ShopWired Review (2024) – A Good UK Alternative to Shopify?

ShopWired Review New

What is ShopWired?

ShopWired is one of the UK’s most popular ecommerce platforms, that has helped UK businesses of all sizes start selling online, with a range of packages for everything from start-ups to businesses with 7 figure turnovers.

They are also one of the most highly-rated UK-based ecommerce platforms, which all sounds great but are ShopWired a good option for UK businesses and a true UK alternative to Shopify?

ShopWired Logo

Pricing
Features
Theme Selection & Customisation
Support
Hosting & Performance
Ease of Use

Total out of 5

4.6

14 Day Free Trial, No Credit Card Required

EcommerceGold is reader supported and we may earn a commission from products or services purchased through links on our site at no additional cost to you, to learn more please see our affiliate disclosure.

ShopWired Review: Quick Summary

Is ShopWired any good?

Yes, we think ShopWired is a great option for an online store and we liked the range of features that ShopWired offers both as standard and the additional apps that can be installed, although some do need to be coded into the theme, which isn’t ideal.

The platform is very easy to use, from the dashboard to the theme customisation (thanks to the new Version 5 framework) and it is all backed up by excellent UK-based support and the platform performs well in our performance testing.

  • Highly rated UK-based support
  • Good performance
  • Easy-to-use interface
  • Very Good Theme Customisation
  • Good selection of features
  • Store management
  • Some Apps require being coded into your site
  • Small theme selection
  • Support not available 7 days a week
ShopWired Logo
4.6/5

EcommerceGold Score

ShopWired Pricing

ShopWired Logo

Pro

£34.95/m
  • Sell up to 750 Products
  • £75k Annual Turnover Limit
  • No Transaction Fee
  • Standard UK Support
  • 2 Admin Accounts
ShopWired Logo

Advanced

£69.95/m
  • Sell Unlimited Products
  • £200k Annual Turnover Limit
  • No Transaction Fee
  • Standard UK Support
  • 5 Admin Accounts
  • Advanced Reports
  • B2B Features Included
ShopWired Logo

Premium

£129.95/m
  • Sell Unlimited Products
  • £500k Annual Turnover Limit
  • No Transaction Fee
  • Priority UK Support
  • 15 Admin Accounts
  • Advanced Reports
  • B2B Features Included
  • All Apps Free with Plan

ShopWired offers 3 standard plans that customers can choose from, which are ideal for start-ups and small to medium-sized businesses (larger businesses with turnovers in excess of £500k a year will want to check out the Enterprise offerings that start from £249.95/m).

They also offer a discount when plans are paid for yearly and the more years you pay for, the larger the discount:

  • 1 Year – 10% Discount
  • 2 Years – 20% Discount
  • 3 Years – 30% Discount

This could result in a pretty significant saving but when it comes to what you get with the plans, one of the more notable aspects are the annual turnover limits, which when compared to much of the competition are quite generous at:

  • £75,000/year on the Pro Plan
  • £200,000/year on the Advanced Plan
  • £500,000/year on the Premium Plan

But you also get more features included for free along with more admin accounts and levels of support on the larger accounts.

ShopWired Free Trial

ShopWired offers a 14-day free trial, which allows you to not only test out the platform but also try all of the apps to see if they will work for your business and you can start your free trial by clicking the button below:

Customer Reviews

Before we get into the review, we have taken a look at what some of ShopWired’s existing customers thought of the platform. For this, we look at Trustpilot, G2 and Capterra.

Trustpilot Logo

4.9 out of 5

g2 logo

4.9 out of 5

Capterra logo

4.0 out of 5

ShopWired Features

The ShopWired platform offers their users a lot of different features to help you start, build and grow an ecommerce business. Some of these features are built in to the platform, while others can be added by installing apps.

Some of the apps available from ShopWired are simple, one click installations but others need to be coded in to your site, some simpler ones liked Google ReCaptcha can easily be done by following the documentation but others are more complicated and to make sure they are installed and configured properly, it is best to pay a one off fee and have the ShopWired team do it for you.

Ecommerce Tools

ShopWired App Selection
  • Multi Buy Offers – create discounts such as buy one get one free or three for the price of two
  • Product Extras – Upsell related products directly in your basket
  • Multi-Currency – sell internationally by displaying your pricing in US Dollars or Euros at the click of a button
  • Product Reviews – let previous customers leave reviews on your products
  • Ebay Integration – manage your Ebay store from your ShopWired dashboard
  • Digital Downloads – gives you the flexibility to sell digital products and/or physical products
  • DropWired – dropship directly from AliExpress in your ShopWired dashboard

ShopWired Marketing and SEO

Having a good selection of tools and features to market your site is extremely important when it comes to ecommerce and the ShopWired platform offers a great selection, including:

Marketing

  • Google Feed – easily submit your product inventory to Google Shopping
  • MailChimp Integration – create and grow an email marketing list with the help of MailChimp
  • Gift Vouchers – sell gift vouchers for your online store
  • Reward Points – build repeat business by offering customers reward points on every order
  • Abandoned Cart – automatically send emails to customers who abandon their carts to encourage them to complete the purchase
  • Create Sales – offer a percentage discount off a selection of products
  • Discount Codes – create discount codes for marketing campaigns or special offers
  • Social Share – let your visitors and customers share your products on their social media accounts
  • Back in Stock Notifications – let customers request notifications for products when they are back in stock

