BigCommerce Vs Shopify: Where The Two Platforms Actually Differ

BLKDG is a Denver Shopify agency, and moving stores from BigCommerce to Shopify is part of our work. On features, BigCommerce vs Shopify is a close comparison: both host your store, BigCommerce’s three self-serve plans cost the same as Shopify’s Basic, Grow and Advanced, and both cover multi-currency, B2B and headless builds. The decision turns on three things: the sales thresholds built into BigCommerce’s plans, what BigCommerce and Shopify each charge when you step off their preferred payment providers, and the size of the app market around each platform.

BigCommerce is the stronger fit when you sell through quotes and multi-tier company accounts, when your products need more than three options or a long list of custom fields, or when you want to rewrite the checkout’s code. Shopify is the stronger fit when you want to choose your plan instead of having your sales choose it, a checkout someone else maintains, and the larger app catalog. If you’re choosing between BigCommerce or Shopify for a mid-market store, those conditions settle most of it.

BigCommerce’s three self-serve plans and Shopify’s Basic, Grow and Advanced plans carry identical prices. BigCommerce’s Core, Growth and Scale plans (opens in new tab) cost $39, $105 and $399 a month billed monthly, or $29, $79 and $299 a month billed annually. Shopify’s Basic, Grow and Advanced plans (opens in new tab) cost $39, $105 and $399 billed monthly, or $29, $79 and $299 a month billed yearly.

The difference in BigCommerce vs Shopify pricing is what each plan measures. Every BigCommerce plan carries a sales cap, and Shopify’s pricing lists no sales cap or automatic upgrade on Basic, Grow or Advanced. On BigCommerce your sales pick your plan, and on Shopify you pick it.

BigCommerce’s plan names and caps date from a restructure that took effect on June 1, 2026 (opens in new tab). Standard became Core, Plus became Growth, Pro became Scale and Enterprise became Performance, with base prices on the three self-serve plans unchanged. The caps came down: Standard’s was $50K and Plus’s was $180K, against $30K and $100K now.

Core upgrades to Growth, and Growth to Scale, automatically when trailing-12-month sales pass the cap (opens in new tab), with no overage charge on either plan. The upgrade starts with the next billing cycle, after advance notice.

Scale works differently. It doesn’t upgrade at its monthly cap; it bills 0.9% on the sales above $33,333 in that month, in arrears. Twelve months at the cap is $399,996, so a store with more than about $400,000 a year in counted sales on Scale pays overage in at least some months. Once trailing-12-month sales reach $2 million, the account moves to Performance, which is a contract plan with no monthly billing option.

Price the overage before you compare the $399 stickers. A store doing $1 million a year in counted sales, spread evenly, runs $83,333 a month, which is $50,000 over Scale’s cap and $450 a month in overage. That puts Scale at $849 a month on monthly billing, against $399 for Shopify Advanced, which lists no sales-based charge. Real stores are seasonal and the overage is computed month by month, so a peak month costs more than the even-spread figure.

At the top of Scale the arithmetic converges on the next plan. A store at $2 million a year in counted sales, spread evenly, pays about $1,200 a month in overage, which brings Scale to about $1,499 a month on annual billing. That’s Performance’s starting price.

BigCommerce measures the cap on what it calls Inclusive GMV: gross order value minus a 10% reduction, which was 3% on self-serve plans before June 2026. Counted sales include the product price after discounts, plus taxes and shipping, and they include orders placed through connected channels such as Amazon, eBay, Facebook and Pinterest. The figure is evaluated on the first of each month, and each store on an account is evaluated separately.

Your own revenue number won’t match it. Because of the 10% reduction, Core’s $30K cap corresponds to about $33,333 of gross order value over twelve months, and Growth’s $100K to about $111,111. Those gross figures include the sales tax you collect and the shipping you charge.

Can you move back down? Yes. Downgrades are self-serve from the account, limited to plans whose threshold the store meets, and they take effect at the start of the next service period.

Plan subscriptions are one line of what a platform move costs. Our guide to ecommerce replatforming sorts the rest, including enterprise licenses, card fees, card number migration, apps and build labor, into the costs that are published and the ones that are quote-only.

BigCommerce and Shopify now charge the same three percentages when an order doesn’t go through a favored payment provider. Shopify’s third-party transaction fees (opens in new tab) are 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow and 0.6% on Advanced. BigCommerce’s Open Payment Provider Fee, introduced on June 1, 2026 (opens in new tab), is 2.0% on Core, 1.0% on Growth and 0.6% on Scale, with contracted Performance plans exempt.

