BigCommerce vs Amazon: Which Platform for Sellers in 2026?

On this page

• BigCommerce vs Amazon at a glance
• Own storefront against marketplace shelf space
• What each one actually costs
• Customer ownership and repeat sales
• Category restrictions and condition rules
• Traffic and buyer discovery
• Who the buyers are
• Getting started and complexity
• BigCommerce’s own Amazon options and Feedonomics
• When each makes sense
• Running both without overselling
• How FLUF Connect handles both channels
• Sources and verification
• Related guides

BigCommerce vs Amazon at a Glance

The comparison between BigCommerce and Amazon is not really about features. It is about who owns the relationship with your customer. On BigCommerce, you do. You hold the names, emails and order histories, and you pay a fixed monthly subscription to serve those buyers from your own domain. On Amazon, you make the sale but Amazon keeps the relationship. You pay a percentage of every sale, and in return Amazon supplies the shopper, runs the checkout and sets the rules for how you may contact them.

A seller choosing between them is not choosing between two shops. They are choosing between owning a building and renting a stall inside someone else’s market hall. The right answer depends on whether you want to build a brand and a mailing list, or whether you want sales from shoppers who are already searching, with less marketing work of your own.

Own Storefront Against Marketplace Shelf Space

BigCommerce is a storefront platform. You choose the domain, the design, the brand presentation and the checkout experience. Your store lives at your own address, looks the way you design it, and every order adds to a customer list you can export, segment and email.

Amazon is a marketplace. There is no storefront that belongs to you in the same sense; there is a product page that Amazon controls, and your offer on that page can sit alongside other sellers of the same item, identified by its ASIN (Amazon Standard Identification Number). Price, delivery promise and seller performance all shape which offer the buyer sees first. Your business name is shown, but the shopper’s attention is on the product and on Amazon.

The consequence for growth: a BigCommerce merchant who grows from 10 orders a month to 1,000 is growing an asset they control, including the domain and the customer list. An Amazon seller with the same growth is growing inside someone else’s property, paying a percentage of every sale, and subject to whatever policy or fee changes Amazon makes.

The flip side matters just as much. A BigCommerce store on day one has capable checkout software and no visitors. An Amazon seller on day one can reach shoppers who have already chosen to shop there. For anyone selling something those shoppers already search for, Amazon is usually the quicker route to a first sale.

What Each One Actually Costs

BigCommerce: subscription plus payment processing

BigCommerce publishes the same headline numbers in dollars on its US pricing page and in pounds on its UK pricing page. The UK figures are not a currency conversion: the pound amounts match the dollar amounts.

The sales ceilings are the part many sellers miss. Core is not a £39 plan for ever: once your trailing-twelve-month sales pass the ceiling, BigCommerce moves you up a plan automatically. Budget for the plan your sales will force, not the plan you start on.

BigCommerce also charges an Open Payment Provider fee on orders taken through a gateway outside its embedded list: 2.0% on Core, 1.0% on Growth and 0.6% on Scale. Orders through embedded providers, which BigCommerce names as including BigCommerce Payments, Stripe, PayPal and Adyen, carry no such fee. If you already have a processor outside that list, check before you launch, because this fee sits on top of the processor’s own charges.

Card processing is charged by whichever provider you use. Stripe’s UK rate is 1.5% + 20p for standard UK cards, 2.5% + 20p for EEA cards and 3.15% + 20p for international cards, with a further 2% where currency conversion applies. BigCommerce’s own payments product, run with PayPal, lists 2.89% + $0.30 on Core, 2.59% + $0.30 on Growth and 2.39% + $0.30 on Scale and Performance, and the same page says it is initially available only to US-based merchants.

Amazon: selling plan plus a referral fee on every sale

Amazon UK’s referral fees for a few common categories: Clothing and Accessories are banded at 5% up to £15, 10% from £15 to £20 and 15% above £20; Consumer Electronics 7%; Home 8% up to £20 and 15% above; Footwear 15%; Books 15%. The minimum referral fee is a floor, not an extra charge: on a cheap item you pay whichever is higher, the percentage or £0.25.

The US bands differ in a way that matters for apparel. Amazon US charges 5% up to $15, 10% from $15 to $20 and 17% above $20 on clothing, two points more than the UK’s top band.

The Individual and Professional plans cross over at a predictable point. In the UK, £25 divided by £0.75 is about 33 items, so from roughly 34 sales a month the Professional plan costs less. In the US, $39.99 divided by $0.99 puts the crossover at about 41 sales a month. Referral fees apply on both plans.

