BigCommerce Vs Shopify (2026): A Detailed Analysis of the best eCommerce Platforms

BigCommerce vs Shopify used to have a simple cost answer: BigCommerce charged no transaction fees, Shopify did. As of June 2026, that answer is gone.

BigCommerce restructured its pricing on June 1, 2026, renamed every plan, lowered its sales caps, and introduced a transaction fee of its own. Most comparison articles still describe the old pricing, or the old “BigCommerce is the B2B platform” shorthand, which makes them wrong on the two facts merchants care about most.

This article compares BigCommerce and Shopify on current 2026 pricing, transaction fees, B2B features, SEO, scalability, analytics, and migration in both directions. Every pricing figure below is checked directly against BigCommerce’s and Shopify’s own published pages, not a search snippet or an older article, and the whole piece was last verified in September 2026.

BigCommerce vs Shopify: quick comparison

The headline: these two platforms have converged. Base prices now match tier for tier, both charge a plan-based fee on payments processed outside their preferred gateway, and Shopify closed most of its B2B gap in April 2026. Which platform is cheaper now depends almost entirely on how you take payments, not the sticker price. Which one fits your business now depends on whether you’re B2B-primary or hybrid, not a flat “BigCommerce for B2B” rule.

What is BigCommerce?

BigCommerce is a hosted eCommerce platform, like Shopify, but with a reputation for building more features natively and leaning less on apps. It has historically been the stronger choice for B2B and multi-storefront selling, though Shopify closed much of that gap in April 2026, covered in detail below.

Its parent company changed its corporate name to Commerce.com, Inc. effective July 31, 2025, unifying BigCommerce, Feedonomics, and Makeswift under one brand; the BigCommerce platform name itself is unchanged. Live store counts vary by tracker: StoreLeads puts it around 36,700 active stores as of September 2026, down roughly 11% year over year in Q2 2026, while BigCommerce’s own “130,000+ merchants” figure is cumulative across the platform’s history, not a current active count.

Notable brands on BigCommerce include Toyota, Skullcandy, Sony, and Ben & Jerry’s.

What BigCommerce includes natively:

• B2B tooling: unlimited price lists, customer groups, quotes, and purchase-order payments across all tiers, with deeper approval workflows than Shopify’s non-Plus tiers
• Multi-storefront: run several storefronts from one backend, added per storefront
• Faceted search and product filtering: built in, where Shopify often needs an app
• Full URL control: a real technical-SEO advantage covered later

What is Shopify?

Shopify is the largest hosted eCommerce platform by most measures. StoreLeads counts roughly 3.06 million active stores as of Q2 2026, and Shopify’s own Q2 2026 filing reports $115.6 billion in GMV for the quarter, up 32% year over year. It holds an estimated 30% of the US ecommerce-platform market.

Shopify’s strengths are checkout conversion, the largest app ecosystem in commerce, native point of sale, and a clear lead in AI features. Brands on Shopify include Gymshark, Allbirds, SKIMS, and Supreme.

What Shopify includes:

• The highest-converting checkout in commerce: Shop Pay is widely regarded as the conversion leader
• Native POS: POS Lite free on every plan, sharing one inventory and customer layer with the online store
• Shopify Magic and Sidekick: free AI tools for content and admin tasks
• Agentic commerce: selling through ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot, managed from the admin
• Native B2B on every plan: since April 2, 2026, covered in detail below
• Shopify analytics, with real limits covered later

Per Shopify’s Q1 2026 earnings, AI-driven traffic to stores grew 8x year over year, and orders from AI-powered searches grew nearly 13x. Whatever you think of the hype, the channel is real.

BigCommerce vs Shopify pricing in 2026

Pricing is where the June restructure changed everything in the BigCommerce vs Shopify decision, and where most comparisons are now wrong.

BigCommerce pricing after the June 2026 restructure

On June 1, 2026, BigCommerce renamed all plans and changed the economics.

Three changes matter:

• The no-transaction-fee era is over. The new Open Payment Provider Fee applies to any order processed through a gateway not on BigCommerce’s approved embedded list. It’s a BigCommerce fee, billed to you monthly, and it applies even to offline and purchase-order payments.
• Sales caps dropped sharply. The entry cap fell from $50,000 to $30,000 and the mid cap from $180,000 to $100,000. The same revenue that kept you on a cheaper plan last quarter can now force an upgrade.
• Inclusive GMV changed. The threshold calculation now reduces gross order value by 10%, up from 3%, and it counts taxes, shipping, and marketplace orders. The figure won’t match your own reports, which BigCommerce confirms is expected.

Who actually pays the fee: most B2C merchants on Stripe, PayPal, or BigCommerce Payments pay nothing, because those are embedded providers. The merchants hit are those on niche, regional, or industry-specific gateways, often the exact merchants who chose BigCommerce because it supported their processor.

Shopify pricing in 2026

Shopify runs five plans. Note the middle plan, previously called “Shopify,” was renamed Grow in 2026.

Shopify’s third-party gateway surcharge disappears entirely if you use Shopify Payments, now available in 39 countries. For most merchants, that’s a single setting that removes the fee.

