Shopify vs Custom Website vs Tilda: Which Fits Your Store?
We have shipped stores on all three paths. Here is when each one wins, what the platforms charge per order, what three years cost on public prices, and what changes in the UAE.
Key takeaways
- Shopify fits a standard catalog that needs payments now, custom code fits a store tied to bookings, a CRM or a warehouse, and Tilda fits a simple catalog on a small budget.
- At $10,000 a month in card sales, processing costs about $11,500 over three years, 11 times Shopify Basic's $1,044. Grow beats Basic above about $25,000 a month (US prices, October 2026).
- Shopify Payments works for businesses in 40 countries and regions, including the UAE, the US and every EU country except Slovakia. Elsewhere, Basic adds a 2% fee on top of your provider's rate.
- Tilda holds up to 5,000 products on Personal and 50,000 on Business, but code export leaves the product catalog behind: products can only be managed on Tilda.
- In the 2025 Web Almanac, 76% of Shopify sites pass Core Web Vitals on mobile, against 35% of WooCommerce sites. Tilda isn't in the table.
Shopify is the better choice for a standard catalog that needs checkout and payments from day one: Basic costs $29 a month billed yearly in the US. A custom website pays off when the store is part of a bigger system with bookings, customer records or stock in several warehouses. Tilda, from $10 a month, suits a simple catalog and a fast start. Prices as of October 2026.
This guide is for founders picking a platform for a first store or outgrowing the current one. We have shipped stores on all three paths: Shopify for a Spanish caviar farm selling in the US, Tilda for a barber brand in Minsk, custom code for a wellness brand in Bali and a chess platform in Germany. Shopify prices below are US prices unless stated.
Shopify vs custom website vs Tilda: which fits which store?
Pick by business model, not by design. Shopify fits a standard catalog that needs payments now. A custom build fits a store that shares data with bookings, a CRM (customer relationship management system) or a warehouse. Tilda fits a simple catalog on a small budget.
Plans, fees and limits from the Shopify, Tilda and Stripe pricing pages and the Tilda catalog guide, as of October 2026. Shopify and Stripe: US prices.
| Shopify | Custom website | Tilda | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fits | Standard catalog, checkout and payments from day one | A store inside a system: bookings, CRM, stock, your own rules | Simple catalog, fast start, small budget |
| Plan, billed yearly | Basic $29/mo, Grow $79, Advanced $299 | No platform plan; you pay for hosting | Personal $10/mo, Business $20 |
| Card payments | Shopify Payments: 2.9% + 30¢ on Basic. Other providers: their rate plus 2% | Your provider's rate, e.g. Stripe at 2.9% + 30¢ | Your provider's rate; no Tilda fee listed |
| Product limit | Unlimited | None set by a platform | 5,000 on Personal, 50,000 on Business |
| Where it stops | Logic beyond a catalog needs apps or custom code | You pay for the build and own the upkeep | The cart suggests no add-ons; the catalog stays on Tilda |
| Our case | Esturión: 45 products for the US | RYTM: store moved off Tilda in 8 weeks | Barber & Co: store rebuilt in place, 795 product pages |
When does Shopify win, and what does it cost per month?
Shopify wins when the range is standard and you want checkout, payments and stock running from one admin on day one. In the US the plans cost $29, $79 and $299 a month billed yearly ($39, $105 and $399 billed monthly), and Plus starts at $2,300 a month, per Shopify's pricing page as of October 2026.
The plan is the smaller part of the bill. Shopify Payments, the platform's built-in card processing, charges 2.9% + 30¢ per online order with standard cards on Basic, 2.7% on Grow and 2.5% on Advanced. Premium cards cost more (3.5% + 30¢ on Basic), and international cards add 1%.
If you use another payment provider instead, Shopify adds a third-party transaction fee: 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced and 0.2% on Plus, on top of that provider's own rates. Paid apps for reviews, subscriptions or wholesale come on top as well; the cost model below assumes $50 a month.
On Esturión de Sarrión, a Spanish caviar farm selling across the continental US, we built the store on Shopify. It holds 45 products in 5 collections with 111 purchase options, including seven house caviars in six tin sizes from 30 g to 1 kg. Shopify runs checkout and stock, PayPal and Venmo sit inside Shopify Checkout, and the team manages everything from one admin.
