Shopify vs. BigCommerce: which ecommerce platform is right for you?

Choosing which ecommerce platform to launch your store on is no small decision. You’re picking the policies that’ll govern your online business and the technical capabilities that’ll make or break the customer experience. 

Shopify, with over 4 million active stores, is a Titan of ecommerce platforms. BigCommerce, with over 40,000 active stores, is a heavyweight in its own right. Weighing up the merits of Shopify vs BigCommerce is no mean feat—they’re both great platforms that host thousands of successful ecommerce businesses.

The choice between Shopify and BigCommerce depends on the size of your business, the experience you want to give customers, and what you value most in an ecommerce service provider. This article dives into the stats and features of both platforms, so you know which one to sign up for based on what you need

Shopify vs. BigCommerce: 14 criteria to consider 

Here’s a deep dive into how Shopify and BigCommerce compare in the 5 big areas that ecommerce business owners have to worry about:

• Usability: from initial setup to daily use, to support when things go wrong

• Features: plugins, integrations, and what they can do out of the box 

• Marketing and sales: from the sales platforms they integrate with, to SEO capabilities 

• Logistics: order fulfillment, security, and managing taxes 

• Pricing and payments: how much the platform costs and how customers pay you

Usability 

Time is money. When you can easily onboard and set up shop on an ecommerce platform, you’ll spend less time learning and more time experimenting with ways to increase conversions. 

Here’s how easy each platform is to use: 

1. Initial setup 

The process of creating your site is pretty similar whether you choose Shopify or BigCommerce. You sign up on the homepage, answer a few multiple-choice questions, and get a personalized set-up guide that holds your hand through choosing a theme, adding a custom domain name, and getting your first product page up. Your store will be ready to rock in an afternoon.

Set-up guide for a Shopify store

Both signup flows are beginner-friendly: Shopify’s signup is slightly more intuitive, but BigCommerce lets you create extra staff accounts for free.

BigCommerce lets you easily manage staff permissions and roles

 2. Ease of use  

Shopify is a beginner’s dream: almost every feature includes a tooltip—a little information box that appears when you hover over it—to explain what it does. Once you’re set up, you’re limited to 3 product options and 100 variants (soon to be 2,048 for Plus merchants).

BigCommerce is slightly harder to use, but often pays you back with more control over different aspects of your store. 

For example, adding a product to your BigCommerce store involves filling dozens of fields and is a much longer process than in Shopify. However, once you’ve done it, you can really customize how customers see your product. You can add an option for gift wrapping, a minimum purchase order, and unlimited product variants.

Finally, some business owners find Shopify’s user interface (UI) more visually pleasing than BigCommerce’s UI, which you need to consider since you’ll be looking at it every day. 

3. Support 

Both platforms offer a wealth of customer support options, including:

• 24/7 chat and email support

• A help center

• A community forum

Shopify Academy, Shopify’s collection of courses, is useful whether you choose the platform or not. It covers almost every aspect of ecommerce success—from platform-specific how-tos to broader topics like managing your finances as an entrepreneur—mostly for free.

You need to pay to access BigCommerce’s collection of courses, BigCommerce University, but they do offer some free recorded webinars and podcasts, too.

If you’re an enterprise-level customer, both platforms provide priority support in the form of a dedicated support agent (for those on Shopify’s Plus package) or an onboarding consultant (for those on BigCommerce’s Enterprise package). 

🏆 Overall winner: Shopify takes the edge for usability, but that’s because it’s extremely intuitive, not because BigCommerce is particularly tricky to use.

Features 

It’s crucial to check that your chosen ecommerce platform is capable of building the kind of store you’re dreaming of. Here are some factors to take into consideration:  

4. Themes and customization

Shopify offers close to 900 mobile-responsive themes, 24 of which are free, whereas BigCommerce offers 180 mobile-responsive themes, with 12 of them being free.

However, several of BigCommerce’s themes are very similar to each other, except for the color scheme, so the choice isn’t as varied as it sounds.

You can search the themes in BigCommerce’s library by industry and collection to find one that suits your business

When it comes to editing your theme, both platforms offer a simple builder. 

