Webflow vs Shopify for E-commerce: Which Platform Fits Your Store, Team, and Growth Goals?

Webflow and Shopify are both popular choices for brands that want to engage in e-commerce. 

Both can host a storefront, present products clearly, and take customers from browsing to payment. With either platform, you can publish product pages, organize a catalog, accept secure payments, collect shipping details, send order confirmation emails, and manage orders after purchase. 

However, there are some differences, and although they can feel subtle at first, they shape how easy it is to design the site, update content, run promotions, and expand the store as your needs grow. 

The question comes to which foundation fits the way you want to sell and the way you want to build. 

We will now go into detail about what each one has to offer and whether they are suitable for your e-commerce goals.

Core E-commerce Functionalities of Webflow

Webflow E-commerce is a good fit when you care about the storefront experience, and you want the store to live inside a fully custom website, not the other way around. 

Day to day, it feels like you are designing and iterating your store the same way you would build a high-end marketing site, then managing products and orders inside a clean, lightweight commerce layer.

Core capabilities you get in Webflow ecommerce include

• A fully visual storefront builder with custom product and category templates
• Product management with variants, inventory tracking, and digital or physical products
• Built-in cart and checkout with payments via Stripe and PayPal
• Shipping and tax settings that cover standard e-commerce needs
• Order management with customer details and fulfillment status
• Automated transactional emails and clean CMS driven content pages that support selling

Pricing is simple and generally good value if you want design flexibility without stacking a bunch of extra tools. The ecommerce tiers are Standard, Plus, and Advanced, and the main differences are product limits, feature depth, and how much volume the plan is built to handle.

Core E-commerce Functionalities of Shopify

Shopify feels like running a store first and a website second, which is exactly why it’s the default choice for e-commerce. 

You log in, and the entire admin is built around selling, not building pages. Products, inventory, orders, shipping, taxes, discounts, and customer flows are all organized like an operating system for commerce, so you spend less time stitching things together and more time getting the business live.

Core capabilities you get in Shopify include

• Product and inventory management built for growing catalogs and frequent updates
• A mature checkout experience with multiple payment options and strong conversion defaults
• Shipping, tax, and order workflows designed for day-to-day operations
• Discounting, gift cards, and other sales tools that are native to the platform
• A large app ecosystem to add subscriptions, reviews, loyalty, upsells, and more
• Built-in reporting and channel integrations for selling beyond your website

Shopify pricing tiers scale with operational needs. Basic works for launching, mid tiers add better reporting and team features, and higher tiers support more complex shipping and lower payment rates, which can matter once volume grows.

Webflow vs Shopify Comparison

If you are choosing between Webflow and Shopify, you are really choosing what you want to be easy by default. Webflow makes it easier to shape the storefront and the story around your products. Shopify makes it easier to run the commerce machine behind the scenes.

Does that mean there is something in Webflow you can't do in Shopify or vice versa? Yes. There are a few clear hard limits, and there are also areas where both can get you to the same outcome, but one platform will make you work harder to get there.

• Storefront control and how “custom” your store can feel
  Webflow is built for full layout control, and it lets you style the cart, checkout, and order confirmation pages so they match the rest of your site and brand. Shopify can look great, especially with modern themes and block-based sections, but you are still building inside a theme system, so your design freedom depends on what the theme and editor allow without custom work.
• Payments and commerce infrastructure
  Shopify supports Shopify Payments and lets you choose from over 100 third-party payment providers, which matters if you need local payment methods or specific processors. Webflow Ecommerce supports two payment providers, Stripe and PayPal, which are clean and straightforward, but it is a real constraint if your business needs something else. 

Shopify also bakes in operational features like abandoned checkout recovery, and it offers a POS that syncs online and in-person inventory and orders. 

• Scale limits and the cost path as you grow
  Webflow has plan-based limits for e-commerce items: 500 on Standard, 5,000 on Plus, and 15,000 on Advanced, and each product can have up to 50 variants.
  Shopify has expanded product variant support up to 2,048 variants, which is a big deal for complex catalogs. On fees, Webflow charges a 2 percent transaction fee on the Standard ecommerce plan and 0 percent on Plus and Advanced. Shopify charges third-party transaction fees if you do not use Shopify Payments, and those fees vary by plan.

If you want the most complete commerce engine with the widest payment flexibility and built-in operational tooling, Shopify is usually the safer foundation. 

If you want the storefront experience to be the product, with stronger control over design and content so your site does more than just list items, Webflow is the better fit.

Build a modern E-commerce Website

Supernowa helps you launch a modern online store in Webflow that looks polished and feels easy to shop. 

We design clean pages that load fast, guide attention, and make products easy to compare. 

You get product listings, product names, and descriptions, and browsing by categories that match how customers think. 

We build conversion-focused product pages, a smooth cart flow, and a checkout setup that works with your payments and shipping rules. 

We also connect analytics and SEO basics so you can measure what is working. If you want a Webflow store that sells and scales, Supernowa can build it.