The Best Ecommerce Platform For Small Business, Compared On What It Costs To Run

For a small business choosing its first real store, Shopify is the best ecommerce platform for small business owners who plan to grow, because its plan price doesn’t rise when your sales do. Its plans cost the same as BigCommerce’s, its online card rate matches most of the field, and none of its plans lists a sales limit that forces an upgrade. Another platform is the better fit in a few specific cases: you already run a WordPress site, most of your sales happen at a counter, or the store is a small add-on to a content site.

The headline card rate won’t settle the choice. Shopify Basic, Squarespace Basic and Core, WooPayments, Wix and Square Plus all charge 2.9% plus 30 cents on an online card sale. The differences sit in the plan price, the fee for using an outside payment processor, and whether the platform moves you to a bigger plan once you sell more.

Shopify’s Basic plan (opens in new tab) is $29 a month billed yearly or $39 billed monthly. Grow is $79 yearly or $105 monthly, and Advanced is $299 yearly or $399 monthly. Shopify Plus starts at $2,300 a month and is built for much larger operations.

None of those plans lists a sales limit, so the plan price stays put as sales grow. Every plan lets you sell unlimited products (opens in new tab), and every merchant can create products with up to 2,048 variants (opens in new tab), which covers almost any size and color grid.

Online card rates on Shopify Payments drop as the plan goes up: 2.9% + 30¢ on Basic, 2.7% + 30¢ on Grow, 2.5% + 30¢ on Advanced (opens in new tab) and 2.25% + 30¢ on Plus. Grow’s rate cut covers its higher plan price at about $25,000 a month in online sales. Below that, the usual reason to move up is staff: Basic doesn’t include additional staff accounts, Grow allows up to 5 and Advanced up to 15.

Recurring app subscriptions and usage charges appear on your regular Shopify bill (opens in new tab), and one-time app purchases are invoiced separately.

Shopify charges an extra fee when you take payments through a provider other than Shopify Payments: 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced and 0.2% on Plus (opens in new tab). It applies to every transaction through a third-party gateway (opens in new tab), even if Shopify Payments is also turned on. PayPal is the exception: when Shopify Payments is your primary provider, PayPal orders don’t carry the fee.

If you need to keep an outside processor, that fee changes which plan is cheapest. On Basic, $10,000 a month through an outside processor adds $200 in fees; on Grow it adds $100. Grow costs $50 a month more on yearly billing, and that’s covered once outside-processor sales pass $5,000 a month. For a fuller breakdown of themes, apps and build costs, see what a Shopify website costs.

The table compares entry and mid-tier plans on yearly billing, the online card rate on each platform’s own processor, and any sales limit tied to the plan.

Two plan names repeat across platforms, so read the platform name with the plan name. Core is a plan at BigCommerce, Squarespace and Wix, and “Plus” is Shopify’s enterprise plan, a $49 Squarespace plan and a $49-per-location Square plan.

Take a store selling $10,000 a month online at a $50 average order, which is 200 orders, with yearly billing and the platform’s own processor. Shopify Basic comes to $379 a month: $29 for the plan, $290 in percentage fees and $60 in per-order fees. Squarespace Core and Wix Core land on the same $379, because their plan price and card rate match Shopify’s. Squarespace’s cheaper Basic plan comes to $569 here, because of its 2% transaction fee.

Square comes to $399 on Plus and $390 on Free, since Free’s lower plan price outweighs its higher 3.3% rate at this volume. WooCommerce comes to between $375 and $700 before any paid extensions, depending on hosting. BigCommerce Core would be $376 at its starting card rate, but a store selling $120,000 a year can’t stay on Core, and after its automatic upgrades it pays $646.

BigCommerce’s plans cost exactly what Shopify’s do: Core is $29 a month yearly or $39 monthly (opens in new tab), Growth $79 or $105, and Scale $299 or $399. The plans were renamed and repriced on June 1, 2026 (opens in new tab): Standard became Core, Plus became Growth, Pro became Scale and Enterprise became Performance, and the sales thresholds dropped.

