Shopify vs BigCommerce for Growing Brands

This is the hardest comparison in ecommerce to write honestly, because Shopify and BigCommerce are far more alike than either company’s marketing suggests. Both are hosted platforms. Both handle your servers, security, and PCI compliance. Both give you a solid admin, a decent theme system, and a functioning checkout. A capable team could run the same brand on either and most customers would never know.

So the interesting question is not which is better — it is which specific differences will actually matter to you. There are about five of them, and depending on your situation they either decide the whole thing or barely register.

The one-line summary

Shopify has the larger ecosystem and the more polished experience. BigCommerce has more built in as standard and does not charge transaction fees on top of your payment processor. Shopify wins on breadth and momentum; BigCommerce wins on what you get without buying apps.

If you stop reading here, you will not be far wrong. But the detail changes the answer for specific kinds of business, so let me go through it.

Difference one: the app ecosystem

This is Shopify’s biggest structural advantage and it compounds every year.

Shopify’s App Store is enormous. Whatever you need — subscriptions, loyalty, bundles, advanced search, B2B portals, obscure regional shipping carriers, niche accounting integrations — there is almost certainly a mature, well-reviewed app for it, usually several competing ones. More importantly, because Shopify has the largest merchant base, third-party vendors build for Shopify first. New tools launch there. Integrations exist there before anywhere else.

BigCommerce’s ecosystem is respectable and covers the common cases well, but it is smaller. You will occasionally find that the tool you want either does not have a BigCommerce integration or has a less mature one. For a straightforward store this never comes up. For a brand with a specific stack — a particular ERP, an unusual subscription model, a niche marketplace connector — it can be the thing that decides it.

The counter-argument, which BigCommerce makes fairly, is that you need fewer apps in the first place, which brings us to the next point.

Difference two: what comes included

BigCommerce ships more functionality as standard. Faceted search, more sophisticated product options and variants, customer groups with tiered pricing, and a capable B2B feature set are available without bolting on third-party apps.

On Shopify, several of those are app territory. Advanced search is an app. Customer-specific pricing on the standard tiers is an app or a workaround. Complex product configuration is an app. Each one is a monthly fee, a bit of page weight, and another vendor relationship.

The practical consequence is that a like-for-like feature comparison often has BigCommerce looking cheaper and simpler, especially for stores with complicated catalogues. Large SKU counts with many variants, wholesale pricing tiers, and detailed product specifications are all areas where BigCommerce’s native tooling saves you money and app bloat.

Whether that matters depends entirely on your catalogue. Selling forty simple products, Shopify’s defaults are ample. Selling four thousand SKUs with option matrices and trade pricing, BigCommerce’s native capability is a real advantage.

Difference three: transaction fees

This one is simple and frequently decisive.

Shopify charges an additional transaction fee if you use a payment gateway other than Shopify Payments. Use Shopify Payments and the extra fee disappears, which is the arrangement most merchants end up in. But Shopify Payments is not available in every country, and some businesses have existing processor relationships, negotiated rates, or requirements that rule it out. In those cases you pay Shopify a percentage on every order on top of what your processor takes.

BigCommerce does not charge additional transaction fees regardless of which gateway you use. You bring whatever processor you like and pay only their rate.

For a store doing modest volume this is noise. For a high-volume merchant with a negotiated processing rate, or a business in a market where Shopify Payments is unavailable, it can amount to a serious annual sum and it tilts the decision meaningfully toward BigCommerce.

Difference four: B2B and wholesale

If you sell to businesses, read this bit carefully, because it is where the platforms diverge most by tier.

BigCommerce has offered strong B2B functionality on its standard plans for a long time — customer groups, price lists, quote workflows, and purchase-order style flows without an enterprise contract. For a mid-sized wholesaler this is attractive, because you get the capability without the enterprise price tag.

Shopify’s B2B story is now excellent, but it lives on Shopify Plus. Company accounts with multiple buyers, per-customer catalogues and price lists, and net payment terms are all native and well-built — and they require the Plus tier. Below that you are using apps and workarounds, which is functional but clumsier.

So the shape of the decision is: if you need serious B2B and you are not ready for Plus pricing, BigCommerce lets you have it sooner. If you are already at Plus scale, Shopify’s native B2B is at least as good and integrates more cleanly with the rest of the platform.

Difference five: headless and flexibility

Both platforms support headless builds, and both do it competently through APIs.

BigCommerce has positioned itself as API-first for longer and is comfortable being the commerce engine behind someone else’s front end. Its APIs are well documented and it is relaxed about you using them.

Shopify has invested heavily here too, with the Storefront API, the Hydrogen framework, and Oxygen hosting, and the tooling is now more opinionated and more integrated than BigCommerce’s. If you want a curated path to headless, Shopify gives you one. If you want to bring your own stack and have the platform stay out of the way, BigCommerce is comfortable with that.