A wholesale page sends trade orders from 3 kg straight to sales through a four-field Shopify form. On the Refresh theme the store scores 100 for SEO and 93 for accessibility in Lighthouse, Google's automated page audit, on mobile.
Shopify gets awkward when the business is more than a catalog: paid consultations, your own sales pipeline, stock across warehouses. Each gap means another app subscription or custom code around the platform.
Is it better to build your own website or use Shopify?
Build your own store when it is one part of a system a platform can't model; otherwise Shopify is cheaper and faster to launch. With custom code you own the code and the data, and you also own hosting, security updates and checkout.
There is a middle path: headless Shopify, where Shopify keeps products, checkout and payments while a separate front end renders the pages. Shopify's own route is Hydrogen:
"Hydrogen and Oxygen make up Shopify's recommended stack for headless commerce." — Shopify developer docs
Oxygen, Shopify's hosting for Hydrogen, comes at no extra charge on paid plans. Teams that prefer Next.js, a React framework, read the same Shopify data through its APIs. Headless suits content-heavy brands with in-house developers; for a few dozen products, it adds a second codebase to maintain.
RYTM, a wellness brand in Bali, ran its store on Tilda, but products, orders, stock and bookings needed one home. We moved rytm.shop onto the brand's own platform 8 weeks after the first commit, with the same look for shoppers. The catalog lives in the brand's database, checkout prices DHL shipping to 53 countries in 9 zones, and paid consultations on rytm.health go through Stripe Checkout.
One back office with 18 sections runs the business behind both sites: a CRM with a 6-stage pipeline, stock per warehouse, supplier bills and FIFO (first in, first out) margins.
ChessProfi needed logic no store platform ships with: players register and pay for a chess tournament through Stripe, a waitlist fills free seats, and a FIDE-certified engine pairs each round (FIDE is the international chess federation). We built ChessProfi from zero on Supabase, a hosted Postgres database with sign-in and server functions, and it now lists 1,000+ tournaments.
The weak spot of a custom store is checkout. Baymard Institute puts average cart abandonment at 70.22% across 50 studies, updated September 2025. Among US online shoppers who abandoned an order, leaving out those who were just browsing, 18% did so because the site wanted them to create an account. A custom checkout needs guest orders and a payment page people trust, which is why RYTM's bookings and ChessProfi's sign-ups both take payment through Stripe.
If you go custom, our guide on how to choose a development company in the UAE lists what to check before you sign.
How far can a Tilda store go?
Further than most people expect. Tilda's paid plans hold up to 5,000 products on Personal and 50,000 on Business, with up to 1,000 categories, per Tilda's catalog guide. The limits lie elsewhere: features Tilda doesn't have, and a catalog that stays on Tilda when you export the site.
Barber & Co, a Minsk store of professional hair, face and body care, stayed on Tilda. In 3 weeks of build on the live store we split it into two storefronts, for her and for him, over one catalog, turned 115 flat sections into a tree, cut 22 filter groups to 5 and moved 795 product pages to tabs in one import. Catalog photos became 30 times lighter: 26 MB of originals load as 0.8 MB.
Tilda's cart suggests nothing on its own, so we wrote the upsell: it ranks up to 12 add-ons from a hidden pool of 254 products and shows how far the order is from free delivery. The Barber & Co case shows the full rebuild.
Payments on Tilda go through connected providers such as Stripe and PayPal, or cash on delivery, per Tilda's payment guide; the pricing page lists no per-order fee from Tilda itself. The catch is the exit. Code export on the Business plan downloads the site as a .zip of files for your own server, but the store doesn't travel with it:
"Product Catalog cannot be exported. This service is only available on Tilda." — Tilda Help Center
On an exported site, products open only from the product list, direct product links stop working, and products are unpublished 7 days after the subscription is canceled. On the Free plan, Tilda keeps the catalog for 30 days, then deletes it.
What does each platform cost over three years?
At $10,000 a month in card sales, card processing is the largest public line on every platform, about $11,500 over three years. The plans add $360 on Tilda Personal and $1,044 on Shopify Basic.
