Shopify vs BigCommerce: a comparison for growing brands

You have two platform quotes on the desk and a launch date that will not move. Pick the wrong one and you pay for the build twice.

The old tiebreaker is gone. Since 1 June 2026, BigCommerce charges 2.0% to 0.6% on orders taken through payment providers outside its own embedded list. So “BigCommerce has no transaction fees” is no longer a reason to pick it. That is the biggest shift in this comparison in years, checked on BigCommerce’s pricing update on 21 September 2026.

Which one, for whom. Choose BigCommerce when built-in trade selling, complex catalogue rules and several storefronts matter more than the size of the app market. Choose Shopify when checkout tools, apps and how fast you can hire matter more. Below the enterprise tier, the fee ladders now match, so price the build, not the plan.

Who this is for. Founders and operators picking a platform, and teams pricing a move from one to the other.

Who this is not for. Anyone weighing a hosted platform against open source. That trade is in Shopify vs WooCommerce.

The plan fee is the small number. The build, the apps and the people you can hire to run the store are the large one, and that is where this choice costs or saves you money. Autonomous Technologies builds and runs the systems behind Shopify stores, for founders and operators who own the store after launch. We work on Shopify, through our Shopify Plus engineering work, so weigh the bias. Every figure below links to the vendor page it came from, checked 21 September 2026.

Score your business against these six rows. Whichever column wins four is your platform. The other two become build scope.

Each platform wins on four things, and they are different four

B2B is short for business to business: selling to shops, dealers and distributors rather than to the public. BigCommerce wins on four things a trade team feels every week. B2B Edition ships corporate accounts, rep quoting, shared shopping lists, a quick order pad and an invoice portal as product (BigCommerce B2B Edition documentation). Its checkout is yours to rebuild. Extra storefronts are a plan add-on. And its plan ladder is priced against your sales volume, which cuts both ways.

Shopify wins on four different things. Its app market is roughly six times larger, on Shopify’s own count of 8,000 apps against 1,208 BigCommerce apps as of April 2024 (Shopify’s comparison page). Shopify Payments and Shop Pay, the saved-details express checkout, do work you would otherwise pay to build. Plus adds checkout extensions and Functions, small pieces of code that change checkout rules without touching a checkout file. And the hiring pool is deeper.

Treat either vendor’s comparison page as marketing. Shopify says its cost of ownership is “31% better than BigCommerce” and its checkout “converts 12% better”. Both come from studies Shopify paid for, with no published method. We have not used them.

Entry prices are close and the fee ladders now match

Both vendors publish self-serve prices in USD and keep enterprise prices behind a sales call. An Open Payment Provider is any card processor not on BigCommerce’s embedded list. Those orders now carry a fee.

Above Plus, Shopify lists “a variable platform fee for more complex business structures”. Plus includes your main store and nine expansion stores. Further stores cost $300 a month each (Shopify pricing, Shopify Plus pricing).

Two BigCommerce rules deserve more attention than the headline price.

First, the plan ladder is tied to sales volume. GMV means gross merchandise value, what you sell before fees and refunds. TTM means the trailing twelve months. Core covers up to $30K TTM GMV, then moves you to Growth on its own. Growth covers up to $100K, then moves you to Scale. Scale carries a $33,333 a month cap with “0.9% on GMV above monthly cap”, evaluated “on the first of each month” (BigCommerce 2026 pricing update). One good quarter can move your plan with no purchase decision.

Second, the exemption list. Twenty-one providers count as embedded, among them Stripe, PayPal Braintree, Adyen and Klarna. Anything else carries the fee. Shopify exempts one thing, Shopify Payments. That is a wider door for BigCommerce if your processor is listed, and a closed one if it is not. For the full picture, see what a Shopify store actually costs.

B2B is where the two platforms genuinely part ways

This is also where most advice online is out of date. Shopify no longer keeps B2B behind Plus. Every paid plan now carries companies, company locations, quantity rules, price breaks, net terms and payment reminders. Net terms means the buyer pays 30 or 60 days after the invoice. The same plans carry ACH bank transfer, saved cards, draft orders and PO numbers.

