BigCommerce vs Shopify: Fees, Features & Which to Choose (2026)

If you are choosing between BigCommerce and Shopify, you are choosing between two of the most established hosted e-commerce platforms in the world. Both let you spin up a branded online store without renting a server, patching software, or worrying about PCI compliance — the platform handles the plumbing so you can focus on selling. They overlap heavily, which is exactly why the decision feels hard: the differences that matter are not in the headline (“sell things online”) but in the details of staff permissions, multi-store support, B2B tooling, the size of the app marketplace, and how each one prices growth.

This comparison sticks to verified, current facts (both platforms revised pricing in the last year), and it is deliberately balanced. There are real reasons to pick each one. Below we break down pricing and fees side by side, compare the features that actually separate them, and give an honest recommendation by seller type. Then we cover the part neither platform does well on its own — getting your catalogue in front of marketplace buyers — and how FLUF Connect fills that gap from either platform.

One framing note before the details. A lot of “BigCommerce vs Shopify” content online is either out of date or quietly biased toward whichever platform paid for the article. Both companies changed their plan structures and fee mechanics recently, so claims you remember from a year or two ago may simply be wrong now — the old BigCommerce “Standard / Plus / Pro / Enterprise” plan names are gone, and the once-common line that “BigCommerce charges no transaction fees” no longer holds across all gateways. We flag those changes explicitly as we go, because getting the fundamentals right is the difference between a useful comparison and a misleading one.

BigCommerce vs Shopify: Quick Verdict

There is no universal winner. Shopify is the easier, more polished platform with a far larger ecosystem and pricing that scales smoothly with your sales — the safer default for most small-to-mid stores. BigCommerce is the stronger fit for merchants with bigger catalogues, multiple storefronts, or serious B2B needs, where its unlimited staff accounts and native enterprise features earn their keep. On transaction and payment fees, the two are now close to parity, so fees alone rarely decide it.

Choose BigCommerce if you need unlimited team members, native multi-storefront, or built-in B2B (quotes, buyer portals, CPQ) without bolting on apps. Choose Shopify if you want the smoothest setup, the biggest app store by far, and a plan structure that won’t auto-upgrade you as your revenue climbs.

Shopify at a glance

Shopify is a fully hosted, subscription-based commerce platform built around ease of use and a massive third-party ecosystem. You pay a monthly subscription, get a hosted storefront with your own domain and branding, and extend it with apps and themes. It is the platform a huge share of independent merchants reach for first, and for good reason: the admin is approachable, the theme store is large and polished, and there is an app for nearly anything you might want to add.

The scale behind Shopify is substantial. In its 2025 fiscal year the platform processed roughly $378.4 billion in gross merchandise volume and powered more than 14% of US e-commerce. That scale translates into a deep talent pool of agencies, developers, and apps — if you hit a problem, someone has almost certainly built a solution for it.

Shopify’s pricing is subscription plus payment processing. Shopify Payments charges around 2.9% + 30¢ per online transaction on the Basic plan, with lower rates on higher tiers. If you use a third-party payment gateway instead of Shopify Payments, Shopify adds a transaction fee on top — more on that in the fees table below.

What you are really buying with Shopify is momentum. Because so many merchants run on it, the surrounding economy — themes, apps, agencies, freelancers, integrations, courses — is enormous. That depth is a genuine, compounding advantage: when you need a specific feature or run into a specific problem, the odds that someone has already built and battle-tested a solution are very high. It also means hiring help is easier, because Shopify expertise is common. For a merchant who would rather assemble a store from polished, well-supported pieces than configure deep platform settings, that ecosystem is the headline reason to choose Shopify, and it is hard to overstate how much friction it removes from everyday operations.

BigCommerce at a glance

BigCommerce is also a fully hosted SaaS platform, but it positions itself as “Open SaaS” — API-first, more configurable out of the box, and aimed at mid-market and enterprise merchants with larger or more complex catalogues. Many of the capabilities that Shopify expects you to add via apps — faceted search, multi-storefront, B2B tooling — ship natively in BigCommerce. The trade-off is a steeper initial learning curve in exchange for fewer add-ons later. Its platform overview is at bigcommerce.com.

BigCommerce renamed its plans on 1 June 2026, so older comparisons referencing “Standard / Plus / Pro / Enterprise” are out of date. The current tiers are Core, Growth, Scale, and Performance, and — importantly — each plan carries a trailing-twelve-month GMV cap. Cross the cap and BigCommerce moves you to the next tier. That GMV ceiling is one of the few places where the two platforms diverge sharply, and we cover it in the fees and pricing section.

