BigCommerce vs Shopify

BigCommerce vs Shopify: an honest comparison from a team that migrates BigCommerce stores

BigCommerce suits merchants with complex catalogs, heavy use of product modifiers, several storefronts on one back end, or a contracted enterprise B2B operation. Shopify suits most other stores: it is easier to run, has a far larger app and developer ecosystem, and since the June 2026 BigCommerce pricing changes it is usually the cheaper platform once sales pass a modest level. If your BigCommerce store is working and you are on an embedded payment provider, staying put can be the right call. For transparency: we are a Shopify Plus Partner and we migrate stores to Shopify, including many from BigCommerce.

At a glance

Comparison point	BigCommerce	Shopify
Pricing	Core $39, Growth $105, Scale $399 a month ($29, $79, $299 billed annually); Performance from $1,499 a month on an annual contract. Plans are capped by sales and upgrade automatically.	Basic $39, Grow $105, Advanced $399 a month ($29, $79, $299 billed annually); Plus from $2,300 a month. No sales caps on the plans.
Transaction fees	None with embedded payment providers (BigCommerce Payments, Stripe, PayPal Braintree, Adyen and others). Since June 1, 2026, other gateways carry a 2.0%, 1.0% or 0.6% fee on Core, Growth and Scale.	None with Shopify Payments. Other gateways carry a 2%, 1%, 0.6% or 0.2% fee on Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus.
Hosting and maintenance	Fully hosted SaaS; no servers or upgrades to manage	Fully hosted SaaS; no servers or upgrades to manage
Ease of use	Capable but denser admin; more settings to learn	Simpler admin and a larger pool of staff and freelancers who already know it
Design and themes	Stencil themes (Handlebars) with Page Builder; Cornerstone is the free default	Liquid themes with the theme editor; free themes such as Horizon and Dawn
Apps and extensions	A marketplace in the low thousands, with more features built in	The largest app ecosystem in ecommerce, well over ten thousand public apps
Product options	Up to 600 variants per product plus unlimited modifiers with price rules	Up to 3 options and 2,048 variants per product; modifiers need an app
Faceted search	Product filtering on Scale and Performance only	Filters on every plan through the free Search & Discovery app
SEO	Editable URLs, meta fields, automatic sitemaps	Fixed URL prefixes, meta fields, automatic sitemaps, strong content tools
Payments	Many embedded providers with no platform fee	Shopify Payments, Shop Pay and wallets; fee on third-party gateways
B2B	Customer groups from Growth, price lists on higher plans; B2B Edition with Performance	Companies, net terms, price breaks and up to 3 catalogs on every plan; unlimited catalogs on Plus
POS	No first-party POS; integrates with Square, Clover, Lightspeed and others	Shopify POS: POS Lite free, POS Pro $89 per location per month
Scalability and multi-store	Multi-Storefront from one back end, with paid additional storefronts on each plan; Catalyst for headless	Markets on every plan; Plus includes nine expansion stores; Hydrogen for headless
Support	24/7 phone support on Growth and above; Core relies on online support	24/7 support on every plan; Plus adds priority support

Prices checked September 2026, in US dollars.

A note on the company name

You may now see BigCommerce referred to as Commerce. In July 2025 the listed company, BigCommerce Holdings, Inc., renamed itself Commerce.com, Inc., and its Nasdaq ticker changed from BIGC to CMRC. Commerce is the parent brand of BigCommerce, Feedonomics and Makeswift. The ecommerce platform itself is still called BigCommerce,.

Pricing and total cost of ownership

On sticker price the two platforms now match plan for plan: $39, $105 and $399 a month, or $29, $79 and $299 a month billed annually. The differences are in what makes you pay more.