In practice most brands considering this should first ask whether they need headless at all, because the answer is usually no and the cost is usually underestimated. Both platforms can support it when the need is real.

Where each one clearly wins

Choose Shopify when: you want the largest ecosystem and the most third-party support; the admin experience and ease of use matter to your team; you sell across multiple channels including physical retail; you are heading toward Plus-level checkout customisation, automation, or multi-store; or you simply want the platform with the most momentum, the most agencies, and the most people who know it. That last point is undervalued — hiring for Shopify is easier than hiring for anything else in ecommerce.

Choose BigCommerce when: you have a large, complex catalogue and want native faceted search and rich product options without apps; you need real B2B functionality without paying enterprise prices; transaction fees on a non-Shopify gateway would cost you meaningfully; or you want an API-first platform that is content to be a back end.

A worked example: where the decision actually turned

A distributor doing both trade and consumer sales, around three thousand SKUs with heavy variant complexity, and an existing merchant account on rates they had negotiated over years.

Shopify would have meant either moving to Shopify Payments and abandoning that rate, or paying additional transaction fees on every order. It would also have meant Plus pricing to get native B2B, or apps to approximate it on a lower tier. The all-in cost was considerably higher than it first appeared.

BigCommerce gave them customer groups and trade pricing natively, faceted search that handled the catalogue without an app, and no penalty for keeping their processor. They chose BigCommerce and it was the right call.

The instructive part is that none of the marketing-level comparisons would have surfaced this. It came down to three specifics: catalogue complexity, an existing processor relationship, and B2B needs below the Plus threshold. Change any one of those and the answer flips to Shopify.

Pricing and how the tiers compare

Both platforms run a tiered monthly subscription with an enterprise tier above it, and both publish pricing that looks broadly similar. The differences show up in how you get bumped upward.

BigCommerce has historically gated its standard tiers partly on annual sales volume, which means growth can move you to a more expensive plan even if your feature needs have not changed. That is worth modelling before you commit, because a fast-growing brand can find itself paying more than expected for capabilities it was already using.

Shopify’s tiers are differentiated mainly by features and by how much of your payment processing rate you keep. Higher plans buy you better processing rates and more advanced reporting, so the calculation is less about volume thresholds and more about whether the rate saving covers the subscription increase — which it does at predictable points you can calculate in advance.

Then there is the app question, which usually dominates both. A Shopify store needing subscriptions, advanced search, B2B pricing, and a page builder could easily add a few hundred a month in app subscriptions. The equivalent BigCommerce store might need fewer of them. Any honest cost comparison has to include the app stack, not just the platform fee, and it has to be based on the functionality you actually need rather than a generic list.

Themes, design, and the front end

Shopify has the stronger design ecosystem, and it is not especially close. The theme marketplace is larger, the quality bar on premium themes is higher, and Online Store 2.0 gave merchants a good section-based editor that lets marketing teams build pages without a developer. If your brand is design-led and you want distinctive, or you want your team composing landing pages independently, Shopify’s tooling is better and the pool of designers who know it is deeper.

BigCommerce’s theme selection is smaller and, candidly, less inspiring out of the box. Its page builder is competent. You can absolutely build a beautiful BigCommerce store — we have seen plenty — but you will be doing more of the work from scratch rather than starting from an excellent base, and you will have fewer designers to choose from.

For a brand where the storefront is part of the product, this is a real point in Shopify’s favour. For a functional catalogue where shoppers care about finding the right SKU rather than admiring the typography, it matters much less.

Speed and Core Web Vitals

Neither platform hands you good performance, and both can deliver it.

Both run solid hosted infrastructure, so the server layer is not usually your problem on either. What determines your Core Web Vitals is the same on both: how heavy your theme is, how many third-party scripts you have loaded, whether your images are properly sized and served in modern formats, and how disciplined you have been about apps.

Shopify stores tend to be slower in the wild, and the reason is straightforward rather than technical — the app ecosystem is so rich that merchants install more, and every app that renders something on the storefront adds weight. That is a discipline problem, not a platform problem, and it is fixable.

BigCommerce’s advantage here is indirect: because more functionality is native, a like-for-like store often carries fewer third-party scripts. That is a genuine benefit, though it evaporates if you install a comparable number of apps anyway.

Either way, plan for performance work as part of the build rather than treating it as something you address after launch when the numbers disappoint you.

Support and the partner network

BigCommerce has a reputation for more accessible support at lower tiers, including phone support, and merchants generally speak well of it. For a small team without an agency, being able to reach a human quickly has real value.

Shopify’s support is decent and improves markedly at the Plus tier, where you get a dedicated contact and launch engineering help. Below that, the more common pattern is that merchants lean on their agency, on the enormous body of community documentation, and on the sheer number of people who have hit the same problem and written about it.