Which one is actually cheaper

The uncomfortable answer for both vendors: they’re now priced almost identically.

• Base prices match tier for tier at $39, $105, and $399.
• Transaction fees match too. BigCommerce’s open-provider fee (2%/1%/0.6%) mirrors Shopify’s third-party surcharge (2%/1%/0.6%) almost exactly.
• Both fees vanish on the preferred processor: Shopify Payments for Shopify, an embedded gateway for BigCommerce.

So the cost winner is decided by your payment setup, not the platform. A merchant on a mainstream gateway pays no fee on either. A merchant on a specialty gateway now pays on BigCommerce where they previously didn’t, which tilts cost toward Shopify for that group.

Shopify’s own comparison page claims a 36% total-cost advantage. That figure comes from research Shopify commissioned and publishes itself, so treat it as marketing rather than neutral evidence.

Shopify vs BigCommerce: B2B, now that Shopify closed most of the gap

This is the section most existing comparisons get wrong, because it changed after most of them were published. For years, “BigCommerce for B2B, Shopify for DTC” was a fair shorthand. As of April 2, 2026, it’s no longer accurate on its own.

What Shopify added on April 2, 2026: native B2B features rolled out to every paid plan, not just Plus. Basic, Grow, and Advanced now include, at no extra cost: company profiles for wholesale buyers, up to 3 active catalogs assigned through Shopify Markets, volume discounts and quantity rules, net payment terms, vaulted credit cards, purchase order numbers, self-serve ordering, and Shopify Flow automation.

What’s still Plus-only: unlimited catalogs (versus 3 on lower plans), direct catalog assignment to individual companies rather than whole markets, deposits and partial payments, and contextual checkout customization.

What BigCommerce still does better: unlimited price lists and catalogs at every tier, no market-level catalog workaround, and deeper buyer-hierarchy and approval-workflow tooling built for complex quote-to-cash processes.

The honest 2026 answer: Shopify now covers simple wholesale, three buyer segments or fewer, well on its standard plans. A B2B-primary business with complex approval chains, more than three pricing tiers, or heavy purchase-order workflows still fits BigCommerce more naturally. “Shopify is DTC-only” and “BigCommerce is the only B2B option” are both outdated as of this year.

Shopify vs BigCommerce: other features

Beyond B2B, the feature gap is narrow on the basics. The differences show up in three areas.

Point of sale: Shopify wins decisively. POS Lite is free on every plan, POS Pro is $89 per month per location, and everything shares one inventory and customer layer with the online store. BigCommerce has no comparable first-party POS and relies on third-party integrations like Square or Lightspeed.

AI: Shopify is clearly ahead. Shopify Magic, Sidekick, semantic search, and agentic commerce are all live in 2026. BigCommerce’s native AI is thinner by comparison.

Multi-storefront and headless: BigCommerce offers native multi-storefront on standard plans, where Shopify reserves expansion stores for Plus. Both support headless commerce, Shopify through Hydrogen and BigCommerce through Catalyst.

On dropshipping, one correction worth making: Shopify shut down Oberlo in 2022. Its official replacement is DSers, with Spocket and AutoDS as strong alternatives. Any guide still recommending Oberlo is out of date.

Shopify or BigCommerce for SEO

Both platforms handle SEO fundamentals: SSL, editable meta tags, sitemaps, 301 redirects, and mobile themes. The difference is URL control.

BigCommerce allows full URL customization, including removing subfolder prefixes. That’s a genuine technical-SEO edge for large-catalog, content-led stores.

Shopify forces /products/ and /collections/ prefixes that can’t be removed, and creates duplicate paths when a product sits in multiple collections. Canonical tags handle the duplication by default, so it’s rarely the ranking problem people claim, but the lack of control is real.

BigCommerce also auto-generates product schema, where Shopify usually needs a theme edit or app.

For most stores, the URL difference matters less than content quality, speed, and backlinks. For a large catalog competing on organic search, BigCommerce’s control is worth having.

Scalability and performance

Both platforms scale to enterprise. They market different strengths.

Shopify markets managed reliability and proven peak-traffic handling. Plus offers around 10x the API throughput of Advanced and handles flash sales at tens of thousands of checkouts per minute.

BigCommerce markets API-first flexibility. Its rate limits run to 60,000 requests per hour on Scale, and Performance removes fixed limits. Large catalogs can hit ceilings on lower tiers.

On raw page speed, ignore any article quoting exact load-time averages like “1.3 seconds versus 2.2 seconds.” Those figures have no credible published source. Both platforms serve from global CDNs and both are fast. Real-world speed depends on your theme, image weight, and app load far more than on the platform.

BigCommerce to Shopify migration

BigCommerce to Shopify is the more common migration direction in 2026, accelerated by the pricing restructure.

What transfers: products, customers, order history, and some content, using tools like Matrixify, Cart2Cart, or a migration partner.

What doesn’t: your theme needs rebuilding, apps need reconfiguring from scratch, and customer passwords can’t move, so buyers reset on first login. BigCommerce CDN-hosted images often need re-hosting on Shopify.