BigCommerce caps each plan by sales. From June 1, 2026, Core covers up to $30,000 of trailing twelve-month sales and Growth up to $100,000. Once you pass the cap, you are notified and the plan upgrades automatically. Scale has a monthly cap of $33,333, with a 0.9% overage charge on sales above it each month, and a Scale store that reaches $2 million in trailing twelve-month sales upgrades to Performance. BigCommerce measures these thresholds on what it calls GMV, defined as gross order value minus 10%, and it counts product price net of discounts plus tax and shipping, including orders from marketplace channels such as Amazon and eBay. The old caps were $50,000 on Standard and $180,000 on Plus, so many stores moved up a plan this summer without selling more.

BigCommerce has long been known for no transaction fees, and that is now only partly true. Orders paid through an embedded provider still carry no BigCommerce fee, and the embedded list is long: BigCommerce Payments, Stripe, PayPal Braintree, PayPal Complete Payments, Adyen, Checkout.com, Worldpay, Amazon Pay, Klarna, Affirm and others. Any other gateway is an Open Payment Provider, and BigCommerce bills 2.0% of that order value on Core, 1.0% on Growth and 0.6% on Scale. Performance contracts can set it to zero.

Shopify has no sales caps. You choose a plan for its features and card rates. Shopify Payments has no extra fee; its US online card rates are 2.9% + 30¢ on Basic, 2.7% + 30¢ on Grow, 2.5% + 30¢ on Advanced and 2.25% + 30¢ on Plus, with higher premium rates for some cards. Using a third-party gateway instead adds 2%, 1%, 0.6% or 0.2% by plan.

A worked monthly example

Take a US store selling $600,000 a year, or $50,000 a month across 500 orders at a $100 average, with annual billing and standard card rates.

Cost line	BigCommerce	Shopify
Plan	Scale, $299 (the store is far past Growth’s cap)	Grow, $79
Sales cap overage	About $105 (GMV of $45,000, minus the $33,333 cap, at 0.9%)	None
Card processing	About $1,590 on PayPal Braintree at 2.89% + 29¢	About $1,500 on Shopify Payments at 2.7% + 30¢
Platform gateway fee	None on an embedded provider	None on Shopify Payments
Monthly total before apps	About $1,994	About $1,579

Two caveats keep this honest. If the store keeps a gateway that is not embedded on BigCommerce, add 0.6% of that order value, roughly $270 to $300 a month; if it keeps a third-party gateway on Shopify Grow, add 1%, or $500. And the app budget differs: a BigCommerce store gets filtering and option pricing built in on Scale, while a Shopify store with complex options pays for an options app. For a store with simple products, Shopify is clearly cheaper at this size. For a store that depends on modifiers, the gap narrows, and the build cost of redesigning those products matters more than the monthly bill.

Ease of use and maintenance

Both are hosted platforms, so neither asks you to patch servers, manage PHP versions or buy hosting. The difference is in daily use. BigCommerce puts more settings in front of you, which power users like and new staff find slow. Shopify’s admin is simpler, its mobile app is strong, and most ecommerce hires, freelancers and agencies already know it.

Staff accounts are one place BigCommerce is more generous: they are included on every BigCommerce plan, while Shopify Basic has none, Grow allows 5, Advanced 15 and Plus unlimited. A team of several people on a small budget should weigh that.

Design and themes

BigCommerce themes use Stencil, a Handlebars-based theme engine, edited through Page Builder and widgets; Cornerstone is the free theme BigCommerce maintains. Shopify themes use Liquid with a section and block editor; Horizon and Dawn are Shopify’s own free themes, alongside a large theme store of paid options. What matters when switching is that the two template languages are unrelated, so a BigCommerce theme cannot be converted. The design is always rebuilt on Shopify, which is also a chance to fix what was not working.

Apps and extensions

BigCommerce builds more into the core: faceted search on higher plans, modifier pricing, customer groups, multi-storefront and real-time carrier quote integrations. Its app marketplace runs in the low thousands. Shopify keeps the core leaner and relies on apps, and its App Store is far larger, with well over ten thousand public apps and new ones every month. In practice, most new ecommerce tools launch on Shopify first. The trade-off is that app subscriptions add up, so we review the app list as carefully as the plan.