A £100 item, sold once on each

This worked example uses the UK list prices above and assumes 100 orders a month to spread the fixed monthly fee. It ignores VAT on Amazon’s fees, delivery costs and any advertising spend.

On this example, Amazon’s fees are about seven times BigCommerce’s. But the gap exists because on BigCommerce you found the buyer yourself, through ads, search, social media or loyal customers, and on Amazon you did not. The BigCommerce column has no line for what it cost to bring that buyer to your store. For a store that relies on paid ads, that missing line can be larger than Amazon’s referral fee.

For a brand-new seller with no audience, Amazon’s pay-when-you-sell model can work out cheaper than buying traffic for a new store. For a seller with an existing customer list or a known brand, BigCommerce’s fixed costs make more sense, as long as the sales ceilings are budgeted for.

Customer Ownership and Repeat Sales

On BigCommerce, every order adds a customer to a list you control: name, email, delivery address and order history. You can segment that list by what people bought or how often they buy, and email them about new stock, restocks and sales, within the usual consent rules for marketing email. The second sale to an existing customer does not need another ad click.

On Amazon, contact with buyers runs through Amazon. Amazon describes its Buyer-Seller Messaging Service as the tool that “simplifies and protects communication with third-party sellers”. The seller-side rules are stricter. Amazon’s Communication Guidelines list “marketing or promotional messaging, including coupons” among the messages sellers may not send, alongside messages that try to buy positive reviews or feedback.

For repeat business, this is the critical difference. A seller with 500 past customers on BigCommerce can tell them about next month’s stock. An Amazon seller with 500 past orders cannot send those buyers a promotion at all. Any repeat sale on Amazon has to come from the buyer finding your offer again on Amazon.

That does not make Amazon buyers worthless to a brand. A buyer who liked the product may search for your brand name later, on Amazon or on the open web. But you cannot start that conversation, and you cannot build a mailing list from Amazon orders.

Category Restrictions and Condition Rules

Amazon sets condition rules category by category. Amazon’s UK Condition Guidelines state that only New items may be sold in Apparel, in Shoes and Bags (listed as Shoes and Handbag), in Sports, and in Baby, Pet and Grocery. The same document says all consumable, ingestible and topical products, such as Beauty, Health Care and supplements, must be listed as New.

For a second-hand fashion seller, that is a hard stop. A pre-owned jacket, a pair of worn trainers or a used handbag cannot be listed in those categories. The same document also bars listing items that need repair, are counterfeit or replica, or were promotional copies, and notes that once you choose the condition of a listing you cannot change it later.

On your own BigCommerce store, there is no category-by-category ban on used goods of this kind. You decide what you stock and how you describe its condition. That asymmetry is one reason resale sellers lean towards Vinted, Depop and similar marketplaces, or run their own store alongside them.

Amazon’s UK guidelines do set out used-condition rules for other categories, including Books, Music, Video and DVD, Video Games, Automotive, Electronics, Home, Office, Software and Toys, with a condition ladder from New through the Used grades and, in some categories, Collectible. For a used-books seller or a games trader, Amazon can be a strong outlet. Within those categories the rules are detailed: for example, the guidelines say advance reading copies and uncorrected proofs of books are not permitted.

Traffic and Buyer Discovery

A BigCommerce store is invisible to a shopper who does not know it exists. Traffic has to come from paid ads (Google, Meta, TikTok Shop promotion), organic search, which takes time to build, social media, or an existing brand. The upside is that once a shopper arrives, the whole experience is yours: your design, your product story, your reviews and your email sign-up form.

Amazon supplies shoppers who are already looking. A buyer typing “leather wallet” into Amazon is in a buying frame of mind, and your offer competes on price, delivery promise and seller performance for their attention. Those shoppers are on Amazon because they chose Amazon, not because they chose you.

How quickly an Amazon listing finds buyers depends on the category, on whether the product already exists in the catalogue, and on how many other sellers offer the same item. How quickly a BigCommerce store finds buyers depends almost entirely on your marketing. Neither platform publishes a typical time to first sale, and you should be wary of anyone who quotes one.

For a brand-new seller with no audience, the difference is stark. Amazon offers demand from the start. BigCommerce offers higher margin per order and a customer list that becomes more valuable the longer you trade.

