BigCommerce vs Shopify: Which Ecommerce Platform Is Better?

BigCommerce and Shopify are both fully hosted ecommerce platforms, so neither asks you to run servers, patch software or manage security certificates. That makes this a closer contest than Shopify against a website builder. It also changed on 1 June 2026, when BigCommerce renamed its plans, lowered the sales limits that trigger automatic upgrades and introduced a fee for payment providers outside its approved list. Many comparisons still quote the old plans, so check the date on anything you read.

We are a Shopify agency, so we recommend Shopify for most merchants. BigCommerce still has real strengths, and we say below where it leads. Every price and limit in this guide comes from the platforms' own pages, checked in September 2026.

Quick Answer

For most UK stores, Shopify is the better choice. BigCommerce's two best known advantages have largely gone: since 1 June 2026 it charges a fee of up to 2% on orders processed outside its list of embedded payment providers, which matches Shopify's third party gateway fees plan for plan, and Shopify now allows 2,048 variants per product against BigCommerce's 600. BigCommerce remains a sound choice if you want several storefronts from one account, need its built in features on an entry plan, or already process every order through one of its embedded providers while staying well below its sales caps.

Key Takeaways

• Both platforms are fully hosted, so hosting, security and core updates are handled for you.
• On 1 June 2026 BigCommerce renamed Standard, Plus, Pro and Enterprise to Core, Growth, Scale and Performance, and cut the yearly sales caps from $50K to $30K and from $180K to $100K.
• BigCommerce's new Open Payment Provider Fee is 2.0%, 1.0% or 0.6% by plan, the same headline rates Shopify charges on its first three plans when you use a third party gateway instead of Shopify Payments.
• Shopify has no sales caps on any plan, so you move up for features or lower fees rather than because your sales grew.
• Shopify now supports 2,048 variants per product and offers B2B on every plan, which removes two of BigCommerce's traditional arguments.
• BigCommerce still includes useful features on its cheapest plan, such as product reviews, real time carrier rates and multi currency selling.

Table of Contents

• BigCommerce vs Shopify at a Glance
• Pricing: What Changed in 2026
• Sales Caps and Automatic Upgrades
• Payment Fees: The Gap Has Closed
• Checkout and Conversion
• Built In Features, Variants and Apps
• Ease of Use
• Themes and Design
• B2B and Wholesale
• SEO
• Selling Channels and Point of Sale
• When BigCommerce Is the Better Choice
• When Shopify Is the Better Choice
• Moving from BigCommerce to Shopify
• Why Matters Perspective
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Final Thoughts
• Related Articles

BigCommerce vs Shopify at a Glance

Shopify prices are from its UK pricing page. BigCommerce's UK pricing page lists every plan in US dollars, excluding tax.

Pricing: What Changed in 2026

BigCommerce's 2026 plan and pricing update took effect on 1 June 2026. The first three plans kept their base prices under new names, Enterprise became Performance with a published starting price, and the sales caps that decide your plan dropped sharply. Merchants can now change plan themselves from their account, but a lower plan only appears as an option while your sales sit below its cap.

Pound figures are approximate, at roughly $1.35 to the pound, and exclude tax. The restructure also removed phone support from the entry plan: chat and email support remain on every plan, phone support is included from Growth upwards, and BigCommerce says a paid phone add on for Core is coming.

Shopify renamed its middle plan from Shopify to Grow. Paying yearly saves roughly a quarter on all three plans. Shopify Plus starts from £1,800 a month, with a 0.2% fee on third party gateways, and Shopify also lists an Agentic plan at £0 a month for selling through AI channels, which charges 2% plus 25p only when you make a sale. See Shopify's current UK prices before you commit, because both platforms change their plans more often than most comparison articles are updated.

Sales Caps and Automatic Upgrades

BigCommerce measures your sales as Inclusive GMV: your gross order value less 10%, a reduction it raised from 3% in June. It counts product prices after discounts plus tax and shipping, and orders from Amazon, eBay and social channels count too. BigCommerce checks your trailing 12 month total on the first of each month. Cross your plan's cap and you are moved up after notice, whether or not you need the extra features.

In pounds, at roughly $1.35 and allowing for the 10% reduction, Core covers about £24,700 of gross sales a year, Growth about £82,300, and Scale about £329,000 before its overage starts. Because BigCommerce counts VAT and delivery charges, a UK store reaches those limits sooner than its net revenue suggests.

