Webflow vs Shopify for Selling Online: Plans and Limits

If you're choosing between them specifically to sell online, the difference isn't which one is "better" — it's how each one charges you for growth. Webflow gates a store by item count (products, categories, SKUs, and variants together) and a transaction fee that drops as you pay for a higher tier; Shopify includes unlimited products on every plan and instead scales its price by staff accounts, card rates, and add-on features. This guide checks both on their own pricing pages, checked September 2026 (webflow.com/pricing, Webflow Ecommerce overview, shopify.com/pricing).

What does it actually cost to sell on each one?

Webflow prices ecommerce as its own plan, separate from — and on top of — a Site plan. Per Webflow's pricing page, on its yearly billing view:

That transaction fee is a Webflow platform charge, separate from whatever your payment processor (Stripe, PayPal, and similar) charges to actually move the money. Our Webflow Ecommerce guide covers the full plan details, including what counts toward that item limit (products, categories, SKUs, and every variant, not just distinct products) and what the plans leave out.

Shopify doesn't sell a separate ecommerce plan — commerce is the product, and every tier is priced together with hosting, checkout, and staffing:

Both companies also run separate promotional signup offers on top of these standing prices — Shopify's pricing page showed "Try 3 days free, then $1/month for 3 months" at the time of this check — so treat the table numbers as the standing reference point and check each live page for whatever offer is running when you sign up. Our Shopify pricing guide covers what each tier unlocks beyond the price and rate, including staff-account counts and shipping discounts.

Neither one has a genuinely free way to sell

Webflow's Starter Site plan is free, but Ecommerce itself is not — it's a separate paid plan you add, starting at $29/mo. Shopify has no free tier at all; its "Start for free" buttons lead to a trial, after which a paid plan is required to keep selling. If cost is the deciding factor for a first store, the entry price on either platform is functionally the same $29/mo, just structured differently: Webflow's is a standalone Ecommerce plan (with a 2% transaction fee on top), and Shopify's is an all-in-one Basic plan (with a 2.9% + 30¢ card rate and no separate platform transaction fee when you use Shopify Payments).

What does each platform charge as you scale, beyond the plan price?

On Webflow, the main scaling cost is the transaction fee: Standard's 2% platform fee drops to 0% on Plus and Advanced, which at meaningful sales volume can matter more than the plan-price jump itself — do that math against your own average order value rather than picking a tier on price alone.

On Shopify, card-processing rates step down with each plan (2.9% → 2.7% → 2.5% → 2.25% + 30¢, per plan, using Shopify Payments), and Shopify's own comparison table lists a separate third-party transaction fee if you use a payment provider other than Shopify Payments instead. Staff-account limits also scale by plan: Basic doesn't list extra staff accounts on its plan card, Grow adds 5, and Advanced adds 15 more on top of that, per Shopify's plan comparison.

What product types and selling channels does each support?

Webflow's product editor supports five types, per its own documentation (Webflow, "Add and manage products and categories"): Physical, Digital, Service, Membership, and Advanced (a catch-all for anything that doesn't fit the other four). Billing runs as either a one-time payment or a subscription — but subscriptions and memberships depend on a feature Webflow has since turned off. Webflow's own Subscriptions article states plainly: "On January 29, 2026, User Accounts functionality will be disabled on all Webflow sites," and the same article lists enabling Ecommerce and User Accounts as a requirement for offering subscriptions. In practice, that means recurring billing and gated membership content aren't a working option on Webflow today, regardless of which Ecommerce plan you're on — our Webflow memberships guide covers the current status and third-party alternatives.

Shopify has no equivalent gap: subscriptions, memberships, and recurring billing are standard territory for Shopify stores, typically through its app ecosystem rather than a native toggle, and every Shopify plan includes in-person selling (Shopify's plan cards each say "Sell online, in person, and in AI chats") alongside its online checkout — something Webflow's ecommerce plans don't offer at all, since Webflow has no point-of-sale product.

What does each one leave out?

Webflow's real gaps, per its own documentation: customer accounts and self-service order history are listed on Webflow's ecommerce page as "(Coming soon)," not live today. Ecommerce can't be combined with Webflow Localize on the same site. And once you enable Ecommerce on a site, Webflow's help center states directly: "Once you've enabled Ecommerce, you cannot deactivate or remove it. You can't delete Ecommerce Collections (i.e., products, categories, and SKUs) after activating Ecommerce" — so test it on a separate site rather than an existing production one if you're not sure yet.

Shopify's real gaps, by comparison, aren't about ecommerce features — its comparison table gates things like custom app development, headless storefronts, and API rate limits behind higher tiers, and physical retail tools (POS Pro) are listed as a +$89/mo add-on for physical storefronts, while the Plus tier lists up to 200 POS Pro locations as included.

Who is each one not for?

Webflow Ecommerce isn't the right tool if you need customer accounts with order history today, a multilingual store (Localize and Ecommerce can't run together), recurring subscriptions or gated memberships, or in-person/POS selling — none of those are currently available regardless of which Ecommerce plan you pick.

Shopify isn't the right tool if the site is mostly a marketing or content site with occasional sales rather than a dedicated store — you're paying a commerce-first platform's price and design constraints for a job a general-purpose site builder or CMS might do more simply, and if visual, from-scratch page design (rather than themes and apps) is what you actually want to control.

Which should I actually pick?

• Pick Webflow Ecommerce if the store is secondary to a highly designed marketing site, your catalog is simple, one-time-purchase, and stays under the item caps above, and you don't need memberships, subscriptions, or in-person sales.
• Pick Shopify if selling is the primary job of the site, you need subscriptions, memberships, or in-person/POS sales, or your catalog is large and variant-heavy — Shopify's unlimited-product model avoids the item-counting math Webflow's plans require.

Where does Figment fit in?

Nowhere for the store itself. Figment publishes a website from a Figma design through its Figma plugin; it has no products, checkout, or payment processing of its own. If you need a highly designed marketing site or landing page in front of a store that runs on Webflow or Shopify, Figment can publish that piece — the cart, checkout, and order management still have to run on one of the two platforms above.

Bottom line: Webflow charges for ecommerce as an add-on plan gated by item count and a shrinking transaction fee, while Shopify bundles unlimited products into every plan and instead scales price by staff accounts, card rates, and add-ons. Webflow's ecommerce plans currently can't do subscriptions, memberships, customer order history, or in-person sales; Shopify covers all of those natively or through its app ecosystem. Check webflow.com/pricing and shopify.com/pricing directly before committing a catalog to either plan.