Product options and modifiers

This is BigCommerce’s clearest technical advantage. A BigCommerce product can have up to 600 variants, and on top of those it can carry modifiers: text fields, checkboxes, date pickers, file uploads and pick lists that change the price or weight without creating a SKU, with no limit on how many. Rules can then adjust price by combination. Shopify allows at most 3 options and 2,048 variants per product, and has no native modifier. Engraving text, paid add-ons and configurable extras need an options app or line item properties in the theme, and anything that should be a real variant must fit within three options. Stores selling configurable products should weigh this carefully.

SEO and content

Both platforms handle the basics well: editable titles and meta descriptions, canonical tags, automatic XML sitemaps and structured data in their themes. BigCommerce gives you more control over URL paths, including category folders. Shopify fixes its prefixes, such as /products/ and /collections/, which rarely hurts rankings but means every BigCommerce URL changes on migration and needs a 301 redirect. Neither platform has a ranking advantage on its own; the migration is where rankings are won or lost, which we cover below.

Performance

Both run on global CDNs and both can be fast or slow depending on the theme and the scripts added to it. On Shopify the most common cause of a slow store is app scripts piling up, so we keep the app list short. For stores that want a fully custom front end, BigCommerce offers Catalyst, its open-source headless framework built on Next.js and its GraphQL Storefront API, and Shopify offers Hydrogen with Oxygen hosting. Headless suits only stores with a development team to maintain it.

Payments and checkout

BigCommerce’s strength is gateway choice: a long list of embedded providers with no platform fee, which suits merchants tied to an existing processor or negotiated rates. Its Optimized One-Page Checkout is solid, and the checkout code is open source, so developers can fork and customize it.

Shopify’s strength is conversion. Its checkout is maintained by Shopify, Shop Pay gives returning shoppers a fast accelerated checkout, and Apple Pay, Google Pay and other wallets are built in. Customization runs through checkout extensibility, with the deepest options on Plus. The catch is the third-party gateway fee: if you must keep your own processor, Shopify charges 2% to 0.2% on top, which can change the maths above. We confirm your payment setup before recommending a plan.

Selling in person and B2B

In person. Shopify POS is first-party: POS Lite is free on every plan and POS Pro is $89 per location per month, with inventory, customers and orders in the same admin as the online store. BigCommerce has no first-party POS and connects to systems such as Square, Clover and Lightspeed through integrations. For a store with a shop counter, this favors Shopify.

B2B. This comparison changed in 2026. BigCommerce offers customer groups from Growth, price lists on its higher plans, and B2B Edition, a full suite with company accounts and buyer roles, a buyer portal, shopping lists, quotes created by sales reps, purchase orders and an invoice portal. B2B Edition is sold with the enterprise (Performance) plan at custom pricing. Shopify now runs its core B2B features on every plan: companies and locations, price breaks and quantity rules, net terms, vaulted cards, draft orders and PO numbers. Basic, Grow and Advanced are limited to 3 active B2B catalogs, and Plus adds unlimited catalogs, direct company catalogs, deposits and partial payments. Shopify has no built-in quote workflow beyond draft orders, so quote-heavy wholesalers use an app. For a wholesale operation that lives on quotes and invoices, BigCommerce B2B Edition remains the more complete native package; for a brand selling to a few hundred trade accounts alongside retail, Shopify now covers it on a standard plan.

Scale and multiple storefronts

BigCommerce Multi-Storefront runs several storefronts from one catalog and one admin. Each self-service plan allows a set number of additional storefronts at a monthly price per storefront, and Performance is quoted.

Shopify handles international selling through Markets, with local currencies, languages and domains on every plan. Separate stores are the Shopify answer to separate brands or very different catalogs, and Plus includes nine expansion stores alongside the main store, managed at the organization level. Third-party carrier-calculated shipping needs Advanced or Plus (or Grow on annual billing), which is worth knowing if your BigCommerce store shows live UPS or FedEx rates today. Both platforms serve very large merchants; at the top end, the choice usually comes down to B2B depth and catalog structure on one side and ecosystem and checkout on the other. If you are moving at that level, see our Shopify Plus migration service.