The rates match and the exempt lists don’t. On BigCommerce, orders processed by a provider on its Embedded Payment Provider list carry no BigCommerce fee on any plan, and that list includes Stripe, Adyen, PayPal Braintree, Worldpay, Checkout.com, Klarna, Affirm and Afterpay. BigCommerce can change the list, and changes apply only to future orders. On Shopify the exempt route is Shopify Payments: the fee applies to third-party and alternate gateways even when Shopify Payments is activated (opens in new tab), and PayPal transactions are exempt when Shopify Payments is your primary provider.

BigCommerce no longer has a blanket no-transaction-fee policy, and the BigCommerce vs Shopify fee question now depends on your processor. If you already process with Stripe or Adyen and want to keep that contract, BigCommerce charges you nothing extra and Shopify charges its third-party fee. If you’d use Shopify Payments anyway, Shopify charges nothing extra either.

BigCommerce’s fee reaches further than card gateways. It applies to offline orders such as purchase orders, marketplace orders from channels like eBay and Etsy, POS app orders and API-created orders (opens in new tab), and to custom integrations with an embedded processor, including ones connected through a third-party app. A wholesale store on Core with $10,000 a month of counted sales in purchase orders pays $200 a month on those orders, $100 on Growth and $60 on Scale. BigCommerce bills the fee to the merchant monthly in arrears and doesn’t allow it to be passed through to shoppers at checkout.

Existing BigCommerce stores reached the new terms on different dates. Monthly plans moved to the new terms on their first billing cycle on or after June 1, 2026, and annual plans move at the end of the annual service period that was running on that date.

Shopify publishes a card rate for each plan. With Shopify Payments in the US, online rates for standard cards are 2.9% + 30¢ on Basic, 2.7% + 30¢ on Grow and 2.5% + 30¢ on Advanced (opens in new tab), and premium cards cost more on every plan. BigCommerce advertises card processing starting at 2.89% + $0.29 per transaction (opens in new tab) through PayPal Braintree, subject to eligibility conditions, and whatever provider you choose sets its own charges separately from BigCommerce’s.

Those rates give Shopify plan upgrades a break-even you can calculate. On monthly billing, Grow costs $66 a month more than Basic and saves 0.2 percentage points on standard cards, so it pays for itself at about $33,000 a month in card volume. Advanced costs $294 more than Grow for another 0.2 points, which breaks even at about $147,000 a month. On BigCommerce the upgrade arrives at $30K and $100K a year in counted sales whether or not the higher plan saves you anything.

BigCommerce Performance starts at $1,499 a month billed annually, with custom pricing above that. Shopify Plus starts at $2,300 a month on a 3-year term and $2,500 on a 1-year term (opens in new tab). On starting prices, the BigCommerce vs Shopify Plus gap is $801 a month against the 3-year Plus price and $1,001 against the 1-year price, in BigCommerce’s favor.

Both contract tiers meter volume. Performance includes $250K a month in counted sales, which is $3 million a year, and charges 0.6% on sales above it; a month with $400,000 in counted sales costs $900 in overage. Higher-volume Plus businesses pay a variable platform fee based on revenue and business model, at a rate Shopify quotes through sales. Third-party gateway orders on Plus carry a 0.2% Shopify fee, and Performance contracts are exempt from BigCommerce’s payment provider fee.

On the feature side of BigCommerce vs Shopify Plus, BigCommerce holds Price Lists, and with them fixed prices per currency, for Performance, along with additional product localization fields for multi-storefront. Plus holds full checkout customization, 200 inventory locations against 10 on Shopify’s other plans, nine expansion stores included in the monthly fee, and API limits up to 10 times the standard on select APIs. Our Shopify Plus work starts by checking your roadmap against the features Plus gates, and we’ll recommend a lower plan when none of them apply.

Shopify’s ceiling on variants is now the higher one. A Shopify product can have up to 2,048 variants (opens in new tab), a limit that rose from 100 for all merchants on October 15, 2025 (opens in new tab). A BigCommerce product can have a maximum of 600 variants (opens in new tab).

Option structure still favors BigCommerce. Each Shopify product can have up to three options, such as size, color and material, and that limit didn’t change with the variant increase. BigCommerce puts no limit on the number of modifiers on a product. Modifiers are the choices that don’t create a SKU: text fields, checkboxes, file uploads and add-ons.

