BigCommerce vs Shopify in 2026: A Feature Comparison for Growing Brands

BigCommerce and Shopify are both serious eCommerce platforms. The brands using BigCommerce are generally satisfied with the core functionality — it handles products, inventory, checkout, and basic selling well. The question isn't whether BigCommerce works. It's whether Shopify grows faster.

Here's how they compare on the things that affect revenue.

Checkout and Conversion

Shopify wins here, and it's not particularly close. Shop Pay — Shopify's accelerated checkout — has 100 million registered users who check out in a single tap on any Shopify store. Shopify's data shows Shop Pay converts at a rate 50% higher than standard checkouts. BigCommerce does not have Shop Pay. That checkout gap translates directly into conversion rate difference, particularly on mobile where most eCommerce traffic now comes from.

Shopify Plus merchants also get Checkout Extensibility, which allows significant customisation of the checkout flow — custom fields, upsell offers, trust badges — without replacing the native checkout and losing its conversion optimisations. BigCommerce's checkout customisation is more limited outside of custom development.

App Ecosystem

The Shopify App Store has over 8,000 apps. BigCommerce's app marketplace has around 1,000. This matters because the specific tool you need — the exact subscription model, the review app with the right email automation, the loyalty programme that works with your checkout — is almost always available on Shopify with multiple well-reviewed options, while BigCommerce often has one option, or none.

App quality and support on Shopify is also generally higher because developers build for Shopify first. The third or fourth-best subscription app on Shopify is usually better than the best subscription app on BigCommerce.

Pricing Model

BigCommerce's pricing tiers are linked to your annual revenue. The Standard plan allows up to $50K/year in sales. The Plus plan goes to $180K/year. Hit those thresholds and BigCommerce automatically moves you to a higher plan at a higher price. You pay more because you're selling more.

Shopify's pricing is fixed. You choose your plan based on the features you need, not based on your revenue. As your store grows, your Shopify bill stays the same. This isn't a small difference for a brand scaling from $200K to $1M in a year — BigCommerce's plan escalation adds meaningful cost at exactly the moment you want every margin point going into growth.

Sales Channels

Both platforms connect to major sales channels. Shopify's integrations are generally more developed and better maintained, particularly for newer channels like TikTok Shop where Shopify has a direct partnership with TikTok. If multi-channel selling is central to your strategy, Shopify's ecosystem has more depth.

International Selling

Shopify Markets is a genuine competitive advantage. Multi-currency, localised pricing, translated storefronts, international tax rules — all manageable from a single store, without building separate instances for each market. BigCommerce's multi-storefront feature handles some of this but requires managing separate storefronts, which increases operational complexity.

B2B

This is where BigCommerce has traditionally been stronger. Its native B2B features — price lists, customer groups, quote management — are more developed in some areas than Shopify's, though Shopify Plus has closed the gap significantly with its native B2B features released in 2022 and expanded since.

For most B2B use cases, Shopify Plus is now sufficient. For genuinely complex B2B requirements — complex pricing matrices, multi-location inventory rules, quoting workflows — BigCommerce still has an edge in some scenarios.

The Bottom Line

For the vast majority of D2C and multichannel brands, Shopify's checkout conversion advantage, larger app ecosystem, and fixed pricing model make it the stronger platform for growth. If you're on BigCommerce and the revenue-based pricing is starting to feel punitive, or if you're finding the app ecosystem limiting, those are the signs that Shopify is worth looking at properly.

Migrating from BigCommerce to Shopify takes 3–6 weeks and preserves your product data, customer records, and SEO rankings. Get a free migration assessment if you want to understand what it would involve for your store.