Piggles or Shopify: a shop, or the whole business?
Shopify is the strongest name in selling products online, and if your business is a shop that wants to be everywhere, it is hard to beat. Piggles is for the business that sells and also books, quotes, invoices and answers customers. Here is where each one is the better choice.
- Free for 14 days
- No card needed
- All sixteen apps included
Where Shopify is the better choice
Shopify is an online-store platform for businesses that sell products first. These are the things it does better than Piggles, said plainly, because the right answer for your business matters more than this page.
Selling in many places at once
Shopify connects your catalog to marketplaces, social shops and even AI chat assistants. Piggles sells on your own site, over the counter and on trade accounts, and does not list your products on marketplaces.
The biggest app store in the business
If you can describe a feature, somebody has probably built a Shopify app for it. Piggles has no app store: what it does is what is in the box.
Checkout and shipping at scale
Shopify’s checkout is used by a huge number of stores, and it comes with shipping labels and a deep set of sales reports. For a store shipping hundreds of parcels a day, that maturity counts.
A till with its own hardware
Shopify sells its own card readers for selling in person, with a more advanced till as a paid add-on. Piggles has no card reader.
Shopify is built around a product being bought. Piggles is built around a customer being looked after, whether they buy a product, book a time or ask for a quote.
Where Piggles fits better
Bookings without an extra app
On Shopify, appointments come from another company’s app, with its own account and its own bill. In Piggles, Bookings is included, and a booking sits on the same customer record as their orders.
Quotes, jobs and invoices
Work that starts as a price somebody has to agree to, becomes a job, and then becomes a bill. Piggles keeps each step, numbered the way you choose, with a payment link on the invoice.
No fee for choosing your own payment company
Shopify charges a transaction fee on every plan unless you use Shopify Payments. Piggles adds no fee to a sale, whichever of the payment companies you connect.
The people side of the business
Staff clock in and out, a schedule you publish, customer requests with an owner and a deadline, and live chat. Each of these is its own app, included in the one price.
Piggles and Shopify, one need at a time
What each one offers for the things a small business looks for, read from Shopify’s own website on September 30, 2026. Where we could not confirm a feature on their site, the table says so rather than guessing.
| What you need | Piggles | Shopify |
|---|---|---|
| A website | Built in Finished sections you arrange, on your own domain. | Built in Themes and an online store editor. |
| An online shop | Built in Products, services, checkout and trade accounts. | Built in Its core product. |
| Selling in person | Partly A counter sale is recorded as an order. There is no card reader or till app. | Built in Shopify POS. The advanced version is a paid add-on. |
| Appointments | Built in Services, staff calendars, email reminders and booking online. | Another company’s app From apps in the Shopify App Store. |
| Quotes and invoices | Built in Quotes that become jobs, then invoices, with a payment link. | Partly Invoices from draft orders. |
| A customer list | Built in One record per customer with orders, bookings and messages. | Built in A customer list. |
| Customer requests | Built in Requests with an owner and a time to answer by. | Partly A chat inbox. Ticketing comes from other apps. |
| Email to your customers | Built in Emails to a list, from your own address. | Built in Shopify Messaging, billed past a free allowance. |
| Text messages | No Piggles does not send text messages. | Built in Shopify Messaging, billed past a free allowance. |
| Posting to social media | Built in Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google, TikTok, YouTube and Threads. | Not confirmed Posting is usually done through other apps. |
| Stock in more than one place | Built in Counts per location, reorder points and transfers. One location included. | Built in Across locations, capped by plan. |
| Ordering from suppliers | Built in Write, approve, print and receive orders, with supplier prices and scorecards. | Built in Purchase orders and transfers. |
| Staff hours and shifts | Built in Clock in and out, timesheets, a published schedule and time off. | Another company’s app Staff accounts by plan. Shifts and time clocks come from apps. |
| Payroll | No Approved hours download as a file for whoever runs your payroll. | Another company’s app From other apps. |
| Automations | Built in Routine steps that run on their own when something happens. | Built in Shopify Flow. |
| An AI assistant | Partly Bring your own Anthropic or OpenAI account, or connect Claude or ChatGPT. | Built in Sidekick. |
| Bookkeeping and accounts | Partly Profit and loss, spending, bills and money owed, with a spreadsheet for your accountant. No ledger, bank matching or tax returns. | Another company’s app From other apps. |
How each bill is put together
No Shopify prices here: they are theirs to publish and they change. This is the shape of each bill, which decides what happens to it as your business grows.
Piggles
- One plan, $99 a month, with every app included.
- Three team members, one location, one website and 10,000 customer records included.
- More room costs a fixed amount: another location, another person, more storage.
- No fee on your sales. Your payment company charges its own card fee.
- Fourteen days free, with no card needed to start.
Shopify
- Four plans, each with its own limits on staff accounts and reports.
- A transaction fee on every sale unless you use Shopify Payments.
- Apps from the App Store are usually billed separately by the company that makes them.
- The advanced till is a paid add-on, and card readers are bought separately.
- Emails and texts past the monthly allowance are billed by use.
Moving from Shopify
Shopify is the platform Move in knows best. Drop in Shopify’s own export files, or paste one read-only key and Piggles reads your store for you. You see what will happen to every row before anything is written, and nothing about the key is kept afterward.
How moving to Piggles worksWhat comes across
- Products with their options, variants and images
- Stock for each of your locations
- Customers, with notes and email consent kept as they were
- Past orders
- Discount codes
- URL redirects, so old links still land somewhere
- Collections, pages and blog posts, through the read-only key
What stays behind
- Your theme: you rebuild the look from ready-made Piggles sections
- Shopify apps and what they stored: each one has its own export, if it has one
- Gift card balances: note them before you switch and issue them again
So which one?
Choose Shopify if
- You sell products only, and want to sell them on marketplaces and social shops too.
- You rely on a specific Shopify app that does something no one else does.
- You ship at a volume where checkout and shipping tools are the whole job.
Choose Piggles if
- You sell products and also book appointments, quote jobs or send invoices.
- You are tired of paying separate apps for bookings, reviews, forms and staff hours.
- You want to use the payment company you choose without a fee for choosing it.
- You want one price that covers every part of the business.
Questions about Piggles and Shopify
Where these facts come from
Everything this page says about Shopify was read from Shopify’s own website and help pages on September 30, 2026. Products change; if something here is out of date, tell us and we will check it again.
Try Piggles beside Shopify for fourteen days, for free.
No card needed. Nothing to cancel if you decide not to carry on.