That makes BigCommerce the easier home for configurable products, such as an item with engraving text, an uploaded logo, a gift-wrap checkbox and four or five selectable attributes. On Shopify, fields beyond the three options are rebuilt as line item properties or through apps. Our BigCommerce to Shopify migration scoping checks the catalog against Shopify’s option and variant limits and flags the modifiers that need rebuilding for that reason.

Shopify’s higher variant limit comes with compatibility checks. Apps that don’t use Shopify’s current GraphQL product APIs may have a downgraded or broken experience on products with more than 100 variants, and some third-party themes and custom apps might not support that many. Stores with 500,000 or more variants also face a daily limit on variant uploads by app or CSV, which doesn’t apply on Plus.

Inventory locations are a smaller difference. BigCommerce allows up to 4 locations on Core, 5 on Growth and 8 on Scale, and Shopify allows 10 on each of Basic, Grow and Advanced.

B2B isn’t a Plus-only feature on Shopify, and BigCommerce’s deepest B2B features aren’t part of its standard plans. Shopify B2B is available on all plans (opens in new tab). BigCommerce’s deepest B2B features sit in B2B Edition (opens in new tab), which BigCommerce describes as its enterprise B2B offering and sells through its sales team or a Customer Success Manager.

On every Shopify plan you get company accounts and locations with location-level permissions (opens in new tab), quantity rules and price breaks, net terms, payment reminders, ACH and vaulted cards, draft orders, reorders, PO numbers and a quick order list. Basic, Grow and Advanced allow up to 3 B2B catalogs, and Plus allows unlimited catalogs. Plus also holds catalogs assigned directly to a company or company location, deposits, and partial payments. Our guide to Shopify B2B covers the data model, catalogs and payment terms in detail.

B2B Edition goes further on the sales-led side of wholesale. It adds corporate accounts with multi-tier hierarchies and buyer roles, a buyer portal, sales staff quoting, masquerade so a sales rep can order on behalf of a consenting company, shared shopping lists, an invoice portal with payment terms, and per-company control of payment methods. It’s licensed separately: BigCommerce’s B2B checkout settings require both the B2B Edition app and an active B2B Edition license (opens in new tab).

Below B2B Edition, BigCommerce’s native wholesale tools are gated by plan. Customer groups (opens in new tab), which carry category-level, product-level and storewide discounts, need Growth or higher. Price Lists (opens in new tab), which set variant-level prices by storefront and customer group, need Performance.

For B2B, then, BigCommerce vs Shopify splits by how you sell. If buyers log in, see their prices and place orders on terms, Shopify covers that from its first plan, while BigCommerce asks for Growth to get customer groups and Performance to get price lists. If your reps build quotes and your accounts have parent companies, subsidiaries and buyer roles, BigCommerce’s B2B Edition has that built in. On BigCommerce’s self-serve plans, an order paid by purchase order also draws the payment provider fee.

BigCommerce lets you replace the checkout, and Shopify doesn’t. BigCommerce’s default is its Optimized One-Page Checkout (opens in new tab), and its code is public. You can fork the checkout-js repository (opens in new tab), edit its components, and set the store’s checkout type to a custom checkout loaded from your own script.

The cost is ownership. A custom BigCommerce checkout no longer receives automatic updates, and BigCommerce warns that it may affect your PCI-DSS compliance. Every checkout improvement BigCommerce ships after you fork is one your developers have to merge.

Shopify keeps the checkout hosted and sells the deeper customization on Plus. Checkout UI extensions for the information, shipping and payment steps (opens in new tab) are available only to Plus stores. Stores on any plan can use public App Store apps that contain Shopify Functions (opens in new tab), which change discount, shipping and payment logic, and only Plus stores can use custom apps that contain them. Our guide to Shopify checkout customization covers the extension types, Functions and each plan gate.

If you choose between BigCommerce or Shopify on checkout alone, the question is who you want maintaining it. A team with developers and a checkout requirement no extension can meet gets more freedom on BigCommerce. A team that wants the checkout kept current without owning its code gets that on Shopify, and pays the Plus price to customize the core steps.

BigCommerce runs several storefronts on one back end. With Multi-Storefront (opens in new tab), storefronts share one catalog, each can have its own domain, theme, categories, pages, price lists and email templates, and orders from all of them land in one place. It’s a paid add-on (opens in new tab) at $30 a month per storefront on Core with a maximum of 3, $50 on Growth with a maximum of 5, and $100 on Scale with a maximum of 8. A product’s name and description can’t be translated per storefront without customization.