Take a UK store with £100,000 of gross sales a year. That is about $135,000, or $121,500 of Inclusive GMV. Before June it sat comfortably on Plus at $79 a month billed yearly, because the old cap was $180,000 and the old reduction was 3%. It now exceeds Growth's $100,000 cap, so BigCommerce moves it to Scale at $299 a month, an extra $2,640 a year for the same sales.

Scale no longer charges in $200,000 blocks. Instead it includes $33,333 of Inclusive GMV a month and charges 0.9% on anything above that. A store selling $600,000 a year, spread evenly, has $45,000 of Inclusive GMV a month, so it pays about $105 a month in overage, roughly $1,260 a year on top of $3,588 in yearly plan fees. Once trailing 12 month GMV reaches $2 million, BigCommerce moves the store to Performance.

Shopify has no sales caps, so the plan decision is about features and fees. With Shopify Payments, Grow's lower card rate covers its higher subscription once online card sales pass about £120,000 a year, and Advanced beats Grow above about £1.26 million. If you use a third party gateway instead, the crossover points are much lower: about £36,000 for Basic to Grow and about £630,000 for Grow to Advanced. These figures assume all sales are online card payments at Shopify's standard UK rates with yearly billing; the 25p fixed fee is the same on every plan, so it cancels out.

Payment Fees: The Gap Has Closed

For years BigCommerce's strongest line against Shopify was that it charged no transaction fees on any gateway. That is now conditional. Since 1 June 2026, BigCommerce bills an Open Payment Provider Fee each month on orders processed by any provider outside its embedded list: 2.0% on Core, 1.0% on Growth and 0.6% on Scale. It is charged to you, not your shoppers, it sits on top of whatever your payment provider charges, and BigCommerce says it must not be passed on at checkout.

The embedded list currently has 21 providers, including Stripe, PayPal Braintree, PayPal Complete Payments, Adyen, Checkout.com, Worldpay, Global Payments, Klarna, Clearpay, Amazon Pay and BigCommerce Payments. The fee is decided order by order, by the provider that actually processed the payment, so offering PayPal at checkout does not help if the shopper pays by card through an open provider. Offline and manual payments, including purchase orders, count as open provider orders.

Shopify charges no transaction fee when you use Shopify Payments, and 2%, 1%, 0.6% or 0.2% on Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus when you use a third party gateway. Plan for plan, the headline rates now match, although BigCommerce applies its rate to GMV after its 10% reduction. A Growth store running $80,000 of Inclusive GMV through an open provider would pay BigCommerce $800 a year in fees, before its provider's own charges.

If you already sell on BigCommerce, look for a line called Open Payment Provider Fee on your invoice, and confirm which provider processes each of your payment methods. Routing online payments through an embedded provider removes the fee on those orders, although offline and purchase order payments still count.

Checkout and Conversion

Checkout performance usually matters more than either platform's fees. Across 265 stores we have audited, the median conversion rate is 1.7%. At that baseline, lifting conversion by a tenth of a percentage point, from 1.7% to 1.8%, raises revenue by 5.88% at the same traffic and order value, about £59,000 a year on a £1 million store. Our guide to why your Shopify conversion rate matters explains how to measure yours.

Shopify claims its checkout converts 12% better than BigCommerce's on average, citing a study it ran with a Big Three management consultancy. That is vendor research rather than an independent benchmark, so treat it as Shopify's claim. What is clear is that Shopify's checkout includes Shop Pay, its accelerated checkout, and that BigCommerce offers a single page checkout with Apple Pay, Google Pay and Amazon Pay on every plan, with stored cards from Growth upwards.

Built In Features, Variants and Apps

BigCommerce builds a lot into its cheapest plan. Its plan table lists product ratings and reviews, real time shipping quotes from carriers including Royal Mail, multi currency selling, more than 70 discount options and a built in blog on every plan, including Core. On Shopify, some of these, such as product reviews, usually come from apps. Check the plan rather than the platform, though. Customer groups, abandoned cart emails, persistent carts and stored cards start on Growth; product filtering and Google customer reviews start on Scale; and price lists are listed only on Performance.

Variant limits have reversed. Shopify raised its limit to 2,048 variants per product for all merchants in October 2025, still across up to three options. BigCommerce allows 600 SKUs per product. If you sell products with hundreds of combinations, Shopify now has the higher ceiling.

BigCommerce says it offers over 1,200 apps, while Shopify describes its App Store as the largest commerce ecosystem. In our work, the integrations that matter most are email and subscriptions. Across 198 client stores, email is a median 30% of revenue, so the depth of your Klaviyo integration is worth more than any single built in feature. For subscriptions we work with Recharge, and Shopify also offers its own free Shopify Subscriptions app. Our guide to optimising your Shopify email marketing covers the flows that earn that share.

