Our guide to UK ecommerce platforms and tools for 2026

Which UK ecommerce platforms and tools should you be using in 2026? Here’s the ecommerce software we love to use, day in, day out.

The ecommerce platform you choose has a big impact on your online store.

Pick the right one, and you get a foundation that’s flexible enough to grow with your business. A platform that provides all the features and functionality you need, and that doesn’t require developer support for every tiny change.

Pick the wrong one, and you spend the next few years working around its limitations, before eventually biting the bullet and migrating to a platform that better supports your ecommerce goals.

As a web design agency in Manchester, we’ve had first-hand experience of many ecommerce platforms and tools (including all the ones included in this article). We have a clear favourite. But we also know that the right platform depends on what you’re actually trying to build.

Whether you’re just getting started in ecommerce or you’re looking to make a success of your ecommerce website redesign, here are the platforms and tools to consider.

The best UK ecommerce platforms for 2026

1. WooCommerce

In our opinion, WooCommerce is the best UK ecommerce platform. It’s the one we recommend for most of the projects we work on.

It’s a free, open-source plugin for WordPress that turns a standard WordPress website into a fully functional online store.

Why we use it

WooCommerce provides everything you need for managing products, categories, baskets, checkouts, orders, payments and customer accounts.

But the main reason we use WooCommerce is its flexibility.

Unlike other UK ecommerce platforms, it doesn’t force you into a template or a fixed set of features. Instead, we can shape WooCommerce around your brand and the way your business actually sells.

We work with clients who have bespoke product options, complex pricing rules or unusual discount or shipping logic. Clients with specific B2B, multilingual content or integration requirements.

WooCommerce can handle all this without requiring awkward workarounds. When a feature doesn’t exist out of the box, it can be built.

For business owners, this means more control. They get a store designed around their products, sales processes and internal workflows. Something that showcases their distinctive brand identity. And that scales with them as the business grows and evolves.

Pros

• Free core plugin — no monthly platform or transaction fees
• Enormous flexibility for custom builds
• Built into WordPress, so your website and store live in one place
• Huge plugin and extension ecosystem
• Scales well

Cons

• Requires more technical knowledge than hosted platforms
• Ongoing maintenance (updates, compatibility checks) is your responsibility
• Needs good hosting to perform well at scale

Costs

The plugin is free. But you’ll need to budget for hosting, a domain, design and development costs and any premium plugins you choose to use.

Best suited to: Businesses that need more than a standard off-the-shelf store, in terms of both design and functionality.

2. Shopify

Shopify is another of the best ecommerce platforms around in 2026, and one that we work with selectively.

It’s a hosted solution, which means your hosting, domain and security are taken care of. The platform is polished, relatively quick to set up and it comes with a strong app ecosystem.

For merchants with straightforward products and standard ecommerce requirements, Shopify is a solid and capable option. But some will find the platform too inflexible.

If your requirements lie outside the scope of Shopify’s templates, things can feel restrictive. You end up relying on multiple apps (which come at a cost and with the risk of app conflicts) or clunky workarounds.

The more bespoke the requirements, the more likely we are to recommend WooCommerce.

Pros

• Quick to set up
• Hosted — security and infrastructure are handled for you
• User-friendly admin interface
• Strong app ecosystem
• Good for teams or business owners without much technical knowledge

Cons

• Transaction fees and/or credit and debit card processing fees
• Less flexibility for custom builds
• Can become expensive when app costs add up
• Not ideal for businesses that need deep WordPress integration

Costs

Plans start from £19/month (Basic) rising to £259/month (Advanced). Transaction fees and/or credit and debit card processing fees also apply.

Best suited to: Business owners with relatively straightforward requirements who want to get a store live quickly and don’t need much customisation.

3. BigCommerce

BigCommerce is often listed as one of the best ecommerce solutions. But we have experience with BigCommerce, and it’s not a platform we regularly recommend.

This software provides web hosting, databases, tools to design your storefront, marketing tools and inventory management. And it’s suited to both big and small ecommerce projects.

However, the platform can feel overwhelming for business owners looking to DIY their own website. There are limited built-in email marketing options. And while BigCommerce doesn’t charge transaction fees, plans are at the pricier end of the scale.

In our opinion, BigCommerce sits somewhere between Shopify and WooCommerce. It’s more capable than Shopify out of the box. But it lacks the flexibility of WooCommerce for custom development.

Pros

• No transaction fees as long as you use a BigCommerce-approved payment provider
• Good native feature set
• Supports product variants
• Good scalability

Cons

• A smaller developer community and ecosystem than WooCommerce or Shopify
• Can feel less polished than Shopify
• Less flexible than WooCommerce for bespoke builds
• Annual sales threshold can force you onto higher-priced plans

Costs

BigCommerce charges its platform fees in US dollars. Prices start at $29 per month (for businesses with up to $30k in annual sales).