That last point is the quiet advantage. Whatever has gone wrong with your Shopify store, someone has documented the fix. The volume of tutorials, forum answers, and agency blog posts is an asset in itself, and it means problems get solved faster even without formal support.

Multi-channel and international selling

If you sell anywhere other than your own website, the platforms diverge in ways worth knowing.

Shopify’s multi-channel tooling is more developed. Point-of-sale for physical retail is native and shares inventory with the online store automatically, marketplace and social selling channels are well supported, and Shopify Markets gives you a reasonably coherent way to handle multiple currencies, regional pricing, and cross-border tax from a single admin. If you have a shop, do markets and pop-ups, or sell through social platforms, having one inventory source is an operational advantage rather than a feature bullet.

BigCommerce handles marketplaces competently and has solid channel management, but its retail point-of-sale story depends on third-party integrations rather than a native product. For international selling, both platforms support multi-currency, though Shopify’s Markets framework is the more integrated approach.

For a purely online brand selling in one country, this section will not decide anything. For anyone with physical retail ambitions or serious international plans, it tilts toward Shopify.

The question of momentum

There is a factor that does not appear on feature grids and probably should: which platform is accelerating.

Shopify ships new capability at a pace that is hard to match, and because it has the largest merchant base in its segment, the ecosystem compounds around it. New tools integrate with Shopify first. New agencies specialise in Shopify. New talent learns Shopify. When you choose a platform you are also choosing the size of the world around it for the next five years, and that affects your hiring, your tooling options, and how easily you can replace a partner who is not working out.

BigCommerce is a stable, well-run platform with a clear position and real technical strengths, and none of this suggests it is going anywhere. But it is competing for a smaller share of attention, and that shows up in practical ways — fewer integrations shipped first, fewer specialists available, a thinner body of community knowledge when something breaks.

This is not a reason to dismiss BigCommerce where it fits better. It is a reason to weight the ecosystem gap a little more heavily than a feature comparison would suggest, particularly if you expect to change agencies or hire internally at some point.

The bottom line

These platforms are close enough that you should ignore the general comparisons and test your specific requirements against each.

Shopify is the safer default for most consumer brands. The ecosystem advantage is real and compounding, the experience is more polished, multi-channel and retail are better handled, and the talent pool is far deeper. For a DTC brand that wants to grow without operational friction, it is the stronger choice and the one I recommend most often.

BigCommerce earns its place on specifics: complex catalogues, B2B below enterprise pricing, and merchants for whom transaction fees on an existing gateway would be a real cost. Those are not edge cases — they describe a lot of genuine businesses, and in those situations BigCommerce is the better-value platform rather than the consolation prize.

The wrong way to decide this is on feature-count listicles, because both will tick nearly every box. The right way is to list the five things your business actually needs that are unusual, and check those specifically. If you want help pressure-testing that list against your catalogue and stack, our development team will tell you plainly when Shopify is not the right answer.

Frequently asked questions

Does BigCommerce really have no transaction fees?

Correct — BigCommerce does not add its own transaction fee on top of your payment processor, whichever gateway you use. Shopify does charge an extra fee if you use a third-party gateway rather than Shopify Payments, though that fee disappears if you use Shopify Payments, which most merchants do. The difference matters in two situations: when Shopify Payments is not available in your country, and when you have a negotiated processing rate you do not want to give up. At modest volume the amounts are small; at high volume with an existing processor relationship, it can become a significant annual cost worth modelling properly.

Is BigCommerce better for B2B than Shopify?

It depends on your budget tier. BigCommerce offers customer groups, price lists, and B2B workflows on its standard plans, so a mid-sized wholesaler gets real capability without an enterprise contract. Shopify’s native B2B — company accounts, multiple buyers, per-customer catalogues, net payment terms — is excellent but requires Shopify Plus. So if you need B2B and are not ready for Plus pricing, BigCommerce gets you there sooner and cheaper. If you are already operating at Plus scale, Shopify’s B2B is at least as capable and integrates more neatly with the rest of your operation.

Which platform is easier to find developers for?

Shopify, by a wide margin, and this is worth weighting more than most comparisons do. Shopify has the largest merchant base in its segment, which means far more agencies, freelancers, and in-house developers with real experience. If your current partner disappears, replacing them is straightforward. BigCommerce has a capable partner network but it is much smaller, so finding specialists takes longer and costs more. Over the life of a store, the depth of the talent pool affects your risk and your bargaining position more than any individual platform feature.

Can I migrate from BigCommerce to Shopify, or the other way?

Yes, in both directions, and it is a well-trodden path. Products, variants, customers, orders, and content all transfer, and the critical work is the same either way: a complete 301 redirect map so you keep your rankings, metadata parity, and careful reconciliation of the data once it lands. The complications are usually around things that were native on one platform and need an app on the other — B2B pricing structures and complex product options being the common examples. Scope those specifically rather than assuming a straight swap, and budget for rebuilding that functionality rather than just moving data.