SEO

  • Blog – create content on your ShopWired store, great for SEO
  • Custom Meta Data – set custom metadata for all of your products such as title, description and keywords
  • SEO Friendly URLs – automatically generated URLs that are search engine friendly, can also be edited
  • Sitemap – automatically generated sitemap that can be submitted to search engines

Reporting and Analytics

You want to see how well your ecommerce store is performing and ShopWired offer a very comprehensive set of reporting features to really let you analyse your business, including:

  • Gross Profit Report – use product cost price to generate a gross profit report on sales for a selected period
  • Sales by Product
  • Sales by Category
  • Payment Methods
  • Sales by Month
  • Failed Searches – see what your customers were searching for but didn’t find
  • Visitors – break down of your sites visitors, including conversion rates and pages viewed
ShopWired Reports

ShopWired Payment Gateways

ShopWired offers a very good selection of payment gateways for UK businesses to use on their stores, including:

  • PayPal Express Checkout
  • Stripe
  • Amazon Pay
  • Klarna
  • Worldpay
  • Sagepay
  • Barclaycard EPDQ
  • Nochex
  • Payment Sense
  • Elavon

If you are using a payment gateway that isn’t listed amongst the ones that ShopWired integrates with, you can contact the support team and they will look into whether or not they can make it work for you.

Do ShopWired charge transaction fees?

No, unlike some other platforms, ShopWired does not charge any transaction fees.

ShopWired Shipping Options

All delivery rates are set manually within the ShopWired platform but there are many different options that can be offered, such as:

  • Different delivery zones, for example UK, Europe and America and all will have separate pricing
  • Set delivery methods by price or weight, such as free delivery if you spend £XX amount
  • Set a default rate for zone
  • Can offer click and collect, which is a great option if you have a store front or warehouse

ShopWired also offer Apps for Royal Mail Click and Drop, which produces a CSV file which is set up for click and drop and Shipstation, which automatically feeds order information through to the Shipstation platform which helps speed up the order management process.

ShopWired B2B Features

While the ShopWired platform is great for B2C ecommerce, it really stands out from the crowd when it comes to its B2B features. All of the B2B features are included as standard in the Advanced Package and they include:

  • Bulk Discounts – offer your customers a percentage or fixed price discount when ordering in bulk
  • Quotation System – customers can request quotes for items, which can then be sent via email with a link to pay
  • Trade Accounts – offers a lot of options including:
    • Application for trade accounts, which can be approved manually or automatically
    • Different pricing for trade customers, can be done individually or by assigning groups
    • Trade only products and/or categories
    • Restrict trade accounts to offline payments such as bank transfer or cheque
  • Credit Accounts – allow customers to checkout and then charge them on account
  • VAT – display prices with or without VAT

These are all features that can be used with all of the other features mentioned above and it is one of the most comprehensive list of B2B features that I have seen with an ecommerce platform.

ShopWired Theme Selection & Customisation

In the summer of 2022, ShopWired rolled out their latest Version 5 update and it is a game changer for them as they have addressed the one thing that always let the platform down and that was the theme customisation options.

In terms of theme selection, ShopWired offers a selection of 20 themes but not all are currently on the Version 5 Framework (they are in the process of transitioning them over) but all of the themes are free to use.

But the big improvement comes in the form of theme customisation as the Version 5 update includes a full site, drag and drop customiser, which allows users to really customise their storefront to fit their branding.

ShopWired Version 5 Customiser

The new customiser comes with a selection of 19 different sections, which includes product specific options like Recently Viewed Products and Featured Categories to content based sections such as Image with Text and Testimonials.

This allows you to build truly custom pages for your store and as this is a full site editor, you can customise your home page, content page, product pages, category pages, even down to the likes of the 404 and Wishlist pages.

There are also options for your header, including adding a custom logo and favicon alongside being able to create a custom navigation menu based of link lists that can easily be created in the dashboard. You can also customise the footer by choosing what links are displayed along with other display options.

Overall, the new Version 5 framework is a very welcome upgrade and offers users a very good level of customisation over their store.

ShopWired Support

ShopWired offers really good support, which is something that many existing customers rate highly and we have also experienced very good support ourselves and as they have a relatively small team so you would often deal with the same person when contacting them, which is nice.

In terms of support contact options, ShopWired offer two, which are:

  • Live Chat – available between 9am and 10pm Monday to Friday
  • Email

Unfortunately, ShopWired doesn’t offer 24/7 support and while the support is really good and the responses are very helpful, having support available over the weekend would be a good addition.

ShopWired Web Hosting and Performance

Ecommerce stores are very resource heavy, which means they need to be hosted on very good servers and ShopWired opted for some of the best in the world. They chose to use Amazon Web Services (AWS), which is definitely enterprise-level and is the host of choice for many big businesses such as Pinterest and Adobe. But what do you get?

