BigCommerce vs Shopify: What the Comparisons Leave Out

For a single‑brand store with a normal catalog, Shopify. For a business running more than one storefront off one catalog, or a catalog large enough that filtering stops being optional, BigCommerce has two real structural advantages — and both of them come with a price tag the comparisons rarely mention.

I read BigCommerce’s own comparison page, commercetools’ enterprise pitch, and the most recent developer writeup on BigCommerce’s 2026 fee change before writing this. BigCommerce’s version cites Forrester ROI figures and a feature table and never says its own filtering feature requires a $299‑a‑month plan. Commercetools skips the comparison entirely in favor of selling itself. The developer piece gets closest — it is the only one of the three that covers the June 2026 payment fee change — and it still doesn’t notice that Shopify now charges almost the identical percentages for the same thing.

Which should I pick, BigCommerce or Shopify?

Shopify, for most direct‑to‑consumer stores running one brand through one storefront. It has the larger app ecosystem, the larger pool of people who already know how to run it, and — as of this year — pricing that is no longer meaningfully cheaper than BigCommerce’s.

What each platform actually costs in 2026

Both platforms publish their prices, and as of this year the headline numbers are almost identical. On BigCommerce’s pricing page, Core runs $29 a month billed annually ($39 monthly), Growth is $79 ($105 monthly), Scale is $299 ($399 monthly), and Performance starts at $1,499 a month with custom pricing. On Shopify’s pricing page, Basic is $29 ($39 monthly), Grow is $79 ($105 monthly), Advanced is $299 ($399 monthly), and Plus starts at $2,300 a month. The first three tiers are priced to the dollar against each other.

The difference is what decides your tier. Shopify’s plans are chosen by you, based on which features you need. BigCommerce’s are chosen by your revenue: Core caps out at $30,000 in trailing‑twelve‑month GMV and auto‑upgrades you to Growth, Growth caps at $100,000 and auto‑upgrades to Scale, and Scale carries a 0.9% overage rate on GMV above $33,333 a month before auto‑upgrading you to Performance at $2 million in trailing annual sales. Grow past a threshold on BigCommerce and the plan changes under you, whether or not you wanted the features that come with it.

The fee that erased BigCommerce’s price advantage

Starting as early as your June 2026 invoice, BigCommerce began charging an Open Payment Provider Fee on any order that doesn’t run through one of 21 named “embedded” providers — Stripe, PayPal, Adyen, Klarna and similar are on the exempt list. The rate is set by plan: 2.0% on Core, 1.0% on Growth, 0.6% on Scale, zero on Performance, calculated on the GMV that runs through a non‑embedded provider.

Shopify has charged a near‑identical fee for years on its own pricing page for any store that routes payments through a provider other than Shopify Payments. “BigCommerce has no transaction fees” was a real pitch for a long time and it isn’t accurate anymore for a store using anything outside the embedded list. If your payment provider is already on BigCommerce’s embedded list, the fee is zero and the old pitch still holds. If it isn’t, run the same GMV through both tables before assuming either platform is cheaper.

Does BigCommerce really have better filtering?

Yes, but it is not included on every plan, and nothing in the top ten results for this search says so. BigCommerce’s own documentation is direct about it: “to use product filters, your store must be on a Scale plan or higher” — that’s $299 a month billed annually, $399 monthly. Core and Growth don’t get it. Where it is available, it’s genuinely built into the platform: up to 12 filters per page, covering category, brand, price, rating, product options and custom fields, with no app and no theme dependency.

Shopify’s filtering is free on every plan, through a Shopify‑built app called Search & Discovery, and it has real ceilings that BigCommerce’s version doesn’t document having. Per Shopify’s own help documentation: a collection of more than 5,000 products stops displaying filters at all, a store can have at most 25 filters total, a single filter displays a maximum of 100 values to shoppers, and filters only appear if the theme is built to support them.

What happens when you need more than one storefront?

This is the advantage that holds up best under scrutiny, and it’s priced to scale rather than to jump. Every BigCommerce plan, including Core, supports additional storefronts sharing one product catalog: up to 3 extra storefronts on Core at $30 a month each, up to 5 on Growth at $50 each, up to 8 on Scale at $100 each. One inventory, several storefronts — a wholesale site, a DTC site, a regional site — for a few hundred dollars a month on top of a plan you’d already be paying for.

Outside Shopify’s own documentation on creating stores, running more than one storefront as one business means running more than one Shopify subscription — a second $39‑to‑$399‑a‑month store with its own catalog, synced by an app if you want the inventory to match. Native multi‑store management, with stores sharing an organization, is a Shopify Plus feature, and Plus starts at $2,300 a month.

Is BigCommerce better for SEO?

Marginally, and it rarely decides anything on its own. The structural SEO gap between the two platforms is small; most of what sinks a store’s rankings is on the Shopify SEO checklist — crawlability, duplicate content, missing structured data — rather than a platform limitation. I’ve written the longer version of this question in the best ecommerce platform for SEO, and the short version holds here too: changing platforms to fix rankings is an expensive way to not fix rankings.

When BigCommerce is the right call

• You run more than one storefront off one catalog. Wholesale and retail, or two regional sites, sharing inventory. BigCommerce prices this as a per‑storefront add‑on starting at Core; Shopify prices it as a second subscription unless you’re already paying for Plus.
• Your catalog needs filtering deep enough to outgrow Shopify’s free limits. Thousands of SKUs per collection, or more than 25 meaningful filter attributes. You’ll pay for this either way — the question is a BigCommerce Scale plan versus a Shopify filtering app — so price both before deciding.
• Your payment provider is already on BigCommerce’s embedded list. Stripe, PayPal, Adyen and similar. The Open Payment Provider Fee doesn’t apply to you, and BigCommerce’s old cost advantage still holds.

And the honest flip side: a single‑brand store with a catalog under a few thousand SKUs gets neither advantage, pays the same headline price, and gets a smaller app ecosystem and a smaller pool of people who already know the platform. That’s most DTC stores, which is why Shopify stays the default.

What does switching actually cost?

More than the plan price difference, in almost every case. One developer writeup on this exact comparison is right to flag URL redirect mapping and SEO preservation as the parts of a migration that actually determine whether it goes well. Every URL on the old platform needs a 301 to its equivalent on the new one before launch, every tracking integration gets rebuilt from scratch, and your reporting won’t be comparable to the months before the move for a while after it. None of that shows up in a platform quote.

What to check before you decide

1. Name which of the two advantages you actually need — multi‑storefront or deep filtering — or admit you need neither.
2. Price the real plan, not the headline one. If you need BigCommerce’s filtering, that’s Scale at $299‑399, not Core at $29‑39.
3. Check your payment provider against both fee tables above at your real monthly GMV, not a guess.
4. If neither advantage applies to you, stop comparing platforms and spend the time on the store you already have.

Over 24 months on Shurhold’s account I’ve managed $112,278 at a 3.6x blended return, and the cart platform underneath it was never one of the levers that moved that number — the account is written up here. Platform comparisons feel like progress because they’re visible and finite. For most stores, the unglamorous work on the store you already have moves more.

Questions people ask