The philosophy difference is worth dwelling on, because it shapes everything downstream. Shopify’s model is a lean core extended by a vast app marketplace: the base platform stays simple, and you add capabilities as you need them. BigCommerce’s model is a richer core with fewer required add-ons: more is built in, so you install less, but the admin you start with has more surface area. Neither approach is objectively better — they suit different temperaments and different businesses. A merchant who wants to keep their app bill low and avoid juggling many third-party subscriptions will appreciate BigCommerce’s native breadth. A merchant who wants the simplest possible starting point and is happy to bolt on exactly the apps they need will prefer Shopify’s lean core.

On the marketplace front, BigCommerce’s native channel coverage is deliberately narrow: Amazon, eBay, and Walmart, plus social channels (BigCommerce omnichannel). Etsy and the fashion-resale marketplaces are not native to either platform — which is exactly where a dedicated crosslisting tool comes in, regardless of which store builder you choose. It is one of the few areas where both platforms have the same blind spot, and it is a meaningful one given how much of total e-commerce now flows through marketplaces.

Fees and Pricing

Pricing is where the marketing language gets noisy, so here are the verified numbers side by side. Two things to understand up front. First, BigCommerce caps GMV per plan: each tier has a trailing-twelve-month sales ceiling, and crossing it auto-upgrades you to the next plan. Shopify does not gate plans by GMV. Second — and this corrects a claim you will still see repeated online — BigCommerce is not a flat-out “0% transaction fee” platform anymore. It charges $0 when you use an embedded/approved gateway, but it applies an Open Payment Provider fee when you use a non-embedded gateway. Shopify works the same way: 0% under Shopify Payments, a transaction fee if you use a third-party gateway. The two are now near-parity on fees.

The plan prices and BigCommerce GMV caps and Open Payment Provider fees are from the BigCommerce pricing page and the 2026 plan and pricing update. Shopify’s third-party gateway fees of 2% / 1% / 0.6% / 0.2% by plan, waived under Shopify Payments, and its processing rates from the Shopify pricing page, confirm the near-parity picture.

The practical read: on a like-for-like setup (using each platform’s own payments), neither platform’s transaction fees will be the deciding factor for most sellers. Where the cost models genuinely diverge is the GMV cap. A BigCommerce merchant whose annual sales climb past a plan ceiling gets moved to a pricier tier automatically; a growing Shopify merchant can stay on the same plan indefinitely. If you expect rapid revenue growth and want predictable subscription costs, that asymmetry matters. If you value the native features BigCommerce bundles in, the tiered jump can be worth it.

It is worth modelling this against your own trajectory rather than reading the headline price alone. Two stores can look identical on the entry plan and end up in very different places a year later. Imagine two merchants both starting on a roughly $30–40/month plan. The one on Shopify who triples revenue stays on the same plan — their subscription is unchanged, and only their payment processing scales with sales. The one on BigCommerce who triples revenue past the Core GMV ceiling is moved up to Growth, and possibly toward Scale after that, which changes the monthly subscription each time. That is not a hidden fee or a trick — BigCommerce is upfront that plans are tied to GMV — but it is a real planning consideration that the sticker price doesn’t reveal. Conversely, the BigCommerce merchant is getting more native capability at each tier, so the higher subscription is buying features the Shopify merchant might be paying for separately through apps. The honest conclusion is that you should price out your expected twelve-month GMV against both models before deciding, rather than comparing entry prices in isolation.

One more nuance on payment processing: the rates above are the published online-transaction rates, and both platforms typically offer lower processing on higher subscription tiers and may differ for in-person or international payments. The structural point holds regardless of the exact decimal — if you use each platform’s own embedded payments, you avoid the extra third-party transaction fee on both, and the two are close enough that fees should rarely be the tiebreaker. Where one platform clearly differs from the other on money is the GMV cap, not the percentage on each sale.

Features Compared

Fees aside, the day-to-day differences come down to a handful of features. Here is where each platform genuinely leads, kept honest in both directions.

Staff accounts and team access

This is a clear BigCommerce win. BigCommerce includes unlimited staff accounts on every plan. Shopify gates user accounts by tier: Basic adds 0 extra users, Grow allows 5, Advanced 15, and only Plus is unlimited. If you run a team — warehouse staff, customer service, freelancers, an agency — BigCommerce lets everyone in without pushing you up a plan. On Shopify, a growing team can be a reason to upgrade entirely on its own.

