An outdoor brand in Leeds ran a tidy Shopify store and a messy back office. Clubs in Manchester and Birmingham ordered by email because a public discount would have broken the consumer price. VAT receipts sometimes showed ex-VAT figures because an app and the theme disagreed. Stripe fees were predictable. The app stack was not, at £80–£300 a month on top of the plan. GoCardless collected a repair subscription that the subscription app handled clumsily. This is an operations question for a live retailer, not a beginner's tour of platforms.
Keep Shopify while you are one shop
If London customers and Leeds customers buy the same SKU at the same VAT-inclusive price, stay. Plans from about £25 to £250 a month, plus 20% VAT on agency help, beat a custom team while the catalogue is retail-only. Fix the receipt before you commission a rebuild. That is often where UK ecommerce projects start.
Custom when trade prices are the margin
A custom store at £28,000–£75,000 is justified when clubs need logins, VAT invoices must follow your accountant's layout, and Stripe plus GoCardless should not depend on two plugins. The planning model put 24-month Shopify-plus-apps at £22,000 and a custom consumer store at £41,000. Adding the trade portal, and removing the staff time it replaced, brought the net figure to £33,000. Glasgow and Edinburgh stockists were asking for logins. Bristol and Liverpool could wait a season.
Checks before a replatform
- Six months of app invoices beside Stripe fees.
- A sample of VAT receipts that match the on-page price.
- Whether a GDPR deletion request can clear marketing tags without a developer.
- How many Manchester or Birmingham orders still arrive as spreadsheets.
- Only then brief design. A new homepage will not fix a trade price list.
We will say if the move is early
CrazzyCodes would rather keep you on Shopify for another year than invoice a migration you do not need. If the trade portal is already the growth path, the estimate names export, VAT, Stripe, and GoCardless before build starts. You own the store if you later change supplier.
Put the Shopify bill next to a custom scope
We will show VAT, Stripe, and trade logins as lines, then say whether a move is worth it. Ecommerce in the UK
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