For business owners across Northern Ireland, Ireland, and the UK, selecting the right website platform is a critical decision directly impacting their digital success. At ProfileTree, we work with businesses of all sizes to develop websites that drive real results—traffic, leads, and sales—not just attractive designs.

Wix and Shopify are two popular options for companies looking to establish or upgrade their online presence without extensive technical knowledge. While both platforms offer user-friendly solutions, they serve distinctly different business needs and objectives.

“The platform you choose should align with your specific business goals and growth trajectory,” says Ciaran Connolly, Director of ProfileTree. “For e-commerce-focused businesses, the investment in a specialist platform like Shopify often delivers significantly better conversion rates and customer experiences than general website builders.”

This guide examines Shopify’s capabilities, ideal use cases, and implementation approaches to help you make an informed decision for your business.

When Shopify Makes Sense for Your Business

Shopify ranks among the top business website solutions available for e-commerce operations. It’s particularly well-suited for businesses that:

• Already have an established business and want to expand online
• Focus primarily on selling products rather than just showcasing services
• Need robust inventory management and payment processing
• Plan to scale their online sales operation over time

If you’re looking for a simple brochure website to showcase your services, Shopify might not be the most cost-effective option. For businesses across Belfast and wider Northern Ireland, we’ve found that service-based companies often achieve better results with more flexible platforms.

Shopify stands out with its commerce-focused features:

• 24/7 technical support, trained explicitly in e-commerce issues
• Templates optimised for SEO and mobile shopping experiences
• Robust security features designed for transactional websites
• Built-in analytics focused on sales performance

For business owners with limited technical or design experience who need a fully functional online store, Shopify offers a compelling solution at a fraction of the cost of custom development. While Shopify doesn’t offer a free version (unlike Wix), it provides a comprehensive free trial lasting approximately three months, giving you ample time to test the platform before committing.

Setting Up Your Business Website on Shopify

The Shopify setup process is straightforward and begins at Shopify.com. Here’s how businesses in the UK market typically approach the setup:

1. Create an account with your email to start your free trial
2. Answer basic questions about your business type and needs
3. Specify where you plan to sell (online store, social media, marketplaces)
4. Identify the types of products you’ll offer
5. Name your store and get a temporary URL

Many of our Belfast clients appreciate that this guided process helps tailor the platform to their specific business model from the start. After completing the initial setup, you’ll access the Shopify dashboard to manage products, settings, and sales channels simultaneously.

Shopify Dashboard and Theme Selection

This is where you can access all your products simultaneously, along with your settings and sales channels. Shopify offers a vast theme library. You can alter the dawn theme, which you have by default. However, they also have many other topics. On their theme store, they have a ton of free and paid themes. Additionally, you can check through each Theme to choose the one you like.

In addition, you can change this with material, pictures, and colours consistent with your Theme. In other words, depending on your chosen Theme, you don’t start with an empty canvas; you build from things like a theme or colour scheme. While some themes are free, the majority of them are not. You may choose the Theme based on its pricing using the filter on the side.

They are often in the 200 to 400 range, but again, depending on your budget, they can be too expensive or fit well inside it. So, that’s something to consider when choosing a theme. Doing it yourself might be cheaper than employing a company to complete it. Therefore, even though it has a fee, it is still cheaper than hiring an agency to create it for you.

All Shopify themes, whether gratis or paid, are optimised for:

• Conversion optimisation
• Mobile responsiveness
• Search engine visibility
• Fast loading speeds

Customisation Options for Your Business

Shopify offers more technical flexibility than Wix in certain areas. If you have some coding experience or access to a developer, you can upload custom code to create unique sections and functionality using Shopify’s Liquid theme language.

For businesses without technical expertise, Shopify’s section editor allows you to add various components like:

• Product collections
• Image galleries
• Testimonial sections
• Featured product highlights
• Newsletter signup forms

Mobile Optimisation Approach

When building your Shopify site, one important consideration is understanding how mobile optimisation works. Unlike Wix, which allows you to switch between desktop and mobile views while editing, Shopify takes a different approach.

Shopify uses responsive design principles, which allow your content to adjust automatically to different screen sizes. You can modify how certain elements appear on mobile devices, but changes will affect mobile and desktop versions.

For businesses in Northern Ireland and across the UK, where mobile shopping continues to grow yearly, proper mobile optimisation is essential for capturing sales from customers browsing smartphones and tablets.

Product Management and Integration

From the product’s dashboard, you must enter the product name, a brief description, and any media, such as image files or actual product images. Therefore, you should use authentic product photographs, not stock photography. You should then include some pricing to compare the prices of different apps. If you wanted to add a sale price, for instance, if this were on sale, it would also appear as a sale price item.