Who the Buyers Are

Amazon shoppers arrive to search for specific products, compare prices and read reviews. Many expect fast delivery and simple returns, and they judge the purchase by Amazon’s standards. The seller’s name is rarely what they remember.

BigCommerce store visitors are whoever you bring: your email list, your social media followers, people who searched for your brand or niche, or people who clicked an ad. Because they came to you rather than to a marketplace, they have usually already shown some interest in your brand or your type of product.

The product type matters too. If you sell one-of-a-kind items of the kind people buy on eBay, such as vintage pieces or collectibles, a BigCommerce product page lets you tell the story of each piece. On Amazon, an item that matches an existing product is sold as an offer on that shared page, so price and delivery do most of the talking. If you sell handmade goods of the kind found on Etsy, a store of your own gives you room to show the making process, where an Amazon product page gives you a fixed layout.

Getting Started and Complexity

BigCommerce asks more of you up front: a domain, a theme or custom design, product photos and descriptions, shipping rules, tax settings, a returns policy and a payment provider. How long that takes depends on the size of your catalogue and how much design work you want. The platform is more flexible than Amazon because you are setting up the whole shop.

Amazon’s set-up is narrower: register as a seller, complete identity and bank verification, choose a selling plan and create listings. Some categories and brands need approval before you can sell in them, and the condition rules above decide what you may list at all.

The trade-off is control. BigCommerce lets you design your checkout, set your shipping rules, write your returns policy and shape the brand experience. On Amazon, much of that is set by Amazon; your main levers are price, condition, stock and how you fulfil the order.

What to check before you list the same product on both

• Condition and category. Confirm the Amazon category allows the item’s condition. A used item that is fine on your store may be banned in its Amazon category.
• Product identity. Check whether the item already exists on Amazon, so you add an offer to the right page rather than a near-duplicate.
• Price after fees. Work out what you keep after the referral fee in that category, not just the headline price.
• Title and description. A long brand-story description written for your store may need trimming to fit a marketplace listing.
• Stock count. Make sure the quantity is right on both before either goes live.

BigCommerce’s Own Amazon Options and Feedonomics

BigCommerce promotes selling on Amazon from inside its platform. Its omnichannel page says merchants can “sell directly to Amazon customers without leaving the BigCommerce platform” and manage Amazon product listings, inventory across channels and order fulfilment. Check which Amazon marketplaces the integration covers for your country before you rely on it.

BigCommerce also owns Feedonomics. It announced the acquisition in July 2021, for up to about $145 million. Feedonomics is a feed management service: it prepares and sends product data to marketplaces and advertising channels. The same omnichannel page lists Google, Meta, TikTok, Amazon, Walmart, eBay, Wish and Mercado Libre among the channels it reaches.

Feedonomics is not a self-serve checkbox. Its BigCommerce app listing describes a managed service where its team handles set-up and ongoing feed maintenance, with “Custom Pricing: Flat Monthly Fee”. Its pricing page says the price “varies by SKU count, channel type, number of channels, and service level” and that it never takes a percentage of revenue. You have to request a quote, so there is no published figure to compare.

For a larger catalogue on mainstream channels, a managed feed service can be worth it. For a small seller, the lack of a published price makes it hard to judge until you have spoken to sales.

When Each Makes Sense

Choose BigCommerce if: you want to build a brand and a customer list that you can market to. Your margins can pay for bringing in buyers. You have an audience already, such as social media followers, an email list or a local reputation, to send to your store. You sell items Amazon will not accept in their category, such as used clothing. You plan to trade for years and see your customer list as a core asset.

A common BigCommerce pattern is a maker or small brand that grows followers on social channels such as Instagram, turns them into email subscribers, and sells new collections to that list. Each repeat order arrives without another marketplace fee, and the brand controls how every product is presented.

Choose Amazon if: you want sales without building an audience first. Your stock is new, often barcoded, and something shoppers search for by product name. You can live with a referral fee on every order in exchange for access to Amazon’s shoppers. You sell in categories where Amazon’s condition rules allow your stock, such as books or games. You want to test whether a product sells before investing in a store.

A common Amazon pattern is a seller who sources new products in categories with steady search demand, prices competitively, and keeps stock and delivery reliable. That seller does not build a mailing list from Amazon orders, because the rules do not allow it, and relies on Amazon for each new sale.

Choose both if: your margins and catalogue size support two sets of fees. Use BigCommerce as your brand home and Amazon to reach shoppers who search there. Split stock that Amazon will not accept onto your store only. Then solve the one risk that comes with running both: overselling.

