Switching platforms
Shopify alternatives when your customers pay from a wallet
Shopify is a good product. If you sell online only, want a polished storefront quickly, and your customers pay by card, very little on this page argues against staying — and we would rather tell you that than win a signup you cancel in a month.
The case for looking elsewhere is narrower than the internet suggests, and it is this: Shopify is built card-first. Where most of your customers pay from a phone wallet instead, every wallet payment reaches you through a third-party gateway app bolted onto the platform, and the same wallet at a physical counter is somebody typing a reference into a till by hand.
That is an architecture question, not a feature-list question, so this page compares architecture. Anything said here about Shopify describes its publicly documented structure rather than current pricing or app availability, both of which move — check those on their own site before you decide.
What you get
What this gives you
A gateway app is an adapter, not a rail
Wallet payments reach a card-first platform through a gateway app in its marketplace. It works. It also means a second vendor, a second dashboard and a second set of settlement timings between the customer and your bank account.
The counter is where it shows
Online, a gateway app is nearly invisible. At a till, a wallet payment the software does not natively understand becomes a cashier reading a confirmation SMS aloud and typing the code into a notes field.
Two subscriptions, not one
Selling in person on a hosted ecommerce platform means its point-of-sale product as an additional subscription, generally per location. Ask what a second till on a busy Saturday costs before you commit.
Offline is a documented limit, not a bug
Hosted POS products typically document offline mode as cash-only. If your connection drops for an afternoon, know in advance which payment types stop working rather than finding out at the counter.
Tax invoicing is local, always
No global platform ships every revenue authority's e-invoicing format. Whatever you choose, the question is whether it holds the line-level detail your filing needs — not whether the logo appears on a compliance page.
What you would be giving up
Theme depth, an app ecosystem nothing else matches, and storefront polish. If those are what your business runs on, that is a real reason to stay, and we will say so.
What "built in" actually means for a wallet payment
A rail is built in when the software knows what the payment is. The sale on screen carries the wallet transaction against it, the amount is matched rather than retyped, and the day's takings reconcile without anyone opening a second statement. A rail is bolted on when the software knows only that money arrived somewhere and a human is responsible for connecting the two.
Online, the difference is small, because the gateway sits in the checkout and the order closes on its callback. In person, the difference is the whole job. A cashier who has to read a confirmation message and type a code into a till is a cashier who will eventually type it wrong, and a mistyped reference is an hour at the end of the week finding the difference between what the wallet statement says and what the till says.
This is why the comparison cannot be done on feature lists. Both platforms will tell you they support mobile money. One means the checkout can take it; the other means the business runs on it.
The four things to compare, in order
First: how does a wallet payment reach you, and how many parties are in the chain? Count the vendors between the customer's phone and your bank account. Each one is a place a payment can sit overnight and a support queue you may have to join.
Second: what happens at the counter? If you have a physical shop, have somebody actually run a wallet sale end to end in a trial. Not a demo — a real sale, by a cashier who has not been coached, with the confirmation arriving on a customer's phone rather than yours.
Third: what is the total subscription once you are selling in both places? Storefront plan, point-of-sale product per location, gateway app, and whatever keeps stock correct between them. This number is rarely the one on the pricing page.
Fourth: what happens when the internet drops? Ask for the documented answer, not a reassurance. Cash-only offline is a perfectly honest answer that you need to know before a bad afternoon rather than during one.
Where a hosted ecommerce platform is still the better buy
If you are online-only, stay. Nothing on this page applies to you: the counter argument is the whole argument, and if there is no counter, a dedicated ecommerce platform will out-build any all-in-one system on storefront capability, and it should — that is all it does.
If your business is a brand rather than a shop — you sell a small catalogue to a wide audience, the storefront is the product, and design and content are where your money goes — stay. The theme and app ecosystem is a genuine asset and there is no equivalent elsewhere.
If your customers pay by card and the wallet question is theoretical for you, stay. Switching platforms costs real weeks; do it for a problem you actually have.
The case for moving is specific: you sell in person and online, most payments come from wallets, and the recurring cost is not the subscription but the reconciliation. That is the shop this page is written for.
How to move without losing what you have built
You do not have to move the storefront to stop doing the manual work. The lower-risk sequence is to put the retail system in behind the store you already have, let it own products, stock and the counter, and leave the storefront exactly where it is until you have a reason to touch it. A shop with an established site keeps its rankings and its design, and the evening a week disappears anyway.
If you do move the storefront, the two things that deserve a plan rather than an assumption are URLs and payments. Map the old product and collection URLs to the new ones and redirect them, or the search traffic you spent years earning lands on 404s. And set up the payment providers on the new store before you cut over, because the gap between a store going live and its payments working is measured in abandoned carts.
Products, variants, prices, customers and stock counts all export as CSV and import here. What does not come across cleanly anywhere is theme customisation and app-specific data, so inventory that as part of the decision rather than after it.