The practical trade off is simple. BigCommerce can suit a small store that wants those features on its entry plan, but its sales caps usually outweigh any saving once the store grows.

Ease of Use

Both platforms handle the technical infrastructure, and neither needs code for everyday management. In our experience Shopify is the easier start for a first store: its admin is simpler, setup is guided, and Shopify adds Sidekick, its AI assistant for store tasks.

BigCommerce's admin shows more settings at once. That suits experienced operators who know exactly what they want to configure, but new merchants tend to find it busier. Since June, BigCommerce merchants can also upgrade or downgrade their own plan from their account, subject to the sales caps.

Themes and Design

The Shopify Theme Store offers roughly two dozen free themes. Most premium themes cost $250 to $500 as a one off purchase, about £185 to £370, and a few start around $150. Shopify lets you install and fully customise a premium theme and pay only when you publish it. Horizon is Shopify's current generation of free themes, built on theme blocks that can sit inside other blocks; AI block generation, once a reason to pick Horizon, now works on every Theme Store theme. Dawn remains the most widely used and best documented free theme.

BigCommerce themes run on its Stencil framework, with free and paid options in its theme marketplace and tools to build your store with or without code. Check current theme prices there before budgeting. Either way, a theme is a starting point: our guide to choosing the right Shopify theme explains what to look for, and our Shopify designers can build a custom design when a theme will not do.

B2B and Wholesale

Shopify B2B now runs on Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus. Every plan gets companies and company locations, catalogues, quantity rules and price breaks, net payment terms, vaulted cards, purchase order numbers, draft orders sent as invoices, quick order lists and Shopify Flow automations. Basic, Grow and Advanced can assign up to three active catalogues across B2B markets and need the current version of Shopify Markets. Plus adds unlimited catalogues, catalogues assigned directly to a company or location for customer level pricing, deposits and partial payments. Contextual checkout and storefront experiences need Advanced or Plus.

BigCommerce's plan table lists customer groups from Growth and price lists only on Performance, and BigCommerce also offers B2B Edition, its dedicated wholesale suite. One detail matters more than any feature list: on the self serve plans, purchase orders and other offline payments count towards the Open Payment Provider Fee. A wholesaler taking most orders on account could pay that fee on a large share of revenue unless it moves to a Performance contract.

SEO

Both platforms cover the essentials: editable titles and meta descriptions, XML sitemaps, 301 redirects, image alt text and structured data through themes or apps. Shopify fixes some URL paths, such as /products/ and /collections/, while BigCommerce allows more flexible URL structures. Neither difference decides rankings on its own.

Both platforms host your store for you, so page speed depends mostly on your theme, apps and images rather than the platform. Content, internal linking and technical hygiene matter far more than the logo on your admin. Our Shopify SEO guide covers what to fix first.

Selling Channels and Point of Sale

BigCommerce connects to Amazon, eBay and Walmart on every plan, and to Google, Meta, TikTok, Microsoft and Pinterest through Feedonomics Surface, whose basic plan is free for up to 100,000 SKUs. In person selling runs through integrations such as Square, Clover and Heartland Retail. Extra storefronts cost $30 a month each on Core (up to three), $50 on Growth (up to five) and $100 on Scale (up to eight), which is one of BigCommerce's clearest strengths.

Shopify builds point of sale into the platform, with POS Pro at £69 a month per location for fuller retail features, and manages social and marketplace channels from the same admin. For international selling, Shopify Markets handles currencies, languages and local pricing from one store.

When BigCommerce Is the Better Choice

BigCommerce is the stronger option if:

• You want several storefronts, such as separate brands or regions, run from one account at a predictable monthly price.
• Your store sits well below the caps and you value the reviews, real time carrier rates and discount tools built into its entry plan.
• Every order already goes through an Embedded Payment Provider, so the new fee does not touch you.
• You are a larger business ready for a Performance contract, where the Open Payment Provider Fee does not apply.
• Your team already knows BigCommerce's Stencil framework and APIs well.

When Shopify Is the Better Choice

Shopify is the stronger choice for most stores, and especially if:

• You expect to grow and do not want your plan decided by a sales threshold.
• You sell products with many combinations and need more than 600 variants.
• You want B2B selling on a standard plan, with wholesale and retail in one admin.
• You sell in person and want point of sale built into the platform.
• You rely on email, subscription and loyalty tools, which in our experience offer their deepest integrations on Shopify.
• You want a large pool of agencies and developers to choose from when you need help.