When BigCommerce is the better choice

• Your catalog depends on modifiers and price rules, such as configurable products with many add-ons, and would need heavy redesign to fit three options.
• You run several storefronts from one catalog and want them in one admin without a Plus contract.
• You are a quote and invoice driven wholesaler on, or ready for, a Performance contract with B2B Edition.
• You must keep a specific processor that is embedded on BigCommerce, and would otherwise pay Shopify’s third-party gateway fee.
• Your team needs many staff logins on a small plan.
• Your store is below the caps, working well and on an embedded provider. A migration costs time and money, and staying put is a reasonable decision.

When Shopify is the better choice

• Your sales have pushed you onto Scale, or you are paying overage or Open Payment Provider fees, and a Shopify plan chosen for features would cost less.
• You want the largest app ecosystem and the widest pool of developers and staff who already know the platform.
• You sell in person as well as online and want POS in the same system.
• Checkout conversion and Shop Pay matter more to you than gateway choice.
• You need B2B for trade accounts alongside retail without an enterprise contract.
• You want filtering and a modern free theme without moving up to a higher plan.

What switching actually involves

BigCommerce is the platform we migrate from most, and we do the data work ourselves with our own scripts rather than relying on an automated tool. Here is what we have learned.

• What moves easily. Products with SKU-based variants, customers and addresses, orders with their original numbers and dates, and shipments with carrier and tracking numbers all come across well from BigCommerce’s exports and API. Categories become collections, brands become vendors and custom fields become metafields.
• The classic trap: option sets and modifier pricing. BigCommerce’s product export only contains options that generate SKUs. Modifiers are missing from it entirely, so a product whose choices are all modifiers imports as a single item with no options. Worse, older stores often still run option sets, a legacy feature with pricing rules attached at the set level, and those prices do not appear in the export or reliably in the API. We have seen the API report one flat price while the live storefront charged a different price for each combination. On an established BigCommerce store, expect this. We rebuild every modifier and take each combination’s price from the live storefront before launch, because the export alone gives the wrong prices.
• Three options is a design decision. Products with more than three option types, or with free text and paid extras, need to be redesigned: which choices become variants, which become app-driven add-ons, which become line item properties.
• Things tools skip. Discounts are not in BigCommerce’s order export and have to be derived per order; split shipments need one fulfillment per parcel; refunded orders that shipped still carry tracking. Automated tools tend to flatten all of this.
• Passwords do not move. Customers set a new password or use Shopify’s one-time code sign-in, so we plan an invitation email.
• What breaks SEO if mishandled. Every product, category, brand, page and blog URL changes. The trap we see most is nested category URLs: the real BigCommerce path for a subcategory often differs from what a tool assumes, so redirects look complete by count while half the subcategories return 404. We read the actual URLs from the store and test each redirect before launch. One more: Shopify reserves the /contact-us path, so that one URL cannot be redirected.
• Realistic timelines. Smaller stores typically take six to eight weeks from audit to launch. Stores with many modifiers, years of orders, B2B accounts or integrations take longer, and the audit sets the schedule.

Our BigCommerce to Shopify migration guide covers the process step by step.

Cost of switching

Our BigCommerce migrations are a fixed price: from $2,500 for stores under 500 products and 5,000 orders ($3,500 for larger stores), typically six to eight weeks for smaller stores. B2B, multiple storefronts and integrations are priced after the audit. Terms are 50% to begin and 50% once the store is live and you are fully satisfied with the figures. We build in a free Shopify development store, so you pay Shopify nothing until launch and keep paying BigCommerce only until cutover.

If your catalog is simple and your history is short, a tool may be enough. We compare the options fairly in our guide to Shopify migration tools. Either way, budget time to review samples and test the store.

Frequently asked questions

If you are weighing a move, start with the migration survey and we will tell you honestly whether switching makes sense. Read our BigCommerce to Shopify migration guide for the process, or see every platform we migrate from.