EKM vs Shopify (2024) – Which One is Better for UK Businesses?

EKM and Shopify are two very popular options for UK businesses, with EKM being the largest UK based ecommerce platform having helped over 80,000 businesses start selling online and Shopify being one of the biggest names in ecommerce with over 1 million users worldwide.

But which one is the best option for UK businesses? That is what we are going to answer in our in-depth comparison of EKM vs Shopify.

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EKM vs Shopify: Quick Summary

EKM vs Shopify – which one is the best? Shopify does just edge it for a couple of reasons:

1. Price – Shopify is a lot cheaper, especially for new and small stores
2. Website Builder – Shopify’s website builder offers more customization options
3. Ease-of-use – overall, Shopify is the easier platform to use in a number of areas

Feature-wise, the platforms are similar but Shopify does have a much larger selection of apps and integrations.

One area where EKM is better is support as it is UK-based and they offer their evolution mode which can be helpful but we just feel that Shopify offers the better overall package.

4/5

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4.4/5

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Pricing

• Evolve: £300/m

Try EKM

• Basic: £25/m
• Standard: £65/m
• Advanced: £344/m
• Plus: From $2000/m

Try Shopify

As you can see, there is a big difference in pricing between the two platforms.

EKM now only offers 1 plan, which is the £300/m Evolve plan as they removed the different priced plans in September 2024 and while this does simplify things, it also makes them quite expensive, especially for new or small stores.

If you go over the £300k limit, you then pay £100 for each additional £100k turnover up to £1 Million and then it is £100 for each additional £1 Million turnover.

The transaction fee applies only for payments received that aren’t through EKM Pay (their in-house payment gateway).

Shopify don’t have turnover limits but instead charge a transaction fee for an payment received through a third-party payment gateways such as PayPal and Amazon Pay and it does depend on the plan you are on as to the fee you pay:

• Shopify Basic – 2%
• Shopify Standard – 1%
• Shopify Advanced – 0.5%

This does give you more control as to which plan you choose but figuring out which one is going to be cost-effective is a challenge but you can use tools such as our Shopify Fee Calculator to help you figure it out.

For enterprise-level businesses, Shopify has its Plus program, which is a plan that is built specifically for your business.

Free Trial

Both EKM and Shopify offer a free trial:

• EKM offers a 28 day free trial
• Shopify offers a 3-day free trial followed by the first month costing £1

Features

One of the main selling points of any ecommerce platform is the features that they offer for their users, so what do these two platforms offer?

EKM

With the EKM platform, you do get to pick and choose many of the features that you have on your website as they work in a very similar way to apps. This is because they are single click installation/removal and in total, there are over 40 of these to choose from and most of them are free to use.

One of the best features of the EKM platform is its Evolution Mode. With this, you get a review of your site by EKM’s specialist Evolution team, who will give you advice on how you can improve your site from design to functionality.

Shopify

While the standard features are very good, it is the amount of third-party apps that are available within the Shopify App store that is really impressive. With over 3000 to choose from, covering everything from ecommerce features, marketing and SEO to order and inventory management.

Due to the vast amount of Apps on offer, it really isn’t possible for me to even begin listing them here.

Unfortunately though, not all of these apps are free to use. Many do offer free trials or plans but if you want access to all of the features that the app has to offer, then you will need to opt for the paid plan.

The paid plans do range in price from a couple of dollars a month to around the $100 a month range. Always be vigilant when installing apps as you could soon find yourself with a hefty monthly bill!

Website Builder

EKM

One area where EKM was never the strongest but at the end of 2021, EKM overhauled their theme selection and customisation options to bring their users a more updated and easier to use tools, which give users more control over how their sites look and feel.

As of updating this post, there are only a small number of themes that work with the new theme customisation tools but there are still 25 themes that work with the old theme customizer but these will be fazed out/replaced with new themes.

The new theme customizer has improved one of the areas where EKM was lacking as users now have considerably more control over the look and feel of their site as they can now:

• Easily rearrange existing sections by dragging and dropping them
• Choose to add or remove sections from the homepage
• Change any text directly within the customizer
• Change font type and theme colours
• Easily edit footer content and links

Overall, this has been a big improvement with EKM’s theme customisation and they are adding small tweaks and improvements all the time but it still isn’t the most intuitive tool to use and one thing we would like to see added would be the option to create a custom navigation menu.

