BigCommerce vs Shopify (2026): Fees, Sales Limits & B2B

For a straightforward retail store, start with Shopify if the payment methods, staff access and integrations you need fit the actual subscription. For a catalog-led business, shortlist BigCommerce when its customer groups, native filtering and supported processor choices justify the sales-based pricing model. Neither platform is automatically cheaper, more open or better for every growing store. A one-person shop and an operation with wholesale customers and seasonal order spikes are different purchases even when they display the same products.

This comparison focuses on the current self-service plans, not a supposed like-for-like enterprise quote. BigCommerce now uses Core, Growth, Scale and Performance; Shopify uses Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus. The BigCommerce review and Shopify review provide background. The dedicated comparison below checks costs, feature gates and exit requirements rather than repeating the older claims that BigCommerce never charges provider-related fees or that Shopify wholesale always requires Plus.

Research method: official pricing and documentation reviewed October 18, 2026; no live store, payment, conversion benchmark or migration was tested. Costs are illustrative USD platform budgets before processing, apps, subscription taxes and operating labor. Shopify's US-context rate card was retrieved through a public text reader because direct responses varied by region; the next section explains that limitation. Use the e-commerce category for alternatives instead of treating a pricing example as a universal recommendation.

BigCommerce's current pricing lists Core at $39 monthly, Growth at $105 and Scale at $399. Annual-base equivalents are $29, $79 and $299, respectively, before fees and taxes. Its June 2026 structure changed more than names: thresholds and Open Payment Provider charges matter, while Scale now meters excess monthly GMV rather than selling fixed overage blocks. Performance starts at a separately quoted annual commitment, not an interchangeable fourth small-store tier.

The US-context Shopify pricing page, retrieved through a third-party text reader on October 18, lists monthly Basic/Grow/Advanced at $39/$105/$399 and applicable third-party fees at 2%/1%/0.6%. Direct browser and server requests returned different regional offers even with a USA label. These are therefore US-context reference inputs, not a verified checkout quote for every reader. We do not normalize Shopify's conflicting annual offers into a universal annual-price table. Confirm your business-location quote and renewal price before subscribing.

Matching monthly base prices do not make the plans feature-equivalent. BigCommerce can require a higher tier because of trailing sales or a native feature; Shopify can require one because of staff access or a particular workflow. No comparable GMV-triggered upgrade threshold was identified in the reviewed Shopify standard-plan material, but that is not a promise that all limits or contract terms disappear as you grow. The SaaS spending guide explains why the useful number is the whole operating budget, not the first subscription line.

BigCommerce's Embedded Payment Providers guide distinguishes qualifying embedded integrations from Open providers. Core, Growth and Scale charge 2%, 1% and 0.6% respectively on eligible Open-provider Inclusive GMV. Embedded-provider orders avoid that particular fee, not the processor's own charges. For mixed payments, the fee applies to the attributable Open-provider order volume rather than every sale. The current classification of the actual integration matters more than seeing a familiar processor logo.

The BigCommerce billing guide says qualifying gross order value receives a 10% reduction before calculating Inclusive GMV. Its example turns $6,000 of eligible Open-provider order value into $5,400, then charges $32.40 on Scale. Offline orders can be fee-exposed too, and a custom connection to an otherwise embedded processor can still incur the fee. Check the exact gateway module, sales channel and eligible order statuses rather than assuming that any Stripe or PayPal connection is exempt.

Shopify's third-party fee guide uses products after discounts, plus tax and shipping, multiplied by the applicable rate. There is no equivalent 10% adjustment in that formula. Qualifying Shopify Payments transactions are exempt from this platform fee; manual methods such as cash on delivery and bank deposits are also exempt. PayPal is exempt when Shopify Payments is the primary provider. Third-party transaction fees are not returned on refunds, and stores created on or after May 12, 2025 have a specific fee rule for redeemed gift-card/store-credit amounts.

Processing remains a separate charge in both systems. A percentage-only platform subtotal is not a complete payment quote: transaction count, card type, country, currency conversion and gateway terms can all change processing costs. Shopify's US card-type documentation distinguishes standard domestic consumer cards from premium and international cards. Do not compare one vendor's platform surcharge with the other's card-processing rate. The store software stack guide helps keep these layers separate from fulfillment, accounting and support subscriptions.

Core supports up to $30,000 trailing-twelve-month Inclusive GMV and Growth up to $100,000; exceeding the relevant threshold leads to an upgrade. Scale includes $33,333 monthly Inclusive GMV, with 0.9% charged on that month's excess. The pricing-page fine print places the automatic Performance transition at $2 million TTM GMV. A lower marketing description of the typical Performance customer is not the mandatory upgrade threshold, and an annual average cannot erase a busy month's Scale overage.

