The bit nobody mentions: lock-in
Monthly price is the easy thing to compare. The harder, more expensive thing is what happens when you want to move. On the hosted builders, your shop isn't really yours — it's a tenancy. Wix can't be exported at all; if you leave, you rebuild from scratch, and your store data doesn't even come out. Squarespace lets you take some text and blog posts but not your store, your design, or — on its newer sites — anything at all. Shopify hands you a spreadsheet of products and orders, but the shop itself is built in its own locked templating language and stops existing the moment you stop paying.
A site on your own hosting is the opposite. It's standard, open-source software (the same WordPress and WooCommerce that runs a huge share of the web), sitting in files and a database you own. You can back it up, move it to another host, or hand it to a developer — without anyone's permission and without losing a thing. The domain is yours too. That's the difference between renting and owning.
So why do the builders feel cheaper?
Because the monthly fee is small and the lock-in is invisible until you need it. Add the subscription up over a year, factor in the per-sale fees, and a £25–£39/month plan is several hundred pounds a year — every year, forever, for something you can never take with you. Your own site is a flat hosting cost and software that's free to run.
For people building something to keep
Owning your online shop, plainly explained
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Common questions
Is this comparison fair — what about card processing?
Card processing (roughly 1.5–2.9% plus a few pence) is charged on almost every platform, including your own site, so the per-sale figures here include each platform's standard online card rate. The real, structural differences are the monthly subscription and — the part that doesn't show up on a price page — whether you can ever leave with your shop intact.
Isn't running your own site harder?
There's a little more to set up at the start, which is exactly what a host like Centaur is for — we handle the hosting, SSL, email and the heavy lifting, so you get the ownership and portability without running a server yourself. And because it's standard software, any developer can help you, not just one platform's specialists.
Can I move an existing Wix or Shopify shop to my own site?
Shopify and Squarespace let you export at least your product and content data, which can be brought into a WooCommerce store. Wix is the hard case — there's no real export, so it usually means rebuilding. Either way, once you're on your own site you never face that wall again.