  • Unlimited Bandwidth
  • Unlimited File Storage
  • PCI Level 1 Compliant Servers
  • Global Content Delivery Network (CDN)
  • 99.95% Uptime
  • Continuous back-ups
  • And most important Blazing Fast Servers

Sounds great doesn’t it? Well yes it does but we don’t like to take companies on their word, so we put them to the test by:

  • 5 Live Customer Examples
  • Running them through Uptrends Speed Test Tool
  • Used the London, UK Server
  • Tested on both Mobile and Desktop
  • Ran the test Once a Day for Three Days

By using Uptrends, we could not only test the load time but also their PageSpeed scores and you can see the results below:

Uptrends Logo
  • Mobile: 1.65 Seconds
  • Desktop: 1.69 Seconds
Google Logo
  • Mobile: 44/100
  • Desktop: 84/100

ShopWired performed well in all tests, with both mobile and desktop load times coming in at well under 2 seconds and PageSpeed scores were also good, but it would be nice to see ShopWired get over the 50 mark on mobile.

But how does this compare to the competition, check out our annual performance testing to find out.

How Easy is ShopWired to Use?

So that is all of the features of ShopWired but what is it actually like to use? Well, that is what we are looking at in this section and we look at:

  • Getting Started
  • Inventory Management
  • Order Management

Getting Started

Getting started with ShopWired is very easy to do as all that is required to start the free trial is your email address, name, business name and create a password and you are good to go. Upgrading to a paid plan can easily done from the Your Account section of the admin area.

The ShopWired admin dashboard is easy to use as they have opted for a main sidebar navigation menu and all sections and sub-sections are clearly labelled, making it easy to move between the different sections of the dashboard.

Additional headings may be added to the standard menu, depending on what apps are installed on the site.

New users are greeted by a short set up guide to help get their store up and running by prompting them to go through the following steps.

  • Setting up Business Info (address, contact details, VAT settings)
  • How to create a new Category
  • How to create a new Product
  • How to set up your Checkout (payment methods & delivery rates)
  • Selecting a theme for your site
  • How to go live (link your domain name)
ShopWired Setup Tutorial

ShopWired’s set up guide is one of the more complete that I have used but it is missing one step that is important to UK based stores, which is to set up their Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions. It would be a nice section to see added but ShopWired do have template documents for both of these pages that you can easily edit to help make sure that your site is legal.

Inventory Management

Good inventory management is an important part of running an ecommerce website and three basic areas that I look at when reviewing platforms are:

  • How easy is it to create a new product
  • How easy is it to organise your products
  • How easy is it to update/edit your inventory

Adding a new product in ShopWired is very simple as they have gone for a single page layout for their add new product page. The flow of the page makes it very easy to use and all of the important sections such as name, description, images and pricing are all fixed sections, with all optional sections such as variations and related being expandable sections at the bottom of the page.

ShopWired Add New Product Page

Organising your products is also very simple as they have opted for the traditional category system and you can create multi layered categories as the platform allows for parent and child categories, meaning that you can easily create a very good hierarchy for your products.

When it comes to managing your inventory, ShopWired does offer a bulk editing tool but this is limited to just updating stock levels. If you need to make any additional changes to your products such as pricing or category, this needs to be done on a product by product basis.

One useful option that they have on the product overview page is that you can quickly change the product status from active to inactive with the click of a checkbox.

Order Management

ShopWired has a very good order management system that allows you to efficiently and effectively manage your orders directly from the admin dashboard.

From the main order overview page, you can bulk select orders and then choose to either print them directly from your dashboard or export them via CSV format, you can also bulk update the order statuses.

ShopWired Order Management

You can also update and edit individual orders by clicking on the selected order and this brings up all of the information for that chosen order and there are options to edit delivery and order information, which is useful. You can also print and downloads order from the order view/edit page.

ShopWired also have options for order/shipping management with third party companies such as Royal Mail Click and Drop and Shipstation, both of which can be accessed by installing the relevant app.

Conclusion

ShopWired

Paul @ EcommerceGold

ShopWired Logo
Pricing
Features
Theme Selection & Customisation
Support
Hosting & Performance
Ease of Use
4.6

Is ShopWired any good?

Yes, ShopWired is a very good and the addition of the Version 5 framework for their themes has made them one of the best options for UK businesses as they now offer a very good all round platform for businesses of all sizes.

This is because the platform is very easy to use as the admin dashboard is well designed, they offer a good range of standard features along with a nice selection of apps to add additional functionality and integrations with third-party platforms, which is all backed up by highly rated and helpful UK based support.

ShopWired Pros:

  • Highly rated UK-based support
  • Good performance
  • Easy-to-use interface
  • Very Good Theme Customisation
  • Good selection of features
  • Store management is very good

ShopWired Cons:

  • Some Apps require being coded into your site
  • Turnover based pricing
  • Support not available 7 days a week

We would definitely recommend giving ShopWired a try for yourself, especially if you are looking for a UK-based alternative to Shopify and you can try them out free for 14 days by clicking any of the links in this post.

ShopWired Alternatives

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!