Inclusive GMV is not accounting profit or simply cash left after returns. The eligible-order list includes Refunded, Partially Refunded and Cancelled statuses, while excluding specified incomplete, declined, pending and test-gateway orders. Sales imported from another system can also require special treatment. Review the store's official metric rather than subtracting real-world refunds from a spreadsheet a second time. The 10% reduction is a billing normalization, not ten percent off the subscription.

Timing needs care. Legacy billing cycles beginning before June 1, 2026 remain outside OPP until their next cycle; existing annual accounts initially transition at the end of their current annual service period. Subsequent sales-triggered upgrades are a different event. The merchant guide places automatic upgrades at the next billing cycle, while Commerce's billing terms also describe mid-period proration. Obtain the account-specific transition and upgrade dates rather than assume a guaranteed twelve-month price lock. The examples below assume the new structure already applies; OPP and overage amounts are billed monthly in arrears.

Assume one store with the same $2,000, $8,000 or $15,000 order base in each of twelve completed months. The base is merchandise after discounts plus customer-charged shipping and tax; every order is eligible and there are no refunds, gift-card redemptions or mixed-payment exceptions. BigCommerce's monthly Inclusive GMV becomes $1,800, $7,200 or $13,500, with trailing totals of $21,600, $86,400 or $162,000. Its minimum sales-based plans are therefore Core, Growth and Scale. These are current-month illustrations, not a reconstruction of twelve historical invoices.

At $2,000 monthly gross order value, BigCommerce Core is $39 with qualifying embedded payments or $75 with all eligible volume through an Open provider. Shopify Basic is $79 with all volume through a non-exempt external provider. At $15,000, BigCommerce Scale is $399 embedded or $480 Open, while Shopify Grow is $255 with the same external-payment base if Grow's features fit. Keeping Shopify on Grow is intentional: we do not invent a sales threshold that forces it onto Advanced merely to line up the table's columns.

Now stress an already-Scale store with a $50,000 gross-order month while its TTM remains below the Performance threshold. Inclusive GMV is $45,000; the excess over $33,333 produces $105.003 of overage, rounded to $105.00. An all-Open mix adds $270 OPP, taking the $399 base to approximately $774.00. Embedded payments remove the $270, not the overage, so the subtotal is approximately $504.00. These exclude processing and other extras. Record normal and peak months with the software evaluation checklist before treating either platform's base fee as a spending cap.

Shopify's user-limit guide gives Basic zero additional Shopify-admin staff accounts, Grow five and Advanced fifteen; the store owner is excluded from that count. An owner plus two employees needing admin access therefore requires Grow or higher, even at low sales. Partner collaborator accounts and POS-only staff are different categories, not a general employee-seat workaround. BigCommerce's current matrix includes staff accounts, but a numerical unlimited allowance was not established here; confirm the required count and roles instead of assuming one.

BigCommerce's native Abandoned Cart Saver requires Growth or above. Shopify lists abandoned checkout recovery on Basic. That does not make every automation or email service equivalent: eligibility, consent, send conditions and follow-up sequence still matter. If you already use Klaviyo or Omnisend, check which native feature it replaces before paying twice. Neither the feature's presence nor a vendor conversion claim proves recovered revenue for your store.

BigCommerce's product filtering begins on Scale. Shopify's Search & Discovery filtering works with compatible themes; creating a filter does not make an incompatible theme display it. Shopify collections with more than 5,000 products do not display those filters. This is a collection boundary, not a blanket 5,000-product store limit. Use representative variants, categories, stock states and currencies when evaluating navigation rather than declaring every Shopify filter a paid third-party add-on.

Shopify's current B2B plan matrix explicitly includes Basic, Grow and Advanced alongside Plus. Companies, net terms and other core wholesale features are no longer Plus-only. Non-Plus stores can assign up to three active catalogs across all B2B markets, using new Shopify Markets; that is not three catalogs for every market. Direct company/company-location catalog assignment, unlimited market catalogs and specified advanced payment features remain Plus distinctions.

BigCommerce Customer Groups begins on Growth and can control category access and group pricing rules. Performance Price Lists and the separately scoped B2B Edition are not interchangeable with those basic groups. If two customers need different contractual prices, ask exactly how they are assigned, how discounts interact and whether the requested company-account or invoice workflow needs the additional edition. Do not present the lowest self-service plan as a complete wholesale quote.