Model: 36 months, $10,000 a month in online card sales (100 orders of $100), domestic standard cards, US prices billed yearly, as of October 2026. Prices from Shopify, Tilda, Stripe and Vercel. App spend and the hosting choice are our assumptions.
| 36 months | Tilda Personal | Shopify Basic | Shopify Grow | Custom |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Platform plan | $360 | $1,044 | $2,844 | $0 |
| Hosting | Included | Included | Included | $720 (Vercel Pro, 1 seat) |
| Card processing | $11,520 (Stripe, 2.9% + 30¢) | $11,520 (2.9% + 30¢) | $10,800 (2.7% + 30¢) | $11,520 (Stripe, 2.9% + 30¢) |
| Apps, assumed $50/mo | n/a | $1,800 | $1,800 | Part of the build |
| Total before build | $11,880 | $14,364 | $15,444 | $12,240 |
| Without Shopify Payments | n/a | +$7,200 (2% fee) | +$3,600 (1% fee) | n/a |
| Design, build, upkeep | By scope | By scope | By scope | By scope, the largest line |
Card fees run about 11 times the Basic plan ($11,520 against $1,044), so the payment setup decides the bill. Grow pays for itself over Basic above about $25,000 a month in sales: it costs $50 more and saves 0.2 points on every card payment. Billed monthly, the break-even rises to about $33,000.
Without Shopify Payments, the 2% fee adds $7,200 over three years on Basic, almost 7 times the plan, and Grow beats Basic from $5,000 a month in sales.
The table leaves out the biggest variable: design and build. For scale, Clutch's e-commerce pricing guide, updated September 21, 2026, puts the average e-commerce development project reviewed on Clutch at $51,943, while most cost less than $10,000. These are market figures from Clutch reviews, not a NextGenSoft price list. For your scope, a partner gives an estimate on a call.
Which store platform is fastest for real users?
On real-user data, Shopify leads the big platforms: 76% of Shopify sites pass Core Web Vitals on mobile, against 35% of WooCommerce sites, per the 2025 Web Almanac by HTTP Archive, published in January 2026. Core Web Vitals are Google's three field metrics: LCP (how fast the main content appears), INP (how fast the page reacts to a tap) and CLS (how much the layout jumps).
Share of mobile sites with good scores, selected platforms. Source: Web Almanac 2025, Ecommerce chapter.
| Platform | Good LCP | Good INP | Good CLS | Pass all three |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Shopify | 86% | 90% | 92% | 76% |
| Squarespace Commerce | 76% | 96% | 89% | 69% |
| Wix eCommerce | 76% | 85% | 95% | 66% |
| 1C-Bitrix | 71% | 71% | 86% | 50% |
| WooCommerce | 39% | 88% | 85% | 35% |
| Magento | 52% | 87% | 64% | 35% |
Tilda isn't in the Almanac's table, and a custom store is its own case: it can beat any theme or lose to all of them, depending on how it's built.
Speed tracks sales. Across Shopify stores, every 100 milliseconds of slower loading went with about 3.5% lower conversion, and stores with a 2.5-second LCP converted roughly 30% worse than stores at 1.5 seconds, Shopify reported in April 2026. Shopify calls this a correlation, not direct causation, and the data covers its own stores only.
The cheapest win is usually images. On Barber & Co we cut catalog photos from 26 MB to 0.8 MB, and all 885 product photos now load as WebP, a compact image format, on phones. The platform stayed the same.
Selling to the UAE, US and EU: payments, currencies and languages
Check where your company is registered before you pick a plan. Shopify Payments works only for eligible businesses located in one of 40 supported countries and regions, per Shopify's Help Center as of October 2026. The list includes the UAE, the US, the UK and every EU country except Slovakia.
If your company sits elsewhere, in Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey or Kazakhstan for example, you connect a third-party provider and pay Shopify's extra fee on top of its rates.
Prices differ by country too. The UAE pricing page lists Basic at $24 and Grow at $69 a month billed yearly, against $29 and $79 in the US, with online standard card rates of 2.9% + AED 1.00 on Basic and 2.8% on Grow. With a 0.1-point gap, Grow pays for itself in the UAE only above about $45,000 a month.
For a custom store, Stripe charges 2.9% + 30¢ per domestic card payment in the US and 2.9% + AED 1.00 in the UAE. International cards add 1.5% in the US and 1% in the UAE, and currency conversion adds 1%.
Languages are the second filter. In Shopify, each published language gets its own URLs, per Shopify's language guide. On Tilda a second language usually means copied pages: its multilingual guide suggests a site per language or language pages in one site, and warns that "creating websites with more than three language options may require some professional designer's assistance."
