So the fair Shopify vs Webflow price comparison at a growing store is Webflow Plus at $74 against Shopify Grow at $79, both on yearly billing. A $5 gap won’t decide this for you.

Webflow’s Ecommerce plans show unlimited sales volume (opens in new tab) on all three tiers, so you won’t get pushed up a plan because revenue grew. The reasons to leave are about what the store can do.

None of these limits matters until your store runs into it, so read them against what you sell today and what you plan to sell next year.

Webflow caps ecommerce items (opens in new tab) at 500 on Standard, 5,000 on Plus and 15,000 on Advanced. That count includes variants and categories, not just products. A shirt in five colors and six sizes is 30 variants, and all 30 count toward your cap.

Ecommerce items are a separate count from CMS items, which hold your blog posts and other content. Webflow Standard allows 2,000 CMS items, and Plus and Advanced allow up to 10,000.

Shopify doesn’t cap products on any plan, and the limit that matters day to day is a default of 2,048 variants per product (opens in new tab). If you sell apparel, footwear or anything with a lot of options, check Webflow’s cap first.

Webflow Ecommerce takes payments (opens in new tab) through Stripe and PayPal, plus Apple Pay and other browser-based methods. There’s no option for another gateway or a regional processor. Local methods such as iDEAL, Bancontact and Boleto aren’t supported natively.

Shopify offers more than 100 third-party payment providers (opens in new tab), which you can use alone or beside Shopify Payments. Shopify Payments itself runs in 41 countries (opens in new tab), and if you’re outside those countries or in an unsupported business category, you’ll need a third-party provider. Some features, such as built-in fraud analysis (opens in new tab), require Shopify Payments.

If you’re a US brand selling to US customers with Stripe, none of this hurts you. It starts to matter when your bank, your industry or your customers need something other than Stripe and PayPal.

Webflow Ecommerce’s native subscriptions depended on User Accounts, and Webflow disabled User Accounts on January 29, 2026 (opens in new tab). The subscription APIs and webhooks went with them, so a new Webflow store can’t set up native subscriptions. Existing subscriptions keep billing through Stripe, but Webflow no longer holds the subscriber or product records.

You can still add recurring billing to a Webflow store through a third-party integration, but it’ll be less seamless for your customers. On Shopify, Shopify Subscriptions (opens in new tab) is a free app made by Shopify. If coffee, supplements, pet food or anything else you sell could run on a repeat order, that alone can settle Webflow vs Shopify for you.

A Webflow store has one currency (opens in new tab). Changing it sets all your products to draft, makes you re-enter prices and invalidates your shipping methods. Webflow Localize, its translation tool, doesn’t cover ecommerce products, categories or ecommerce pages.

Webflow’s plans do include automatic sales tax and VAT calculation (opens in new tab), but only for the US, Canada, the EU and Australia. If your customers are all in those places and pay in one currency, you can stop here. If international growth is in your plan, the store side of Webflow won’t follow the marketing side.

If you’re worried Shopify will box in your design, you’re probably picturing an off-the-shelf theme. A theme isn’t the limit of the platform. Shopify lets you edit your theme’s code (opens in new tab), including its Liquid, HTML, CSS, JSON and JavaScript files. Liquid is Shopify’s template language, the code that pulls your products and content into each page.

That means a custom Shopify theme can carry the layouts your Webflow site has. We build those from blank files rather than from a starter theme, with editable sections so your team can change content without touching code. You give up Webflow’s visual canvas for building pages, and a developer does more of the first build.

You don’t always need custom work. Horizon, Shopify’s free theme family, lets you build layouts in the editor that used to take a developer. It’s the right place to start if design isn’t your main difference from competitors.

Either way, the platform isn’t what makes a store look like yours. Being a brand rather than a template comes from your typeface, your original photography and how you write, and all of those can move with you from Webflow to Shopify.

On Webflow, the cart, checkout, PayPal checkout and order confirmation (opens in new tab) are pages whose parts you can reorder and restyle.

Shopify’s checkout and accounts editor (opens in new tab) changes how your checkout, order status, thank you and customer account pages look. Adding custom pieces to the information, shipping and payment steps takes checkout UI extensions (opens in new tab), and those are for Shopify Plus only, at $2,300 a month and up. If an unusual checkout layout is central to your brand, that’s a real cost on the Shopify side.

Webflow’s control stops at how checkout looks. Its checkout has no server-side logic, so you can’t add a step or call an outside fraud or tax service inside the transaction. Shopify checkout is less open to restyling below Shopify Plus, and Shopify runs it for you.

Can you use Webflow with Shopify? Yes, and there are three ways to do it. Which one fits depends on how much of your store you want on each platform.

