BigCommerce Review 2026: Plans, GMV & Payment Fees

The official pricing guide lists Core at $39 monthly or $29/month billed annually, Growth at $105 or $79, and Scale at $399 or $299. Their annual base commitments are $348, $948 and $3,588 respectively. Performance is custom-priced from $1,499/month billed annually, without a standard monthly offer. These are USD subscription amounts, not totals including processing, apps or taxes.

The current plan table gives Core a $30,000 trailing-twelve-month Inclusive GMV boundary and Growth $100,000. The 2026 pricing notice distinguishes monthly next-service-period upgrades from annual GMV upgrades that can occur during the paid term. Do not assume annual prepayment postpones a threshold upgrade until renewal. Scale includes $33,333 monthly Inclusive GMV and charges 0.9% only on the excess; a $2 million TTM boundary moves it to Performance.

Both time windows matter. A seasonal merchant can incur Scale overage during a busy month even when an annual average looks comfortable. Annual billing changes the base commitment; it does not eliminate separately assessed monthly fees. Existing billing cycles that began before June 1, 2026 can transition at renewal, so another merchant's current invoice may reflect legacy timing rather than the offer available to you.

The GMV calculation instructions start with qualifying gross order value and apply a 10% reduction. Sum Order Total (inc tax), converting non-USD orders into USD using the daily average rate for the order date. Shipping, handling and other charges included in that total remain part of the calculation. Do not substitute product-only revenue or deduct processor fees as though GMV meant the cash reaching your bank.

Eligible statuses include Awaiting Fulfillment, Awaiting Payment, Awaiting Pickup, Awaiting Shipment, Cancelled, Completed, Disputed, Manual Verification Required, Partially Refunded, Partially Shipped, Refunded and Shipped. Pending, Incomplete and Declined orders are excluded, as are test-gateway orders. In particular, moving an order into Refunded or Cancelled status does not make it an excluded order under this documented calculation. The blanket 10% adjustment is not a reconciliation to your actual refunds.

Storefront, manual, offline and API-created orders can count, and captured payments are included in the guide's eligibility rules. Reconcile the calculation with the official Account Dashboard value rather than assuming a payment-provider report uses the same population. When using the ecommerce platform directory, compare fee definitions as well as percentages: identical-looking rates applied to different revenue bases are not equivalent costs.

The Embedded Payment Providers page lists Open Payment Provider fees of 2% on Core, 1% on Growth and 0.6% on Scale. These are BigCommerce charges in addition to processor fees. Orders using approved embedded integrations avoid this platform fee; contracted Performance is also exempt from it. That exemption should not be read as free payment processing or a waiver of unrelated contractual charges.

The billing guide makes the integration route decisive. A custom connection, including one through a third-party app, can incur the fee even when the processor's name appears on the embedded list. Relevant offline, marketplace, POS and API orders processed externally can also be exposed. A mixed-provider merchant should inspect the order-level breakdown instead of applying one assumption to every sale.

For a worked monthly Scale illustration, assume $60,000 of qualifying gross orders, all fee-exposed. The 10% reduction gives $54,000 Inclusive GMV; excess above $33,333 is $20,667, producing approximately $186 at 0.9%. The 0.6% provider fee adds $324. With the $399 base, that is approximately $909 before processing, apps and taxes, not an exact invoice or tax quote. Use that layered approach when reading Shopify alternatives, rather than comparing subscriptions alone.

One concrete feature gate is native product filtering, available on Scale and higher. It supports up to 12 filters per page and displays up to 500 commonly used values per filter. With filtering enabled, listing pages display the first 10,000 returned products. Broad product-count marketing therefore does not establish unlimited faceted navigation or display of every matching item.

A merchant below Growth's revenue boundary can still need Scale for this functionality. Evaluate a representative category with actual option values, variants and filters before selecting the cheaper plan. Separate the requirement to store a product from the requirement to help shoppers find it. Native capability can reduce an app dependency, but only if its documented behavior matches the catalog you actually operate.