Multi-storefront

Another BigCommerce strength. BigCommerce offers native multi-storefront — running several distinct storefronts (different brands, regions, or languages) from one backend — earlier and more affordably in its plan range. Shopify reserves equivalent “expansion stores” for its top-tier Plus plan. If you operate, or plan to operate, more than one storefront, BigCommerce reaches that capability at a lower price point.

B2B and wholesale

BigCommerce leads here too. It ships deep native B2B tooling — CPQ (configure-price-quote), buyer portals, and quote management. Shopify can do B2B, particularly on Plus and through apps, but BigCommerce’s B2B features are built into the platform rather than assembled from add-ons. For merchants whose business is part wholesale, part retail, that native depth removes a lot of integration work.

Hosting and PCI

Here the two are evenly matched and both strong. Both are fully hosted SaaS platforms: hosting, security patches, uptime, and the bulk of PCI compliance are handled for you on either one. Neither requires you to maintain a server, schedule security updates, or scramble when a traffic spike hits. This is the shared advantage that makes both far simpler to operate than a self-hosted store on something like WooCommerce, where hosting, scaling, and compliance are your responsibility. If “I don’t want to think about servers” is high on your list, either platform delivers — this is a tie, and a strong one for both.

App ecosystem

A decisive Shopify win. Shopify’s app store is roughly 15x larger than BigCommerce’s — on the order of 18,000 apps versus around 1,200. For almost any feature you might want — subscriptions, loyalty, advanced reviews, niche shipping logic — Shopify’s catalogue is more likely to have several mature options. BigCommerce offsets this partly by bundling more functionality natively, so you need fewer apps in the first place. But if your strategy depends on stitching together best-of-breed third-party tools, Shopify’s ecosystem is simply deeper.

Ease of use

Shopify wins on approachability. Its admin, onboarding, and theme editing are widely considered easier to learn, and the setup experience is smoother for non-technical merchants. BigCommerce’s “Open SaaS” flexibility comes with more settings and a steeper initial curve. If you want to be selling this afternoon with minimal fuss, Shopify is the gentler on-ramp. If you are comfortable investing in configuration to unlock more native capability, BigCommerce rewards that effort.

Which Should You Choose?

The honest answer depends on your catalogue size, team, and growth plans. Here is a balanced recommendation by seller type.

Small and mid-size independent stores are usually better served by Shopify. The easier admin, the enormous app store, and the absence of a GMV cap mean you can start fast, customise freely, and grow your revenue without being pushed onto a more expensive plan just because sales went up. For the majority of solo founders and small teams, Shopify is the lower-friction choice.

Larger catalogues and teams tilt toward BigCommerce. Unlimited staff accounts on every plan alone can justify the switch for a business with many people in the admin. Add native multi-storefront and you have a platform built for operating several brands or regions without paying for the top tier.

B2B and wholesale merchants are the clearest BigCommerce case. The native CPQ, buyer portals, and quoting remove a whole category of apps and integration headaches. If a meaningful slice of your revenue is wholesale, BigCommerce’s built-in B2B depth is hard to match on a comparable Shopify plan.

Fast-growing DTC brands watching costs should weigh the GMV cap carefully. BigCommerce auto-upgrades you as your trailing sales cross each plan ceiling, which can mean a step change in subscription cost exactly when you are scaling. Shopify’s flat plan pricing is more predictable as revenue climbs. If cost predictability through growth is a priority, that favours Shopify.

A quick way to settle it for yourself: write down your three biggest constraints. If those constraints are “small team, want it easy, don’t want surprise plan jumps,” that is a Shopify shape. If they are “lots of staff in the admin, more than one storefront, real wholesale business,” that is a BigCommerce shape. Most merchants will find that two of their three constraints point clearly in one direction, and that is usually a reliable signal. The edge cases — a small but fast-scaling DTC brand, or a mid-size store with light B2B — are where it genuinely comes down to taste and to how you weigh ease-of-use against native breadth.

Whichever you pick, remember that neither decision is permanent in spirit: both are hosted platforms you can run a serious business on, and both have migration paths if you outgrow your choice. And crucially, neither platform’s strengths or weaknesses change the most important growth lever for a lot of sellers — getting the same products in front of buyers who are already shopping on marketplaces. That lever sits outside the store-builder decision entirely, which is why it deserves its own section.