Compare
Card-first and wallet-first, side by side
Architecture and responsibility, not prices or feature counts — those change and belong on each vendor's own site.
| What you are comparing | Shopify + gateway app | Shopify POS | sell.ke |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it is built around | A hosted storefront | The storefront's counter companion | The business, of which the store is a view |
| How a wallet payment arrives | Through a third-party gateway app | Through the same gateway | As a rail the sale already knows about |
| Vendors in the payment chain | Platform, gateway, bank | Platform, gateway, bank | Platform, bank |
| Same wallet at a physical till | Not applicable | Depends on the gateway's in-person support | Recorded against the sale at the counter |
| Selling in person | Not included | Additional subscription, generally per location | Same system, included |
| Offline at the counter | Not applicable | Documented as cash-only | Full offline selling, reconciled on reconnect |
| Stock across shop and site | One record, online only | Integrated | One record, nothing to integrate |
| Storefront flexibility | Very high | Very high | Moderate — conventional by design |
| Best for | Online-first brands | Online-first brands with a shop | Shops where the wallet is how people pay |
Shopify and Shopify POS are trademarks of Shopify Inc., which is not affiliated with sell.ke. Rows describe each product's publicly documented architecture; pricing, app availability and feature specifics change and should be checked with the vendor directly.
Questions
Shopify alternatives with mobile money — questions
Can Shopify accept M-Pesa?
On the storefront, yes — through a third-party payment gateway app such as the ones offered by pan-African processors, which sit in Shopify's app marketplace and handle the wallet side. It is a supported arrangement and it works. What it is not is native: the gateway is a separate vendor with its own dashboard, its own settlement timing and its own support queue, and it does not solve taking the same wallet payment at a physical counter, which is a different problem with a different answer.
Is there a Shopify alternative that handles the counter as well?
Several, and they divide into two kinds. Some are point-of-sale products that integrate with an ecommerce platform — you still run two systems, but a vendor maintains the join. Others, sell.ke among them, are one system where the storefront is generated from the same product and stock records the till uses, so there is no join to maintain. Which you want depends on whether your storefront requirements are unusual enough to be worth running two systems for.
What does a payment gateway app actually cost?
Two fees, and you should price both. The gateway charges its own rate per transaction, published on its site. The platform may also charge an additional transaction fee when you use a gateway other than its own — that is a documented part of the hosted-platform model and the figure is on the platform's pricing page. Work out both against your real monthly volume rather than the headline subscription, because at scale the per-transaction side is usually the larger number.
Will I lose my search rankings if I move my store?
Only if you move it carelessly. Rankings attach to URLs, so the work is mapping every product, collection and content URL on the old store to its equivalent on the new one and serving a 301 redirect for each. Done properly, most of the accumulated authority transfers within a few weeks. Done by launching a new site and letting the old URLs 404, it does not transfer at all. If this worries you — and it should — put the retail system in behind your existing storefront first and leave the URLs alone.
Can I keep my existing storefront and still fix the stock problem?
Yes, and it is often the right first move. sell.ke integrates with WooCommerce, and a store on any platform can be run with sell.ke as the system of record behind it. The counter, the stock and the books consolidate; the storefront stays exactly as it is. You get the reconciliation back without spending a month on a migration, and you can decide about the storefront later on its own merits.
How much does sell.ke cost?
Plans run from USD 12/month for a single-location till to USD 115/month for unlimited scale, with the online store on your own domain included from USD 23/month. In Kenya the same plans are KES 1,499 to KES 14,999/month, billed in shillings. Every plan starts with a 14-day trial and no card, and there is no per-terminal licence and no commission on your sales. There is no hardware to buy either — sell.ke runs on a phone, tablet or laptop you already own.
Which countries does sell.ke work in?
The software is not geographically limited — the counter, inventory, the storefront, reporting and accounting work anywhere, in multiple currencies. What is market-specific is two things: the payment rails available to you, and your country's tax-invoicing rules. We currently run with merchants in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Ghana and Nigeria, and the deepest local payment and compliance integrations are in Kenya. If you are outside those markets, ask before you sign up and we will tell you precisely what would and would not be connected for you.
Does it keep working when the internet drops?
The counter does. Offline mode keeps taking sales, printing receipts and reserving stock while the connection is down, then reconciles everything when it returns — so a bad afternoon costs you connectivity, not revenue or a gap in the record. The parts that are inherently online stay online: card and mobile-money authorisation, tax-authority submission, and the storefront itself all need a live link.
Can I bring across the products I already have?
Yes — bulk import from CSV or Excel, including photos, variants, pack sizes, prices, cost prices and opening stock counts. If what you have is a supplier price list rather than a clean spreadsheet, Amina can build the catalogue from a photo or a PDF of it, which is usually faster than retyping.
Read next
The other pages that answer the question you are probably about to ask.
Shopify vs WooCommerce vs all-in-one
Three different purchases, compared on architecture rather than feature counts.
Square POS alternatives
What to use when Square is not available to you, or not the shape you need.
Loyverse alternatives
A free till is often enough. Here is the point where it stops being.
POS that syncs with your website
Real-time stock between counter and storefront — because they are the same system.
How to take card & mobile payments
What you need to take each payment type, and what each one actually costs.
All-in-one POS, inventory & online store
One system for the counter, the stock and the website — not three that sync.
Go deeper on a feature
An online shop off the same stock
A branded storefront on your own domain, reading the same products, stock and prices as the till.
Getting paid the Kenyan way
STK push at the counter, paybill and till confirmation, M-Pesa on the website — on your own shortcode.
Selling at the counter
Split payments, held orders, manager-gated discounts and a drawer count that reconciles.
See it for your trade
Try it on your own products
Fourteen days, no card. Import your product list or let Amina build it from a photo of your price list, and run it alongside whatever you use now.