With EKM you can add custom pages to your site but you can only add content with a basic text editor and you don’t get access to any of the sections that are available within the theme customizer, there are also no SEO tools for the pages.

If you want to add a blog to your store, you will need to install this feature and it allows you to easily add blog posts to your site but the formatting options are limited but it does include some SEO tools.

Shopify

One of the areas where Shopify is very strong is their website builder and it is arguably one of the best ecommerce website builders on the market.

In terms of theme selection, Shopify offers over 100 free and paid themes via their own theme store and the paid options range from $200 – $350 but there are also themes available from marketplaces such as ThemeForest or direct from developers, meaning that there are plenty of options out there.

But where Shopify’s website builder really excels is when it comes to customisation as they offer a full site editor, which allows you to:

• Add, remove and rearrange sections on nearly all page types
• Customise the header and footer (including the navigation menu)
• Lots of theme settings including colours and fonts

It is also very easy to use and one thing that is good with the Shopify website builder is that not only can you create custom pages but you can build templates for these pages using the customizer, which allows you to build some really good looking pages.

Shopify also includes a built-in blog but this is a little bit on the basic side as you only get a text editor for your content, which limits the formatting options but there are page builder apps that can add many more options and all of Shopify’s pages include SEO tools that let you set a custom URL and metadata.

Support

One of the reasons why people choose a hosted ecommerce platform such as EKM or Shopify is that they get help and support to run their website. But how good is either platforms offering?

EKM

One of the areas the EKM prides itself on is its support and they offer a lot, not only do you get access to their highly rated UK-based support in the form of:

• Live chat
• Email
• Phone

Support isn’t available 24/7 but support times are great for UK business as it is available 8am – 6pm Monday to Friday and 9am – 5.30pm on Saturdays.

Shopify

Shopify made some changes to their customer support in 2023, with an overhaul of the help centre and all support moving to live chat (with the help of an AI chatbot) and email.

This has made contacting their support easier and it is available 24/7, you just have to figure out how to get past the chatbot so that you can speak to a human operator.

They also have a community forum that is frequented by their support staff and other users will also offer help and advice where they can.

Hosting & Performance

On paper, there is little to choose between the two platforms when it comes to their hosting as both offer:

• Unlimited Bandwidth
• Unlimited Storage
• PCI Compliant Servers
• 99.9% Uptime

Now this all sounds fantastic but we don’t take these platforms at their word, so we put them to the test by:

Taking 5 live customer examples site and running them through Uptrends speed tool using the London, UK server once a day for three days testing both the mobile and desktop performance, so how did these two platforms perform?

Uptrends Desktop: 1.16 Seconds
Google Desktop: 86/100
Uptrends Mobile: 1.28 Seconds
Google Mobile: 55/100

Uptrends Desktop: 2.78 Seconds
Google Desktop: 82/100
Uptrends Mobile: 3.33 Seconds
Google Mobile: 42/100

As you can see, EKM was the clear winner when it came to load time but the scores were quite close on the Google PageSpeed scores.

If you want to see how the two compared against the competition, check out our fastest ecommerce platforms post.

EKM vs Shopify Video

Ease of Use

What the platforms offer in terms of features, website builder and support are one thing but we think that ease of use is just as important as any of these because your ecommerce platform should make the process of running your store a lot easier, not more stressful so how do EKM and Shopify compare?

Getting Started

EKM

Getting started with EKM is very simple as all you need is an email address, create a password, select which plan you would like to try, input some basic business details such as name and address and you are good to go!

Once you have signed up, you will be greeted by a comprehensive set up guide that takes you through pretty much everything you need to know in order to get started and as mentioned above, you also get a 30 minute welcome call from one of the the team to help you get started and also answer any questions you may have about the platform.