A Shopify Buy Button (opens in new tab) puts a product on any outside site, and it’s included in all Shopify plans. You create the button in Shopify, then add its embed code to your page through Webflow’s custom code feature. Product changes in your Shopify admin carry through to the button.

This suits a brand that sells a few products from a marketing site. It gets clumsy as a catalog grows, because you’re placing products by hand instead of building a store.

The second route keeps Webflow as your front end, with products synced from Shopify and checkout on Shopify. The connection runs through third-party apps. Storesynk (opens in new tab) syncs products, variants, collections and tags into the Webflow CMS, and shoppers add to cart on Webflow and pay on Shopify checkout.

Smootify (opens in new tab) works in a similar way through one Shopify app, and its add-ons don’t need Shopify Plus. Looop (opens in new tab) syncs products, variants and inventory, and you’ll need its paid plan, because the free plan doesn’t include Shopify Checkout.

You pay for both platforms plus the app. Use a Webflow site plan with CMS items, such as Premium (opens in new tab), since a synced catalog lives in the CMS and Storesynk doesn’t ask for a Webflow Ecommerce plan. Add Shopify Basic at $29 a month on yearly billing, then the app.

Smootify’s Lite plan (opens in new tab) is $15 a month billed yearly, Looop Plus (opens in new tab) is $29 a month, and Storesynk (opens in new tab) needs a paid plan for a live domain.

Some apps also stop working. Payment, inventory and fulfillment apps keep running, but apps that depend on a Shopify theme don’t (opens in new tab). If a review, upsell or product page app installs through your theme, check it before you commit. Very large catalogs can also run into Webflow’s CMS limits.

The third route is headless, which means you build and run the storefront yourself and Shopify handles the store behind it. In Shopify’s headless model (opens in new tab), its Storefront API serves your products, collections, search and cart, and customers hand off to Shopify for checkout.

An app-connected Webflow site is a light version of this. It takes on some of the same trade-offs, because theme-based Shopify features don’t reach a storefront that isn’t a Shopify theme. If the only reason you’re considering it is design, a custom theme gets you there with one platform to pay for and one place to manage.

Your data moves. Your design doesn’t, at least not as a file. A Webflow design has to be rebuilt as a Shopify theme in Liquid, so budget for it as a design and development project rather than an export.

Shopify’s migration path (opens in new tab) covers products, customers, historical orders, gift cards and store credits, blogs and pages. Move them in that order: products first, then customers, then historical orders. Products and customers can come over by CSV file or a migration app, and historical orders need an app or a custom build by a Shopify Partner.

Two limits shape that work. Product CSV files (opens in new tab) can’t be larger than 15 MB. Webflow’s product CSV holds standard fields only, so any custom fields you’ve added need their own plan.

Historical orders go in last and need an app or a custom build, so they’re the step to plan first in a move from Webflow to Shopify. Decide early how much order history you need in Shopify, and plan the export while your Webflow store is still live.

Redirects protect your search traffic. Shopify’s product and collection pages sit on fixed /products/ and /collections/ paths (opens in new tab), so your old URLs generally need mapping to new ones. Stores below Shopify Plus get up to 100,000 redirects, and Shopify Plus stores get up to 20,000,000, with CSV import on both.

A redirect only works on a URL that returns a 404, and Shopify suggests setting up redirects before you transfer your domain (opens in new tab). Build your map before launch day, not after it. If you’d rather not run this yourself, our team handles moving from Webflow to Shopify, covering the URL map, the redirects, your data and a theme built alongside it.

Webflow vs Shopify has a clear Webflow answer for some brands. If the store is a small part of a site that mainly exists to tell your story, a move would cost you more than it would give you.

Stay on Webflow when your catalog sits comfortably under your plan’s item cap, you sell one-time purchases in one currency, and Stripe or PayPal covers how your customers pay. You can also sell digital products (opens in new tab) from the same setup. Once you’re past $2,250 a month in sales, move to Webflow Plus and the 2% fee goes away.

Our comparison of Shopify and Squarespace lands in a similar place: close on price for a small store, further apart on features as the store grows.

Move from Webflow to Shopify when you’ve got a concrete reason: you want to sell subscriptions, you need a payment option beyond Stripe and PayPal, you’re selling in more than one currency, or your variants are pushing against Webflow’s item cap. Wanting a change of platform isn’t enough, since a move costs real money and time.

If you’ve got one of those reasons and you’re worried about losing the look of your site, that’s the problem a custom Shopify theme solves. You keep the design standard you chose Webflow for, and your store runs on a platform built around selling.