Shopify is a popular ecommerce platform headquartered in Ontario, Canada. But if you’re looking for a Shopify alternative based right here in the UK, you’re in the right place.
Here’s what makes us a superb UK alternative to Shopify.
Shopify vs Shopblocks: In a Nutshell
|
Shopblocks |
Shopify |
| Headquarters |
UK (Stockport, Greater Manchester) |
Canada |
| Transaction Fees |
ZERO! No transaction fees charged by Shopblocks. 3rd party credit card fees apply. |
There's a "credit card fee" of 1.6% plus 20p per online transaction if you use Shopify Payments - Shopify's own payment processing system. So this ultimately
If you use a third party provider, you pay Shopify transaction fees plus the third party provider's fees. |
| Monthly Pricing |
From £5/month for non-ecommerce and £39/month for ecommerce up to £199/month |
From $29 to $299 |
| Design Retraints |
None. With BlockLab you're free to design your site as you wish and don't even need a designer or developer to do it |
Theme based platform. So you choose a theme and then any design retraints are subject to that theme's limitations |
Shopify vs Shopblocks: Pricing and Transaction Fees
Our ecommerce subscriptions start at £39/month. And while on the surface, you may think Shopify's $29 entry level ecommerce offering is good value, it's vital you take transaction fees into account.
We charge no transaction fees whatsoever to any of our customers. None. Nada. Shopblocks won't take a penny from you for taking payments online on your Shopblocks ecommerce site. Your third party payment provider will charge a card fee. If you use stripe, this will be a fee of 1.4% + 20p at the time of writing.
Shopify has its own payment handler - Shopify Payments. Transactions on Shopify payments are 2.2% + 20p for $29/month users falling to 1.6% + 20p for the $299/month accounts.
If you decide to use a third party payment provider like Stripe or Paypal, then you'll pay fees to Shopify in addition to fees to the third party payment provider.
This means that for businesses making even a reasonable number of sales per month, Shopify's additional transaction fees can soon add up.
No Design Restraints
You really can make your online shop look however you want with Shopblocks and our innovative Blocklab tool. You won’t be limited to themes and templates and you can make changes quickly and easily yourself without a designer or developer.
SEO Ready
Shopblocks websites are SEO ready from the moment you launch, with a whole host of SEO considerations taken care of for you:
- Automatic redirects put in place for you
- Canonical tags
- Easily modifiable titles, descriptions and content
- Speedy websites
- Mobile friendly
Control of your Robots.txt file
A more advanced SEO consideration for ecommerce is that of crawl budget optimisation - trying to take some control over which parts of your site Google crawls ultimately and stopping it from crawling parts you don't want it to see.
For those without much knowledge of SEO, we make sure our robots.txt file is absolutely fine right out of the box. Shopify does that too.
But we also let you make modifications (which Shopify does not). We think it would be a tad arrogant of us to assume that SEOs would never want to make changes to a default robots.txt and we think this makes us a great Shopify alternative for people who want more control over this element of their SEO.
UK Based
We’re a UK based platform and our clients are trading from the UK. Our support is all UK based too with 24/7 email support and UK office hours telephone support.
Put us to the Test as a Shopify Alternative
We think we’re as easy to use and SEO friendly as Shopify is. But with our UK headquarters and our cost saving approach to transaction fees, we think we’re a solid alternative if you’re looking to set up your online shop right here.
Book your Demo
You can, of course, simply sign up and go! But if you’d prefer the opportunity to see a demo of Shopblocks, simply book your appointment. The demo will take approximately 15 minutes and we always allow a little extra time for answering any questions.