You may keep track of the quantity, set the shipment weight for various delivery methods, and assign it a category. As a result, it’s crucial to give products to certain types when adding them. It just makes it simpler for people to comprehend what this product is about while also enabling them to browse and search by specific categories. Regarding business websites, you need to confirm that customers can easily find your products.

You can also integrate new apps, just like Wix. You can link drop shipping accounts using tools like drop shipping applications. More tools can assist you in managing it, such as Page Feed, Optimisers, Shopify emails, and Instagram feeds. Shopify allows you to add multiple sales channels to your dashboard if you sell on Facebook or Google. Adding products to your Shopify site will automatically feed into your Facebook and Google platforms. You can also set them up there, if you’d like, on any platform you’re selling to.

Shopify Pricing Plans

When you first sign up for it, you can pay £1 each month. However, their plans often start at £19 and run up to £344. So that’s the most fundamental up to their most sophisticated. The performance, however, will never change. You receive the same allocation amount for all of them, regardless of your site’s size, number of products, and other factors.

Therefore, all plans contain everything mentioned above, including limitless contacts, sales channels, 24/7 support, manual order creation if necessary, and other features. The Shopify online store is also included in the base subscription, and you may upgrade to incorporate a point of sale.

Basic Plan Features

Starting with the most basic plan, it has everything you’ll need to build your store, customise your products, and handle payments. They are much more expensive than all third-party payment processors’ transaction costs and fees. For the basic plan, you can use any third-party payment processor; in other words, you can use any processor other than Shopify’s. Therefore, transaction fees will apply to services like Stripe, Apple Pay, and similar ones.

For the basic plan, you receive up to two staff employees, enabling you to use two different accounts for your shop for up to 1,000 locations and basic reporting. Five employees will increase if you choose the Shopify account and obtain extra shipment information. There are many benefits even with the most basic plan, and just as with Wix hosting and any other type of hosting in general, you can choose a plan only for a month or a year. It is easy to adjust your plan anytime by upgrading or downgrading.

Advanced Plan Advantages

With the advanced plans, additional currency conversion fees, if you are selling in various currencies, are the key differences between these plans.

The fee drops to 0.5% from the most basic 2% when you get the advance. Your transaction fees will be lower if your plan is more expensive. The exchange rate conversion cost is the same for all of them, but if there are tariffs or imports, there is also a 0.5% tax rate. With the advanced, you also receive up to 15 staff members, professional reports, some foreign pricing, and shipping costs that a third party has calculated.

As a result, when it comes to technological details, all of these are essentially the same.

Multiple Shops Under One Account

For businesses with diverse product lines or multiple brands, Shopify allows managing several stores under a single account. However, each shop requires its own separate plan – you cannot share a single plan across multiple shops. This setup works well for UK businesses with distinct brand identities or those selling to different market segments that require separate storefronts..

Customer Management and Analytics

There is a list of customers who have purchased something from your business website. It’s pretty simple to see things like returning customers, new customers, previous customers, potential consumers, and folks who still need to make a purchase. Once more, based on their signup options, you can always choose whether you want to email older consumers a little bit and see how it works for you.

Analytics

This is where you can view overall sales over time. You may view total sessions, essentially the lengths of time people spent on your site from when they logged in to when they completely left. So that you can track sessions over time, visitor numbers, and return customer rates. They have their data, but you can also compare to various days, months, and other periods by adding Google data and Google Search Console to the mix.

It is straightforward to see which products are performing well, which products are not performing well, and whether it is worthwhile to keep selling those products. Therefore, when it comes to your online store, the reporting tool is undoubtedly something you want to watch.

Conclusion

Shopify is mainly for those who already have an online store and require nothing more than a business website. Wix would be better if you also need other functionality. If you lack the technical know-how to set up your business website, it’s straightforward to set up yourself using Shopify. However, even though Shopify offers free and commercial themes, you can also design your own Theme. If you enjoy the Shopify platform, e-commerce capability, and pricing, everything should work well for you.

Shopify offers a fully customised theme, access to an online marketing and e-commerce platform, and the ability to link to other platforms. Again, this would be a great alternative if you wanted to build your business website. However, whether you do so will truly rely on your circumstances, including your financial situation, level of technical expertise, desired website design, and other factors.

At ProfileTree, we help businesses across Northern Ireland, Ireland, and the UK evaluate their specific requirements and implement the right digital solutions for sustainable growth. Our web development team specialises in creating optimised, high-converting sites on various platforms, including custom Shopify implementations.

Whether you choose Shopify, Wix, or another solution, the key is selecting a platform that aligns with your business objectives and provides the specific features you need to serve your customers effectively. For personalised advice on choosing and implementing the right e-commerce solution for your business, contact our Belfast-based team for a consultation.