Moving from BigCommerce to Shopify

Both platforms are hosted, so a move is cleaner than leaving a self hosted system. A good migration exports products, variants, images, customers and order history; maps every BigCommerce URL to its Shopify equivalent with 301 redirects; rebuilds the design on a Shopify theme; replaces any BigCommerce features you relied on with Shopify features or apps; and tests checkout, tax, shipping and fulfilment before launch. Our Shopify migration checklist walks through each stage, and our guide to Shopify migration costs explains what drives the price.

Before you decide, check your Inclusive GMV in the BigCommerce dashboard and look for the fee line on your invoice. If the June changes moved you up a plan or added fees, compare your new yearly cost with Shopify's.

Our Shopify packages are priced openly on our website, and every development project carries a three month guarantee.

Why Matters Perspective

BigCommerce is a serious, purpose built ecommerce platform, and we take it more seriously than any website builder. The June 2026 changes matter because they removed the two arguments we heard most often from merchants weighing it up. On fees, BigCommerce now charges the same headline rates as Shopify's third party gateway fees. On variants, Shopify's ceiling is now more than three times higher.

BigCommerce keeps real advantages: affordable extra storefronts, useful features built into its entry plan and more flexible URLs. But its sales caps now start at $30,000 a year and count VAT and delivery, so for a growing UK store the platform's price is increasingly set by its sales rather than its needs. Shopify lets you choose your plan for what you need, and that is why we recommend it for most of the businesses we speak to.

We are a Shopify Select partner with Verified Skills across development and marketing, and a Klaviyo and Recharge partner. If BigCommerce genuinely suits your business better, we will tell you.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is BigCommerce better than Shopify?

For most stores, no. BigCommerce builds features such as product reviews into its entry plan and runs several storefronts from one account well, but since 1 June 2026 it applies sales caps from $30,000 a year and a fee of up to 2% on orders outside its embedded payment providers. Shopify has no sales caps, supports 2,048 variants per product and offers B2B on every plan.

Does BigCommerce still have no transaction fees?

Only if every order goes through one of its Embedded Payment Providers, such as Stripe, PayPal Braintree or Adyen. Since 1 June 2026, orders processed by any other provider, including offline and purchase order payments, carry an Open Payment Provider Fee of 2.0% on Core, 1.0% on Growth and 0.6% on Scale. Performance customers on contract do not pay it.

What are BigCommerce's sales limits now?

Core covers up to $30,000 and Growth up to $100,000 of trailing 12 month Inclusive GMV, which is gross order value less 10%. Scale includes $33,333 a month, charges 0.9% on GMV above that and moves the store to Performance at $2 million a year. Crossing a limit moves you up a plan automatically after notice.

Is Shopify cheaper than BigCommerce?

For most growing stores, yes. Shopify starts at £19 a month billed yearly with no sales caps, while BigCommerce starts at $29 a month billed yearly but moves you up as sales grow. A UK store with £100,000 of gross sales a year would now sit on BigCommerce Scale at $299 a month, while on Shopify it could stay on Basic.

Which platform allows more product variants?

Shopify. Since October 2025 every Shopify plan supports up to 2,048 variants per product across up to three options, while BigCommerce allows 600 SKUs per product.

Which platform is better for B2B?

For most wholesalers, Shopify. It now offers B2B on every plan, with company accounts, up to three catalogues, net payment terms and quantity rules, and Plus adds unlimited catalogues and company level pricing. BigCommerce offers customer groups from Growth, price lists on Performance and its B2B Edition, but purchase orders count towards its Open Payment Provider Fee on the self serve plans.

Can I move from BigCommerce to Shopify without losing SEO?

Yes, if you plan it. Export your products, customers and orders, map every BigCommerce URL to its new Shopify address with 301 redirects, and keep page titles, descriptions and content in place. In our experience, missing redirects cause more ranking losses than the change of platform itself.

Final Thoughts

BigCommerce's June 2026 restructure narrowed the gap between the two platforms on fees and widened it on sales caps. It now charges much like Shopify when you use an outside payment provider, while still tying your plan to your sales in a way Shopify does not.

For most ecommerce businesses, Shopify is the better long term home: no sales caps, a higher variant limit, B2B on every plan and a much larger ecosystem of integrations and experts. BigCommerce remains a good fit for multi storefront setups, for small stores that value its built in features, and for larger merchants on a Performance contract.

If you are weighing up a move, or BigCommerce moved you up a plan in June, email us at info@whymatters.co.uk and we will compare the numbers with you, or see our Shopify packages.

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