The difference is that each BigCommerce plan has a sales ceiling. Core covers up to $30,000 in trailing twelve-month sales (opens in new tab) and then upgrades automatically to Growth, and Growth covers up to $100,000 before upgrading to Scale. Scale doesn’t upgrade at its cap; it charges 0.9% on Inclusive GMV above $33,333 a month, or roughly $37,037 in orders. Once twelve-month Inclusive GMV reaches $2 million, the account moves to Performance, which has custom pricing starting at $1,499 a month billed annually.

BigCommerce measures those thresholds on gross order value after a 10% reduction (opens in new tab). That puts Core’s ceiling at about $33,333 in orders a year, or roughly $2,778 a month, and Growth’s at about $111,111 a year, or roughly $9,259 a month. Sales are checked on the first of each month; a monthly plan upgrades at the start of the next billing period after notice, and a yearly plan can upgrade in the middle of its term.

For the $10,000-a-month store, BigCommerce counts $9,000 a month. Starting from zero, it crosses Core’s threshold in its fourth month and Growth’s in its twelfth, and from then on it pays Scale’s $299 plan plus $347 in card fees at the starting rate: $646 a month. That’s $267 a month more than Shopify Basic for the same sales, or $3,204 a year.

BigCommerce also charges an Open Payment Provider fee (opens in new tab) on orders through a processor outside its embedded providers: 2.0% on Core, 1.0% on Growth and 0.6% on Scale. Those match Shopify’s outside-processor fees plan for plan. Card processing starts at 2.89% + $0.29 (opens in new tab), a starting rate rather than a flat one.

On catalog limits, BigCommerce allows 600 SKUs per product (opens in new tab) and up to 4 inventory locations on Core (opens in new tab), 5 on Growth and 8 on Scale. Shopify’s Basic, Grow and Advanced plans each include 10 inventory locations (opens in new tab). For product options, checkout and the rest of the head-to-head, see our full BigCommerce vs Shopify comparison.

WooCommerce is a free plugin with no monthly subscription (opens in new tab), but you pay for hosting from a provider you choose. WooCommerce estimates hosting at $25 to $350 a month for most stores, rising with traffic and performance needs. Its payment extension, WooPayments (opens in new tab), costs nothing to install and has no monthly fee.

WooPayments charges 2.90% + $0.30 on US cards (opens in new tab), plus 1.50% on international cards and 1.00% when currency conversion applies. Paid extensions are sold as annual subscriptions: WooCommerce Subscriptions (opens in new tab), for example, is $279 for a one-year plan that includes updates and support. Each extension you add is another renewal on its own date, outside the hosting bill.

WooCommerce is the right call when you already have a WordPress site you’re happy with and someone who maintains it. Updates, security and hosting performance are yours to manage, and that time is a cost even when it isn’t on an invoice. Our Shopify vs WooCommerce comparison walks through those running costs, including developer time and checkout limits, line by line.

Squarespace has four plans: Basic at $19 a month on yearly billing or $25 monthly (opens in new tab), Core at $29 or $39, Plus at $49 or $65, and Advanced at $99 or $139. Every plan lets you sell unlimited products and services. Basic includes 2 contributors, and the higher plans include unlimited.

Basic charges a 2% transaction fee on online sales of products, services and donations, on top of card processing. Core, Plus and Advanced charge 0%. Core’s extra $10 a month on yearly billing pays for itself once online sales pass $500 a month, so Basic only makes sense for a store that barely sells.

Card rates are 2.9% + $0.30 on Basic and Core, 2.7% + $0.30 on Plus and 2.5% + $0.30 on Advanced. Digital content and memberships carry their own fee: 7% on Basic, 5% on Core, 1% on Plus and 0% on Advanced. Each product can have up to six options and 250 variant combinations (opens in new tab), which is plenty for most small catalogs and tight for apparel with many sizes and colors.