Use a concrete scenario: one retail buyer, one trade buyer, two price agreements and an order with payment terms. Review what each buyer can see, what price appears at checkout and who can approve changes. Keep ordinary retail promotions from unintentionally altering a negotiated order. The CRM category can help evaluate sales-side tools, but a CRM record or customer label does not itself enforce storefront catalog permissions.

Choose the merchant's real business country before using a payment-rate table. Shopify Payments eligibility depends on the supported country and business requirements; selling to US customers or displaying USD does not establish a US merchant account. A seller in an unsupported region may still operate a Shopify store using an eligible alternative, but the applicable processor and platform fees need a separate regional calculation.

Shopify's international-pricing limitations distinguish market pricing from supported local-currency checkout. A currency converter can change the display while a third-party checkout still charges the store currency. BigCommerce also requires matching the provider integration, currency and payment methods to the intended market. Quote conversion, settlement and refund costs rather than assuming that a multi-currency storefront eliminates all cross-border charges.

BigCommerce offers a Multi-Storefront architecture, but extra storefront seats and their entitlements need a quote; deleting a storefront is not necessarily canceling its subscription. Shopify Markets is not automatically a set of independently configured stores, and separate Shopify stores should not be budgeted as one basic subscription. If the real requirement is a brand-specific presentation or content site, the website-builder category and Webflow vs Framer comparison address a different layer from the commerce engine.

BigCommerce's backup guide separates product/customer exports, order reports, theme downloads and actual files. Customer passwords cannot be exported. Order CSVs cannot natively be imported back through the control-panel CSV route; use an appropriate API or migration tool. Theme downloads do not include separately uploaded images. A catalog spreadsheet plus theme ZIP is therefore not a complete transferable store, even when both downloads finish successfully.

Shopify's backup and duplication guide similarly requires apps to be reinstalled and settings such as shipping, taxes, checkout and payments to be reconfigured. Historical orders need an app/API route rather than an ordinary admin CSV import. Its customer import guide does not transfer passwords from another platform through CSV. Stored payment credentials and subscriptions require processor-specific planning, not an assumption that customer rows contain reusable card details.

For a move into BigCommerce, the pricing guide documents the M-MIG external_source value for historical API-imported orders so they do not inflate trailing sales; it also changes inventory-related behavior. Treat that as a migration-specific configuration to verify, not a label for new sales. Reconcile variants, stock, original order identifiers, returns and file access with a small authorized sample. If historical support context matters, the Gorgias vs Zendesk Shopify guide shows why moving the storefront does not automatically move every conversation or integration.

Build a redirect inventory before changing domains or product paths. Shopify's redirect guide describes 301 redirects and CSV management, but redirects operate on broken source URLs and have reserved-path restrictions. BigCommerce's backup process also supports redirect exports. Neither a migration plugin nor a platform's SEO feature list guarantees that existing URLs, canonicals, structured data and internal links have been preserved.

Audit important product and category URLs, including locale paths, and check the destination pages after mapping them. The Sitebulb vs Screaming Frog comparison can help select a crawler, but a clean crawl is not a promise of unchanged rankings. Test checkout, taxes, fulfillment, notification rules and analytics independently; retaining a product URL is not proof that an order can be processed correctly.

Keep the original store and exports available until reconciliation and rollback criteria are satisfied. Avoid letting both storefronts send duplicate abandoned-checkout emails or process the same stock update. Record who owns the cutover and which apps, gateway contracts and domains require separate cancellation. The Shopify alternatives guide provides the wider choice, while WooCommerce is worth a separate evaluation if owning hosting and maintenance is an intentional requirement rather than an accidental new responsibility.

Prefer Shopify provisionally when the selected staff tier, payment eligibility, retail workflow and integrations fit the business. Prefer BigCommerce provisionally when its catalog controls, customer-group model and qualifying embedded providers justify the plan required by both features and Inclusive GMV. A lower provider percentage can be outweighed by a higher subscription; an embedded integration can remove OPP while leaving sales overages untouched. Recalculate with your actual payment mix and peak month, not only an annual sales average.

Before committing, obtain a dated regional subscription quote and processor agreement, test the needed roles and B2B scenario, and reconcile a migration sample. Keep unknown staff allowances, annual transition timing and extra-storefront pricing as questions rather than fabricated numbers. The strongest choice is the platform whose documented boundaries fit your operation and budget—not an unsupported conversion winner or a promise that one fee line represents the full cost of selling online.