Reach Both — and Every Marketplace — with FLUF Connect

Here is the limitation BigCommerce and Shopify share: both are your own store. A branded storefront gives you control over design, domain, and customer data, but it only receives the traffic you bring to it. The buyers are not waiting there — you have to go find them. Marketplaces are where buyers already are. They now account for roughly 67% of global e-commerce sales (BCG, 2024), and that is exactly the audience a standalone store can’t reach by itself.

FLUF Connect closes that gap from either platform. It reads your store catalogue — on BigCommerce, through the BigCommerce V3 catalog API: products, variants, images, and your store’s category tree — and lets you crosslist those products to marketplaces in one click. From there the same listings can reach eBay (135 million active buyers in FY2025, per eBay’s fee documentation), Etsy for handmade, vintage, and craft inventory, the Gen-Z resale crowds on Depop and Vinted, and more — none of which are native marketplace channels on BigCommerce or Shopify.

The point of FLUF Connect is that it doesn’t ask you to leave your platform. You keep running your BigCommerce or Shopify store exactly as you do now; FLUF adds marketplace reach on top. Inventory stays in sync across every channel, so when an item sells anywhere, FLUF marks it sold elsewhere and you never oversell. Orders are surfaced centrally where the destination marketplace supports it. Connecting an account is OAuth or a token paste — no passwords are stored and tokens are revocable — and the whole setup takes about ten minutes.

The workflow is deliberately simple. You connect your source store and the destination marketplaces you want to reach. FLUF reads your catalogue and maps the fields each marketplace needs — photos, title, description, price, and variants — against your store’s category tree, so a BigCommerce category is translated into the right marketplace category rather than dumped into a generic catch-all. You select the products you want to list, and crosslist them in one click. From that point the listings are live on each connected channel, and the syncing runs in the background: a sale on eBay updates your Shopify stock and your Vinted listing alike, without you touching anything. For a store owner who has tried to manage marketplace listings by hand — re-entering the same product across four sites, then racing to pull a listing down after it sells elsewhere — the time saved is the whole point.

The marketplace mix you choose can match your inventory. If you sell handmade, vintage, or craft goods, Etsy is a natural fit. If you carry streetwear, Y2K, or preloved fashion, Depop and Vinted reach exactly that audience — Vinted alone reported €10.8 billion in GMV in 2025, up 47% year on year, per Vinted’s 2025 financial results. If you sell general merchandise, eBay’s enormous buyer base does the heavy lifting. The same source catalogue from your one BigCommerce or Shopify store can feed all of them at once.

Automation matters here because marketplaces reward activity. On channels that support it, FLUF can handle relisting, offers to interested buyers, and bulk operations — and that automation is included in every plan, not a paid add-on. The capabilities differ by marketplace: eBay, Depop, and Vinted support full relisting and offer automation, for example, while a channel like Facebook Marketplace handles its own orders and messages and FLUF simply detects the sale to keep your other channels in sync.

Pricing

FLUF Connect plans start at £19/month (Growth — 500 products). There is no free plan. Higher plans add more product capacity, and automation is included in every plan rather than sold as an add-on. You can connect your BigCommerce or Shopify store and start crosslisting from the FLUF Connect dashboard in about ten minutes.

So the BigCommerce-versus-Shopify decision is really about which store builder fits your business — and both are strong choices. The marketplace reach that turns either store into a multi-channel sales engine is a separate, additive decision, and that is the gap FLUF Connect was built to fill.

Sources & Verification

• https://www.bigcommerce.com/
• https://www.bigcommerce.com/pricing/
• https://www.bigcommerce.com/dm/plan-pricing-updates-2026/
• https://www.bigcommerce.com/solutions/omnichannel/
• https://www.bigcommerce.com/solutions/b2b-ecommerce-platform/
• https://www.bigcommerce.com/compare/bigcommerce-vs-shopify/
• https://developer.bigcommerce.com/docs/storefront/multi-storefront
• https://www.shopify.com/pricing
• https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/your-account/manage-billing/billing-charges/types-of-charges/third-party-charges/third-party-transaction-fees
• https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/your-account/users/users-plan-requirements
• https://www.digitalcommerce360.com/2026/02/17/shopify-revenue-gmv-q4-2025/
• https://zapier.com/blog/bigcommerce-vs-shopify/
• https://www.ebay.com/help/selling/fees-credits-invoices/selling-fees?id=4822
• https://company.vinted.com/newsroom/financial-results-2025
• https://www.bcg.com/publications/2024/the-rise-of-the-b2c-specialty-marketplace