Squarespace fits a business whose website is mainly content, with a store attached and sales coming through the site and social channels. Our Shopify vs Squarespace comparison covers inventory locations, marketplaces and what a later migration costs.

Square’s plans are Free at $0, Plus at $49 and Premium at $149 (opens in new tab), each per location per month, and Square Online is part of them. Businesses processing over $250,000 a year can ask Square about custom pricing and processing fees (opens in new tab). On Plus and Premium, a second shop or market stall is billed as another location.

Online rates depend on the plan: 3.3% + 30¢ on Free (opens in new tab) and 2.9% + 30¢ on Plus and Premium. At the counter, Square charges 2.6% + 15¢ on Free, 2.5% + 15¢ on Plus and 2.4% + 15¢ on Premium. On online sales alone, Plus earns back its $49 once they pass about $12,250 a month; Plus also takes 0.1% off each in-person sale, so a busy counter reaches that point sooner.

For comparison, Shopify’s in-person rates (opens in new tab) run from 2.6% + 10¢ on Basic to 2.3% + 10¢ on Plus. If your register does most of the selling and the website is a smaller channel, Square is the simpler setup. If online sales carry real weight or will soon, our Shopify vs Square comparison covers multi-store inventory, returns and the hardware you’d replace for stores that also sell in person.

On Wix (opens in new tab), selling starts at the Core plan; the Light plan doesn’t take online payments. On a yearly subscription, Core is $29 a month, Business $39 and Business Elite $159. Wix Payments charges 2.9% + $0.30 on US cards (opens in new tab) other than American Express, 3.7% + $0.30 on American Express, and $15 per chargeback.

Wix’s catalog limits are generous for a small store. You can upload up to 50,000 products (opens in new tab) from the dashboard, give each product up to 6 options and create up to 1,000 variants per product. It suits a small business that wants a drag-and-drop site with a store attached.

Webflow sits in the same design-first group. It fits a brand whose store is a small part of a content-led site, with a small catalog sold in one currency, where the look of the site matters most. Our Webflow vs Shopify comparison covers its catalog caps, payment options and what running both platforms together involves.

If you sell to retailers as well as consumers, Shopify handles both from one store. Shopify B2B (opens in new tab) is available from the Basic plan up, so you don’t need Plus to take wholesale orders. Basic, Grow and Advanced each allow up to 3 active catalog assignments (opens in new tab) across B2B markets, and Plus allows unlimited.

Net terms and vaulted credit cards are included on every plan, and Basic includes company accounts, locations, quantity rules, price breaks and reorders. Deposits, partial payments and payment requests per fulfillment are Plus-only. That means a small brand can open wholesale on the plan it already pays for, then move to Plus only when it needs more than three active catalogs or deposit terms. If you’re setting that up, see our Shopify B2B and wholesale builds.

The best ecommerce platform for a company running dozens of storefronts isn’t the one a small business needs. BigCommerce’s Performance plan starts at $1,499 a month billed annually, and Shopify Plus starts at $2,300 a month. Salesforce Commerce Cloud is built for enterprises running dozens of sites or already organized around Salesforce, and our Salesforce Commerce Cloud vs Shopify comparison covers who it’s for. A small business doesn’t need any of them to start, and on Shopify, moving to Plus later doesn’t mean changing platforms.

Start with where your sales happen and what you already run. Each of these conditions points to one answer:

For the last case, Shopify is the best ecommerce platform for small business owners because the costs that grow with you are the ones you can predict. The plan price stays put as sales rise, the card rate falls as you move up, recurring app charges sit on your Shopify bill, and wholesale is already included. The cost to plan around is the outside-processor fee, and Shopify Payments avoids it.

Once the platform is settled, the storefront is what customers see. If a marketplace theme no longer fits your brand or slows your pages down, our custom Shopify theme development builds the storefront from blank files around your products, with fast mobile load times and product, collection and cart pages designed to convert.