Best suited to: Mid-sized retailers with relatively standard requirements who want more functionality than Shopify without moving to a self-hosted solution.

4. Squarespace

Squarespace is good for small businesses that want an attractive website with basic ecommerce functionality built in. The design quality is consistently high and the setup is straightforward.

But take note. This is a UK ecommerce platform with very limited capabilities. Once you need anything beyond simple product listings and a standard checkout process, Squarespace starts to hem you in.

For businesses with genuine ecommerce ambitions, we’d recommend using Shopify or WooCommerce over Squarespace from the start.

Pros

• Beginner friendly
• Good-looking templates
• Hosted and maintained for you
• Reasonable starting price

Cons

• Very limited customisation (all Squarespace websites tend to look the same)
• Weaker product management for larger catalogues
• Transaction fees on lower plans
• Not suited to complex or growing stores

Costs

The Basic plan starts from £12 per month. But, on this plan, you have to pay both transaction fees and credit and debit card fees.

Best suited to: Very small businesses or sole traders selling a small number of products alongside a portfolio or brochure website.

5. Wix

Wix is another website platform that supports ecommerce functionality.

Like Squarespace, it offers a simple way to sell online, and it works well for those who are on a budget and want to design a site themselves.

There’s a drag-drop editor for ecommerce web design and an all-in-one dashboard you can use once your site is live. But Wix isn’t without its downsides.

Build an ecommerce website with Wix, and making changes is difficult. If you want to switch templates, you have to redesign your site from scratch. You’ll also find it hard to migrate your site to a different platform if you find you outgrow Wix capabilities.

Pros

• A user-friendly interface and website builder
• A large app marketplace
• Modern web design templates

Cons

• Lacks extensive ecommerce functionality
• You can’t switch templates without rebuilding the site from scratch
• Difficult to export your site if you want to switch platforms
• Doesn’t support complex integrations

Costs

Basic ecommerce sites start from £16 per month. But you also have to factor in card transaction fees.

Best suited to: Business owners looking for a professional-looking website with basic ecommerce functionality.

UK ecommerce platforms compared

Here’s how the best ecommerce software measures up.

Our preferred tools for ecommerce websites

Beyond the platform you use, there are thousands of ecommerce tools available. These help to improve the functionality, performance or reliability of your website, without adding custom code.

The tools below all play nicely with WooCommerce. They’re the plugins we use on most of our ecommerce builds and are well worth considering for your ecommerce website.

Advanced Custom Fields Pro

Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) Pro is one of our recommended WordPress plugins. It helps us create custom functionality and web pages that are easy for clients to add and edit.

With tailored product information fields, product customisers, conditional options and custom pricing rules, business owners can manage content and settings without having to edit any code.

The end result is a store that is bespoke in terms of design and functionality, but straightforward to manage day-to-day.

WP Rocket

WP Rocket handles website caching and performance optimisation. It improves load times through full-page caching, deferred JavaScript loading, database optimisation and a range of other techniques.

This makes a big difference to store load times — for both human visitors and search engine bots. For ecommerce businesses, this matters because a slow website can affect ecommerce conversions, user experience and search visibility.

Object caching (Redis, Memcached, APCu)

For larger or more complex WooCommerce stores, standard page caching using WP Rocket isn’t always enough.

Object caching improves performance for users who are interacting with dynamic parts of the store. Things like account areas, baskets, order management or admin screens.

For stores with large product catalogues, lots of simultaneous users or complex backend operations, this helps keep the store fast and usable.

Gravity Forms

We use Gravity Forms for advanced form requirements. Enquiry forms, quote request forms, registration flows and anything that needs conditional logic, file uploads or third-party integrations.

Our clients can manage these forms from the WordPress admin area without changing any code. They can update fields, adjust options and review submissions without having to submit a ticket to us.

This ecommerce tool gives business owners more flexibility when collecting enquiries or customer information. It can be used to qualify leads, get enquiries to the right place and reduce back-and-forth communication.

GTM4WP

GTM4WP connects WooCommerce stores with Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics, Google Ads, Meta/Facebook and other tracking platforms. And it’s something we set up as standard on most ecommerce builds.

This tool makes it easy to assess the performance of a website and your marketing efforts by giving insight into things like:

• Product views
• Users who add a product to cart
• Users who make a purchase
• Users who arrive on your site via a particular ad or marketing channel

This helps business owners make better decisions. They have all the data they need to improve their ecommerce website and their marketing tactics.

