---
title: "Shopify alternative for small businesses"
url: "https://miow.me/shopify-alternative"
updated: 2026-10-15
description: "miow compared with Shopify for a small business that sells a few things: price, fees, products, leaving, and moving a Shopify store across."
---

# miow, a Shopify alternative for small businesses

miow builds and hosts small-business websites, and moves a Shopify site's pages across.

## What is a good alternative to Shopify?

miow is one for a small business that sells a few things beside the rest of its website, each one of a kind, and wants the website written for it. A shop with stock in sizes and colours, or tills in a physical store, is what Shopify is built for, and miow is not.

## How is miow different from Shopify?

Shopify's figures are from its pricing page and help centre in October 2026, in pounds as the page showed them in the UK.

|  | miow | Shopify |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Price | Building costs nothing, and so does hosting unless miow sets a monthly price for the site, shown under Money in its Settings before anything is taken | No free store; Basic £19 to Advanced £259 a month paid yearly, or £25 to £344 paid monthly, after a three-day trial and three months at £1 |
| Fee on a sale | None from miow; cards are paid into the site's own Stripe account, which charges its own card fees | On Basic, 2% plus 25p a card online through Shopify Payments, and a further 2% when another payment provider takes the card |
| Your own domain | On any site, with a domain you already own | On every plan |
| Signing in | A passkey your phone keeps; no password and no email sign-in | A Shopify account |
| Leaving | One zip of the site as data, every page as markdown, and every picture | CSV files of products, customers and orders; pages and blog posts are copied by hand, and product pictures are not in the product file |

## Can I move my Shopify site to miow?

Yes, if the site publishes a list of its pages at its address followed by /sitemap.xml; Shopify makes one for every store. Give miow the address, and up to 40 of its pages come across at the same addresses, each laid out by a model under a rule to keep every word, with its pictures copied into miow's own storage.

Forms, newsletter sign-ups and anything that runs as a script stay behind; where a form was the way to get in touch, the page keeps the email address or phone number it gives. Links to the old site keep working once its domain points at miow.

## What does miow leave out?

miow takes no bookings, sends no newsletters and sells no domains. Each product is one item at one price, marked sold once it is paid for, which suits one-off pieces more than stock in sizes and colours.

A business that relies on bookings or a newsletter keeps that service where it is and links to it from its miow site.

## How does miow compare with other website builders?

[miow compared with other website builders](/compare) lists every comparison.

## Move your Shopify site

Give its address, or describe the business, and miow makes the pages.

[Start a site](/#start)