The EKM admin dashboard is pretty easy to navigate as the sidebar navigation menu is well labelled and contains the following sections:

• Dashboard (home page)
• Shop
• Orders
• Analytics
• Design
• Features
• Settings

The only one that doesn’t really work is the Shop section, which is covered in more detail in the next section.

Shopify

Getting started with Shopify is equally as easy as you only need an email address, your shop name and create a password to get started.

Once you have completed to sign-up process, you will be greeted by a setup guide but it doesn’t contain that many steps and misses out on quite a few of the important things you need to do in order to get up and running.

Fortunately, they do have a very good video series in the form of the Shopify Academy that will take you through setting up your online store. There are also some useful hints and tips in these videos.

The main Shopify dashboard is very well laid out and easy to navigate around as the main sidebar navigation menu is clearly labelled and all of the headings and sections are clearly defined as to what they do. This make it very easy to learn where everything is and the uncluttered layout is also aesthetically pleasing.

Inventory Management

Being able to manage your stock efficiently and effectively is a hugely important part of running an online store and for me there are three main areas to this and they are:

• Adding products
• Organising your Products
• Managing your inventory

EKM

Most of EKM’s inventory management is done in the shop section and the add new product page appears as a pop-up, like in the image below:

The pop up to add a new product is easy to use a follows a logical flow through the different sections and once they are all completed, clicking save will add the new product to your store.

Adding a new category is very similar to adding a new product, only with fewer sections that you need to fill out. With EKM, you can add parent and sub-categories, which makes creating a hierarchy really easy to do.

As standard, managing your inventory is not the easiest thing to do in EKM as you need to navigate through the shop preview that appears in the Products section of the dashboard and find the product you want to edit, which isn’t the best workflow.

EKM have introduced an inventory manager that was designed to make inventory management a lot easier and it includes a selection of bulk management tools, which includes price and stock levels and is an improvement over the standard system but we feel that this should replace the default products section that really isn’t very useful or easy to use.

Shopify

Shopify have gone for a single page layout for their add product page and it has a very nice flow from section to section and this makes it very simple to add a new product to your store.

Organising your products is a little tricky as the Shopify collections system is completely straightforward due to their being a few different options on how to do this.

Using the manual collections is very similar to a traditional category systems but the automatic one is based of rules that you set up using product tags and to get the working effectively, it is worth reading through the documentation.

Setting up sub-collections is also not particularly straightforward as you need to do this when you are editing your navigation menu, not in the collection creation or edit page.

You can manage your inventory levels on the inventory page but if you want to make changes to the pricing, SKU code or any other field from the product, then you can select the products you want to edit from the product overview screen and then click the edit product button, which allows you to make updates in bulk.

Managing Orders

EKM – You can manage orders in bulk or on an individual basis with EKM. From the order overview page, you can print orders directly and there are four options for the layout of the invoices/packing slips, you can also update the order statuses. If you use any third-party software for your order, then you can export all of your order information in CSV format.

If you need to manage or update an individual order, you can do this from the overview page or by going into the order.

Shopify – The order management system in Shopify isn’t the best as standard as you can only print off packing slips, if you want to print invoices or any other paperwork, you will need to install an order printer app to make it more useable.

While being able to print off order information isn’t great in Shopify, they do have some useful bulk management features including being able to change order statuses, capture payments and export order information.

Summary

Conclusion

EKM vs Shopify: Which One is Best Ecommerce Platform for UK Businesses?

Even though both platforms are good options, Shopify does come out on top for two main reasons:

1. It has a much better website builder than EKM, including theme selection and customisation
2. It is easier to use and some of the workflows are more efficient

Shopify also offers a larger range of features and has more integrations with 3rd party software.

There are something that EKM does better than Shopify with the two main ones being support because EKM’s team is UK-based (plus they have evolution mode) and they beat Shopify in our performance testing but we think that Shopify offers the better overall package.

But we highly recommend trying both platforms out for yourself so that you can find the right platform for your business.

4/5

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Try EKM

4.4/5

EcommerceGold Score

Try Shopify

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Paul Haywood

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Hi, I'm Paul, the Owner and Founder of EcommerceGold.
I ran my own Ecommerce Business for over 7 years and now help others start their own online retail empires!

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