FiboSearch

We use FiboSearch as an alternative to the standard product search tool that comes with WooCommerce.

That’s because FiboSearch is much more capable. It provides faster search results, search suggestions as you type, and fuzzy matching that finds products even when customers don’t type the exact name.

For stores with larger catalogues, product search is a really important part of the customer journey. Customers who can find what they need quickly are much more likely to buy.

Rank Math SEO or Yoast SEO

Every ecommerce website needs one of these SEO plugins.

Rank Math SEO and Yoast SEO are both capable of handling technical SEO essentials, like page titles, meta descriptions, sitemaps, schema and robots.txt settings.

While these tools don’t “do SEO” on their own, they provide a good framework for setting up the site and adding new content in a way that supports your SEO efforts.

Email and marketing integrations

For an ecommerce business, reliable email delivery is important. Order confirmations, customer notifications, password resets, abandoned cart emails and admin alerts all need to reach the right inbox within seconds.

We usually set up websites to send emails through a reliable, dedicated email service, rather than relying on WordPress defaults.

The same applies to email marketing and abandoned cart flows. We can connect WooCommerce to the email marketing platform that best suits the business and its existing systems.

Getting this right means customers receive the communications they expect, when they expect them — and businesses can run automated email marketing campaigns without messages falling through the gaps.

Polylang Pro

Polylang Pro is our preferred ecommerce tool when we need to create a multilingual WordPress or WooCommerce website.

We like it because it gives good control over multilingual content, and we can customise the setup further where needed. That may mean connecting with DeepL or other AI translation tools to improve the efficiency of the translation workflow.

This isn’t relevant for all businesses. But for those selling internationally or serving customers in more than one language, this tool helps to create a localised store experience, which has a big impact on conversion rates.

Rollbar

Rollbar is an error monitoring service that sends alerts when something goes wrong on an ecommerce store. It means we (and our clients on maintenance plans) hear about technical issues in super-fast time — often before customers notice them.

For ecommerce businesses, this is invaluable. A broken checkout, a failed payment integration or an error in the order flow can cost sales every minute it goes undetected.

Rollbar means problems get picked up and fixed fast, protecting the customer experience and reducing the risk of small technical issues turning into bigger operational and reputational problems.

A word on custom code for ecommerce websites

Although we use plugins where they make sense, we don’t use them to meet every website challenge.

For features like customer-specific pricing, B2B registration forms, quote requests, product customisers, custom shipping rules, custom discount logic and bespoke workflows, we prefer to write custom code.

This gives us more control. It means cleaner code and a faster website. It also helps us meet the client’s exact requirements rather than just coming close with an off-the-shelf plugin.

A website with fewer, well-chosen plugins and some targeted custom code almost always outperforms (and is easier to maintain) than one loaded with extra tools.

A Radical ecommerce website: where to start?

As you’ve probably gathered by now, WooCommerce is our favourite ecommerce platform. It gives us the flexibility to build around your business, rather than forcing the business to fit the platform.

That means bespoke design and functionality. And a store that can adapt as your business grows and evolves, and as your product selection, sales and website visitors increase.

Our tried-and-tested approach combines WooCommerce and carefully selected ecommerce plugins. It also incorporates custom development where it’s needed to produce a store that’s perfectly tailored to your business.

If you’re thinking of building a new online store or if you’ve outgrown your current ecommerce setup, we’d love to talk it through.

Ready to get started? Get in touch with the Radical team to set up a call.

FAQs

What is an ecommerce platform?

An ecommerce platform is the software that powers an online store. It manages everything from product listings and inventory to the shopping cart, checkout, payment processing and order management.

Some platforms are hosted, meaning the provider handles the technical infrastructure. Others, like WooCommerce, are self-hosted, meaning you’re responsible for website hosting and maintenance.

What are ecommerce tools?

Ecommerce tools are the plugins, integrations and software used alongside an ecommerce platform to extend its functionality or improve performance.

They often handle things like product search, email marketing, analytics tracking, page speed optimisation and error monitoring.

The right tools depend on the platform you’re using and what you want your store to do.

What is the best ecommerce platform for small business?

It depends on what you need. For very simple stores, Squarespace or Shopify can be a quick and easy starting point.

For businesses that want more control, better customisation or a platform they won’t outgrow, WooCommerce is a better option.

Do I need an agency to build a WooCommerce store?

Not necessarily for a simple store.

But for anything beyond the basics — stuff like custom design, bespoke functionality, performance optimisation, integrations with other systems — working with an experienced WooCommerce agency will get you much better results than a DIY build.