Cost and time: roughly $500 to $3,000 for a small store, more for complex catalogs, with typical timelines of four to six weeks.

The SEO step that matters most: map every indexed BigCommerce URL to its new Shopify equivalent with 301 redirects, preserve title tags and meta descriptions, and resubmit your sitemap. Done wrong, stores report 20% to 60% organic traffic loss. Done right, rankings recover within four to eight weeks. Your old store stays live until DNS cutover, so there’s no downtime.

Shopify to BigCommerce migration

Merchants move from Shopify to BigCommerce for specific reasons: complex B2B beyond Shopify’s three-catalog limit, multiple storefronts from one backend, ERP integration, URL control, and escaping per-app costs.

The process mirrors the reverse direction. Rebuild the theme, since Shopify’s Liquid themes don’t port to BigCommerce’s Stencil. Reconfigure apps. Passwords don’t transfer. Build a complete 301 redirect map, which BigCommerce’s URL flexibility actually makes easier to match against your old Shopify structure.

One honest caveat worth weighing: BigCommerce’s new sales caps and open-provider fee cut against some of the cost reasons merchants historically cited for moving, and Shopify’s April 2026 B2B expansion removes the feature reason for merchants with three or fewer wholesale buyer segments. Run the numbers on your actual revenue, gateway, and catalog complexity before committing to the switch.

Where both platforms run out of reporting

Every merchant hits this eventually, and it’s the part of the BigCommerce vs Shopify comparison neither vendor advertises. Neither platform’s native analytics solves it.

Shopify gates reports by plan and caps them hard:

• Reports display a maximum of 1,000 rows in the admin
• Exports cap at 10,000 rows per report
• Session history only goes back to October 2022
• Attribution is last-click only, with no multi-touch option
• Deeper reports like cohorts are locked to Advanced and Plus

BigCommerce’s native analytics is surface-level. Its report suite covers the basics but is weak on lifetime value, cohort retention, and cross-channel attribution, and its exports are static snapshots.

The shared problem: neither platform can pull in ad spend for true ROAS, cost of goods from your accounting tool, or customer lifetime value across channels. And if you run either platform alongside Amazon, Etsy, or a second store, there’s no native consolidated view at all. Month-end becomes a CSV exercise.

Analytics across BigCommerce and Shopify with Putler

Putler connects both platforms and reports on them together.

It’s an eCommerce analytics tool that pulls sales, customer, product, and transaction data from BigCommerce, Shopify, payment gateways, and marketplaces into one dashboard. Multiple stores are supported, and duplicate records across sources merge automatically.

What that changes:

• One revenue number: combined across every store and channel, or filtered to one
• Customer segmentation: RFM analysis identifying your best and lapsing customers across platforms
• Product-level insight: which products carry margin, which sell together, which drive repeat purchases
• No row caps: full data access without Shopify’s 1,000-row admin limit
• Forecasting: revenue and customer projections built on your own history
• Faster exports: CSV in one click

Putler doesn’t replace either platform’s admin. It sits on top and answers the questions neither one can answer alone, which matters most if you run both platforms or you’re mid-migration between them.

BigCommerce or Shopify: which should you choose

Choose Shopify if:

• You sell direct-to-consumer and want the highest-converting checkout
• You sell in person and need native POS
• You want the largest app ecosystem and the strongest AI features
• You’re on a mainstream payment gateway, so no transaction fee applies
• You run B2B alongside DTC with three or fewer pricing catalogs
• Ease of use and speed to launch matter most

Choose BigCommerce if:

• You run complex B2B with more than three pricing catalogs or deep approval workflows
• You need multiple storefronts without jumping to enterprise pricing
• Full URL and technical-SEO control matters for a large catalog
• You use an embedded gateway, so the open-provider fee doesn’t apply

The deciding question for most merchants isn’t features anymore. It’s payments and catalog complexity. On a mainstream processor with simple B2B needs, the platforms cost nearly the same and both handle wholesale, so pick on fit. On a specialty processor or with complex multi-tier B2B, the math tilts clearly one way.

If you go with Shopify, growing sales on Shopify is the natural next step, and knowing the common issues Shopify stores face helps you prepare.

FAQs

BigCommerce vs Shopify: the honest verdict

Neither platform is better outright, and the old shorthand of “Shopify for DTC, BigCommerce for B2B” stopped being reliable in 2026. Shopify fits direct-to-consumer, omnichannel, mainstream-gateway sellers, and now covers simple B2B too. BigCommerce fits complex B2B, multi-storefront, and embedded-gateway sellers.

The 2026 changes on both sides, BigCommerce’s fee restructure and Shopify’s B2B expansion, mean the decision now rests on payment setup and catalog complexity rather than platform reputation. Both leave you short on reporting, which is the one gap you’ll hit either way.

Pricing, fees, and feature details verified against BigCommerce’s and Shopify’s own published pages as of September 2026. Both platforms update terms periodically; confirm current numbers before signing a contract.

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