RYTM sells in English, Russian, Indonesian and Spanish, with product copy written by hand in each. Its 44 store pages, 11 per language, are linked with hreflang, the tag that tells search engines which language version to show. ChessProfi runs its interface in 10 languages, from German to Arabic and Hindi.
How to choose your store platform: a 7-question checklist
Answer these before you compare themes or quotes.
- Where is your company registered? If it's not on the Shopify Payments list, every online card order on Basic carries a 2% Shopify fee on top of your provider's rate.
- What do you sell? A standard catalog with sizes and colors fits Shopify or Tilda. Paid bookings, your own subscription rules or wholesale price lists point to custom code.
- What must the store talk to? List every system: CRM, warehouse, accounting, delivery. Each one is an app, an integration or a reason to build.
- How many languages? One or two work anywhere. Three or more with hand-written copy and hreflang favor Shopify or custom code.
- What are your monthly sales? In the US, Basic beats Grow below about $25,000 a month on Shopify Payments; above that, Grow wins.
- Who runs the store day to day? A Shopify or Tilda admin needs no developer. A custom store needs one on call.
- How will you leave? Download your product data now and check what stays behind if you switch.
Put the answers on one page and you have the core of a brief. Our one-page software development brief template shows the rest. We build on all three, whichever fits the job; see how a project runs on our website design and development page.
Questions we get asked
Is Shopify worth it for a small business in 2026?
Usually yes, if you sell a standard catalog and want checkout, payments and stock in one admin without a developer. Basic costs $29 a month billed yearly, and Shopify Payments takes 2.9% + 30¢ per online card order (US prices, October 2026). At $10,000 a month in sales, card fees come to about $320 a month, 11 times the plan. It gets expensive when you stack paid apps or can't use Shopify Payments.
Is Shopify Payments available in the UAE?
Yes. As of October 2026, the UAE is one of 40 countries and regions where businesses located there can use Shopify Payments, along with the US, the UK and every EU country except Slovakia. On Shopify's UAE pricing page, Basic costs $24 a month billed yearly, and online payments with standard cards cost 2.9% + AED 1.00 on Basic and 2.8% + AED 1.00 on Grow.
When is headless Shopify with Next.js overkill?
For most stores with a few dozen products. In a headless setup Shopify keeps products, checkout and payments while a separate front end renders the pages, so you maintain two codebases and pay developers for both. It pays off for content-heavy brands with in-house developers who need pages a theme can't build. Shopify's own recommended stack is Hydrogen, with Oxygen hosting at no extra charge on paid plans.
Should I choose WooCommerce instead of Shopify?
Choose WooCommerce if you already run WordPress and have a developer to look after hosting, updates and plugins. The 2025 Web Almanac found it on 44.4% of ecommerce sites on mobile, the most of any platform, but only 35% of WooCommerce sites pass Core Web Vitals on mobile, against 76% of Shopify sites. A fast WooCommerce store is possible but takes more technical work.
Can I move from Tilda to Shopify later without losing SEO?
Yes, if you plan the move. Download the product list from Tilda as a CSV, map its columns to Shopify's product import template, and set 301 redirects from every old product and category URL to its new address before launch. Tilda's code export leaves the catalog behind, so that CSV is your copy of the data. After the switch, watch Google Search Console for a few weeks.
How long does it take to build an online store?
It depends on scope more than on the platform. On our projects, RYTM's store moved off Tilda onto the brand's own platform 8 weeks after the first commit, and the Barber & Co rebuild took 3 weeks of work on the live Tilda store. Clutch's e-commerce pricing guide, updated September 21, 2026, puts the typical timeline of an e-commerce development project reviewed on Clutch at 9 months.
Sources
- Shopify pricing · Shopify, 2026
- Shopify Payments supported countries and regions · Shopify Help Center, 2026
- Tilda pricing plans · Tilda, 2026
- How to add products to an online store on Tilda · Tilda Help Center, 2026
- Code export · Tilda Help Center, 2026
- Pricing and fees · Stripe, 2026
- Web Almanac 2025: Ecommerce · HTTP Archive, 2026
- E-Commerce Website Development Pricing Guide 2026 · Clutch, 2026
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About the author
Artsiom Yankovich
Head of Design & Strategy
Leads design and strategy, from product logic to brand. 9+ years, 150+ projects.