Running Both Without Overselling

The risk of running both is one physical item promised to two buyers. BigCommerce keeps its own stock count; Amazon keeps its own in Seller Central. Unless something connects them, a sale on one leaves the other still showing the item.

You have three broad options. First, BigCommerce’s own Amazon integration or a Feedonomics contract, if they cover your Amazon marketplace and your catalogue. Second, a crosslisting tool such as FLUF Connect. Whatever you pick, check exactly which direction stock updates flow in before you go live, because tools differ. Third, separate the stock: list some items only on BigCommerce and others only on Amazon. That avoids the problem but gives up a single shared catalogue.

For one-off items, where you hold a single unit, the check matters most. A shared-stock mistake on a product with 50 units is a small correction. On a one-off vintage piece it means cancelling an order and apologising to a buyer.

How FLUF Connect Handles Both Channels

FLUF Connect lets you list your BigCommerce products on Amazon from one dashboard. When an item sells on BigCommerce, FLUF detects the sale and takes the item down on Amazon automatically. The same is true when the item sells on another connected channel where FLUF detects sales, such as eBay or Etsy.

The other direction is manual. FLUF does not detect sales on Amazon. When an item sells on Amazon, BigCommerce is not updated automatically: mark the item sold in FLUF by hand, or reduce the stock in BigCommerce yourself.

What that means day to day: a sale on your BigCommerce store needs no action from you on Amazon. A sale on Amazon does: as soon as you see the Amazon order, mark the item sold in FLUF so your store stops offering it. For single-unit stock, make this part of the routine for every Amazon order.

7 days for £1, then from £9/month. The Starter plan is £9/month with unlimited listings. Crosslisting, inventory sync, order sync and bulk operations come on every plan; relisting, offer management and smart pricing come with the plans above Starter.

Sources and Verification

Every fee and policy on this page was checked against the sources below on 13 September 2026.

• BigCommerce US pricing page and BigCommerce UK pricing page — Core, Growth, Scale and Performance prices on monthly and annual billing, the sales ceilings and auto-upgrades, the 0.9% charge above the Scale ceiling, and the 2.0%, 1.0% and 0.6% Open Payment Provider fees.
• BigCommerce Payments rates — 2.89%, 2.59% and 2.39% plus $0.30 by plan, and the US-only availability.
• Stripe UK pricing — 1.5% + 20p for standard UK cards, 2.5% + 20p for EEA cards, 3.15% + 20p for international cards, plus 2% for currency conversion.
• Amazon UK selling fees — £0.75 Individual per-item fee, £25 Professional monthly fee (both excl. VAT), the 8% to 15% typical referral range, the Clothing and Accessories bands, Consumer Electronics, Home, Footwear and Books rates, and the £0.25 minimum referral fee.
• Amazon US selling fees — $0.99 Individual and $39.99 Professional fees, the 5% to 45% referral range, the clothing bands and the $0.30 minimum referral fee.
• Amazon.co.uk Condition Guidelines (PDF) — New-only categories, the used-condition categories, the unacceptable-condition list and the rule that condition cannot be changed after listing.
• Amazon Communication Guidelines (PDF) — the ban on marketing or promotional messages to buyers.
• Amazon Buyer-Seller Messaging Service — how buyer and seller communication is handled.
• BigCommerce omnichannel page — the Amazon integration description and the channels listed for Feedonomics.
• BigCommerce press release on the Feedonomics acquisition — July 2021 acquisition for up to about $145 million.
• Feedonomics on the BigCommerce app marketplace and Feedonomics pricing — managed service, custom flat monthly fee, no revenue share.

What we could not verify: which Amazon marketplaces BigCommerce’s built-in Amazon integration supports for UK sellers, and exactly what it syncs; BigCommerce’s help article on the integration was not available when we checked. We found no primary source for typical repeat-purchase rates on BigCommerce stores or on Amazon, or for a typical time to first sale on either, so this page does not quote any. The Amazon Condition Guidelines PDF is the version Amazon still hosts; category rules can change, so check Seller Central for your category before listing.

Related guides

• Sell on BigCommerce — the complete guide
• Sell on Amazon — the complete guide
• Crosslist from BigCommerce to Amazon
• Amazon vs Shopify
• BigCommerce vs Shopify
• All crosslisting guides
• FLUF Connect pricing
• All marketplace guides