For a smaller, presentation-led shop, compare the necessary selling workflow with Squarespace or Wix rather than buying a higher commerce tier solely for a feature that may not be needed. This is a requirements comparison, not a measured usability ranking. Native filters and hosted checkout also do not guarantee conversion gains, faster pages or improved search rankings; those outcomes were not tested here.

The Multi-Storefront requirements distinguish purchased storefront seats from the storefronts occupying them, with plan-dependent limits. Current add-seat prices were not established in this research, so historical per-storefront quotes should not be recycled. The guide also distinguishes per-storefront product limits: 250,000 for Stencil and 500,000 for headless storefronts. Those are separate from the native filtering display limits.

User permissions are global rather than storefront-specific. That matters for agencies and multi-brand teams expecting each operator to see only one brand. Validate the actual permitted actions before treating a common control panel as separate client isolation. A storefront seat, a staff user and an independently permissioned organization are not interchangeable concepts, even if they all appear in the same expansion discussion.

Deleting an additional storefront frees its seat for reuse but does not cancel the monthly seat subscription; removing that subscription requires contacting support. B2B Edition also needs a separately scoped commercial assessment rather than an assumption that every Performance contract includes it. The small-business ecommerce software guide helps frame a full stack budget covering apps, themes and integrations alongside the platform and storefront charges.

The store-backup guide treats products, files, customers, orders, redirects and themes as distinct datasets. Customer passwords cannot be exported. Product images and downloadable files need separate handling, while a theme download excludes uploaded images. Retaining a catalog CSV therefore does not establish that the store's customer access, appearance and downloadable purchases can all be reconstructed elsewhere.

The order-export documentation is equally important: orders can be exported, but native CSV order re-import is unsupported. Restoration or migration requires API-based tooling. When importing historical orders, the pricing guide specifies M-MIG in external_source to exclude that history from trailing sales volume. The same flag bypasses quantity requirements and does not deduct product stock, so validate the intended inventory behavior too.

Define acceptance criteria for old and archived orders, refunds, files, customer matching and redirects before cutover. Default CSV coverage of every archival state was not established, and app-held records or B2B company and invoice data can require separate exports. A move involving WooCommerce needs source and destination checks, not merely a successful file download. Secure the exports and verify representative records before cancelling the source store.

A trial lasts 15 days and expires without billing, but the available retention evidence conflicts. The cancellation guide describes deletion 30 days after trial expiry, while the current pricing FAQ says trial data is kept for 90 days. Neither should become a universal retention promise in this review. Export needed sample data before expiry and ask support to confirm the account-specific deadline; trial access is not a permanent free selling plan.

For paid stores, request cancellation at least two business days before renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the current period's end, with the remaining cycle non-refundable under the documented policy. Data is deleted 30 days after cancellation; continued data access after cancellation requires reapplying a paid plan. Export first instead of treating the deletion window as free read-only access. App subscriptions, payment agreements and domain renewals need separate attention.

An additional storefront has a different 90-day restoration period after deletion, through support. That does not extend whole-store retention or end its seat subscription. Keep a dated checklist separating data deletion, subscription termination and external services. Our software evaluation framework is useful here: an acceptable exit should be demonstrated before a long commitment, not discovered while a retention deadline is approaching.

BigCommerce is a credible shortlist for merchants whose catalog and operating requirements justify a hosted commerce platform, particularly when native filtering or multiple storefronts solve a concrete problem. The decision depends on the complete fee model: plan placement, seasonal GMV, payment integration routes and separately purchased services. A low base subscription or an old no-platform-fees summary is not enough to establish value.

Keep Shopify in the comparison when hosted operations are the priority, and use the ecommerce directory to challenge requirements rather than chase a universal winner. Before buying, reconcile one representative month, confirm required plan gates and validate an export sample. This October 8, 2026 assessment is documentary: it does not claim a successful store migration, a conversion improvement or superior hosting speed. The strongest recommendation is for buyers who can verify those operational details before committing.