Shopify also writes down what B2B cannot do, and that list decides more builds than the feature list. Accelerated checkouts do not work with B2B. Neither do subscriptions, tipping or legacy customer accounts. Orders stop at a “maximum of 500 line items” (Shopify B2B considerations, and B2B features by plan). If your buyers place 900-line restock orders, that is the whole decision.

BigCommerce B2B Edition answers a different shape of business. It is built for the distributor whose sales start with a quote and a rep. It ships company account tools, rep quoting, approval steps and shared shopping lists. Its quick order pad takes part of a stock code or a spreadsheet upload. CPQ, short for configure, price, quote, is part of the product (BigCommerce CPQ announcement). The Buyer Portal is open source, so you can rewrite the buyer side.

Here is the honest split. If your trade buyers log in and buy at agreed prices, Shopify B2B covers it. One catalogue and one admin for both is worth real money. If your trade sales start with a quote, BigCommerce ships more of that ready-made. Our B2B and wholesale page sets out how we scope either one.

The checkout question is really a staffing question

Shopify’s answer is that you change the checkout at set hook points, not by editing it. The checkout and accounts editor works “on the Basic plan or higher”. Apps that change “the information, shipping, and payments pages”, and the Checkout Branding API, are “available only on the Shopify Plus plan” (Shopify checkout customisation). Functions handle discounts, shipping and payment options, and cart checks, on Shopify’s servers.

BigCommerce takes the opposite line. Its Checkout SDK, a toolkit of ready-made code, is “a JavaScript library of methods for performing actions related to checkout”. It lets you “build your own custom checkout page on BigCommerce” (BigCommerce Checkout SDK documentation). If you need a checkout step no vendor has thought of, BigCommerce lets you build it.

That freedom has an owner and a bill. A custom checkout is yours to keep working through payment updates, browser changes and card-security reviews. Shopify’s limit hands that job back to Shopify. The real question is whether you have an engineer who will still own that checkout in three years. We can only answer from our own side: 54 consecutive calendar months of work on one client platform, April 2022 to September 2026. Most teams do not have that continuity funded.

Three integration differences, and all three are cost lines

Both platforms open their data to other software, both can run headless, and both link to the usual back-office systems. Headless means the shopper-facing site is built and hosted apart from the store platform. An ERP is the system that runs stock, orders and finance. The platform rarely holds a build up. What holds it up is which system owns each record, and who clears the error queue (Shopify ERP integration guide).

1. Ready-made links follow market share. More vendors ship and maintain a Shopify link than a BigCommerce one. On BigCommerce you build or buy a custom link more often. That is a cost line, not a fault.
2. Extra storefronts are priced differently. BigCommerce sells them as a plan add-on at $30 a month on Core, $50 on Growth and $100 on Scale (BigCommerce pricing). Shopify includes nine expansion stores with Plus, then charges $300 a month each. Below Plus, Shopify has nothing like it. In our view that is the strongest BigCommerce argument for a multi-brand seller.
3. Do not assume an app works with B2B. Shopify warns that some App Store apps “aren’t fully compatible with Shopify B2B, specifically companies and catalogs” (Shopify B2B external integrations). Ask for a demo against real companies and catalogues.

Where this breaks: the move costs more than the fee gap saves

A move between these two platforms is the same project either way. The state of your data matters more to the cost than the platform does. Products, variants, customers, orders and web addresses all move with standard tools. What does not move is the part that decides whether launch goes well.

Three things sink launches in either direction. The map that sends old web addresses to new ones. The switch-over of the payment gateway. And the matching of orders placed around the switch. Metafields are the extra data fields you add to a Shopify record, and option-set logic usually ends up there. Our migrations page carries the tests we run before a cutover.

What we would tell you on a scoping call

Most teams asking this have already decided and want permission. The useful version is narrower. Name the three things your storefront cannot lose. Check each against the vendor’s own docs. Then price the gap. If it is similar on both, pick the one you can hire for.

We will say plainly when a quote-led distributor with a working BigCommerce team should stay put. A move that saves a percentage point in fees and costs you a working B2B process is not a win. Where Plus falls short is in our honest Shopify Plus review.