Shopify’s counterpart is separate stores plus Markets. Plus includes the main store and nine expansion stores in the monthly fee, with further stores at $300 a month each or a revenue share, and each contract covers one brand. Shopify’s Basic, Grow and Advanced plans include no expansion stores, which is where BigCommerce vs Shopify favors BigCommerce for multi-brand sellers below the contract tier.

Both platforms include multi-currency on every plan. On BigCommerce a currency is either transactional or display-only (opens in new tab): shoppers are charged in a transactional currency, while a display-only currency shows an estimate and settles in the store’s default. Transactional currencies use static conversion rates, fixed prices per currency need Price Lists and therefore Performance, and store credit works only in the default currency.

On Shopify, all four plans include localized selling through Markets, and Advanced adds regional tailoring of the store. Only stores using Shopify Payments with one-page checkout (opens in new tab) get every function of selling in local currencies, and configuring business entities (opens in new tab) needs Plus. Our guide to selling internationally with Shopify Markets covers the fees, duties and the choice between running Markets yourself and Managed Markets.

Both platforms publish an open-source storefront framework. BigCommerce’s is Catalyst (opens in new tab), built on Next.js and React Server Components under an MIT license (opens in new tab), and usable with the Makeswift visual editor or without it. For a headless BigCommerce storefront, domains and SSL are managed outside BigCommerce.

Shopify’s framework is Hydrogen, built on React Router (opens in new tab), and Shopify also supplies the hosting. Oxygen, its edge hosting for Hydrogen storefronts, comes at no extra charge on paid Shopify plans. It has fixed limits, including a worker bundle of 10 MB or less, 30 seconds of CPU time per request and 128 MB of memory, and proxies can’t sit in front of an Oxygen deployment. Shopify’s plans include 1 headless storefront on Basic, Grow and Advanced and 25 on Plus.

On headless, BigCommerce vs Shopify comes down to preference for Next.js against a bundled host. Whether to go headless at all is a separate decision, and our guide to headless commerce on Shopify lists the jobs that move from the platform to your team when you make that choice.

Shopify says its App Store (opens in new tab) has over 16,000 apps, and BigCommerce says its app marketplace (opens in new tab) has over 1,200. Both are the vendors’ own marketing counts, with no method attached. Taken at face value, Shopify lists about 13 apps for every one on BigCommerce.

The count matters when you need something specific: a subscription tool that works with your payment provider, a connector for your ERP, a returns app your warehouse already uses. A larger catalog raises the odds that a maintained app exists and lowers the amount of custom integration you pay for.

Shopify scales API limits with the plan. Its GraphQL Admin API (opens in new tab) allows 100 cost points per second on standard plans, 200 on Advanced and 1,000 on Plus, per app and store.

Is BigCommerce now called Commerce? No. The parent company, BigCommerce Holdings, Inc., changed its name to Commerce.com, Inc. (opens in new tab), and its ticker changed from BIGC to CMRC on August 1, 2025. The product you buy is still BigCommerce, and it sits alongside Feedonomics and Makeswift under the parent brand.

Most of a BigCommerce to Shopify move is mapping one data model onto another. Variants carry over, with Shopify’s three-option limit as the constraint, and modifiers have no direct equivalent, so they’re rebuilt as line item properties or through apps.

URLs change too. Shopify product URLs follow a fixed /products/ pattern with a prefix you can’t change, while BigCommerce sets URL structure at the store level, so most product and category URLs need a redirect. Our guide to protecting your rankings in a platform move walks through the baseline, the redirect map, staging, cutover and monitoring in order.

Payments are the third change. If you’re on a gateway from BigCommerce’s embedded list today, price Shopify both ways before you commit: Shopify Payments at the card rate for your plan, or your current provider plus Shopify’s third-party fee.

Choose BigCommerce if most of these describe you:

Choose Shopify if most of these describe you:

For a growing direct-to-consumer brand with a standard catalog, our BigCommerce vs Shopify verdict is Shopify. Shopify’s plans list no sales cap, the payment fee disappears on Shopify Payments, and the app catalog is the larger one by Shopify’s and BigCommerce’s own counts. For a B2B seller built around quoting, or a catalog of heavily configured products, BigCommerce is the better fit and a move to Shopify would mean rebuilding what you already have.

If you’re on BigCommerce and the thresholds or the payment provider fee have changed your costs, BLKDG’s BigCommerce to Shopify migration service starts with an audit: we crawl every indexed URL, map each one to its Shopify destination, check your catalog against Shopify’s option and variant limits, and flag the modifiers that need rebuilding. Products, collections, customers and order history move next, and redirects are tested on staging before launch. You can plan your migration with us and get a scope, timeline and redirect strategy for your store.