Shopify’s builder lets you add in more types of content blocks than BigCommerce’s does, including signup forms, contact forms, and blog strips. 

Whichever platform you choose, there’s also the option to edit the HTML or CSS code—or pay someone to do it for you. However, if you’re a small business and don’t want to spend a long time mastering the art of ecommerce web design, Shopify wins in this category. 

5. Plugins and integrations 

No other ecommerce platform has the breadth and variety of Shopify’s App Store. There are 8,000+ plugins dealing with everything from marketing to upselling and customer service, so you can customize your site any way you want without consulting a developer. 

If you plan on using a growth marketing strategy (one that involves running many small experiments to learn how to get more customers or conversions), this will be a huge asset. The variety of Shopify’s app store gives you plenty of scope for new features to test.

Shopify’s app store allows you to experiment with different features very easily

BigCommerce’s app store is more modest, with just over 1,200 available apps and plugins. Shopify’s most popular apps have equivalents in BigCommerce, so you won’t have to go without commonly requested functionalities like SMS marketing or live chat customer support. However, you might lose out if you want to experiment with more innovative features. 

On the flip side, BigCommerce offers many features upfront that you’d need a plugin for on Shopify, including the ability to add reviews to your products, generate real-time shipping quotes, and add unlimited staff accounts. Since using a lot of plugins will slow your site down, there is an SEO advantage to relying mostly on in-built features. 

What’s more, Shopify plugins are usually billed via subscriptions. If you need a handful of them, this can mean paying a few hundred dollars every month. For a solopreneur, or anyone more worried about saving money rather than having an all-bells-and-whistles shop, BigCommerce scores big here.

🏆 Overall winner: it’s a tie. If you want a fully customized shop and can pay for it, go with Shopify. If you’re on a budget and don’t mind a simpler site, go for BigCommerce.

💡Pro tip: both platforms make it easy to edit your store’s HTML. Even with little to no development knowledge, you can integrate different tools with your online store by simply copying and pasting the tracking code. 

For example, Contentsquare is an invaluable platform you can integrate with Shopify and BigCommerce to help you understand how users behave on your site, so you can learn how to convert more of them into customers. 

Use Contentsquare Surveys to easily add an exit-intent survey, and set it to appear when customers decide to leave your product page without making a purchase. This lets you ask visitors why they’ve decided to shop elsewhere, so you can learn how to encourage them into a sale.

You can trigger a Contentsquare exit-intent survey to appear when a customer navigates away from your site

Marketing and sales

Shopify and BigCommerce have different strengths when it comes to their marketing and sales capabilities, which can be a deciding factor if you’ve got a favorite channel or strategy. Let’s take a look:

6. Marketing 

Email marketing delivers the highest ROI of any digital marketing channel, with businesses earning an average of $36 for every $1 spent (a 3,600% return). In retail and ecommerce, that figure can reach $45 for every $1 spent, making it a critical strategy to prioritize.

Shopify offers its users a free plugin to take care of vital email marketing flows—like welcome messages, first purchase upsells, and abandoned cart reminders.

BigCommerce doesn’t have an in-built email marketing feature, but you can easily integrate third-party email software, like MailChimp, Constant Contact, or Omnisend. 

Both platforms allow you to create automatic discounts, coupons, and promotions. They also provide ecommerce analytics dashboards that track the results of any ads you’re running on other platforms. 

🧠Keep in mind: Contentsquare helps ecommerce teams move beyond basic analytics by revealing how shoppers interact with every pixel on your site—from browsing to checkout. Use its AI-powered insights to uncover friction points, optimize user journeys, and boost conversion rates. If you run a Shopify or BigCommerce store, integrating Contentsquare turns your data into a powerful, actionable roadmap for growth—no guesswork, just smarter decisions.

7. SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO)—or how easy it is for search engines like Google to find your site and serve it to users when they search for a related query—is another big consideration. If customers can find your shop easily through a simple search, your marketing costs will shrink.  

Both platforms help you customize webpage information that’s important for SEO, like title tags (the titles of your pages as they appear on a search engine) and meta descriptions (the little blurbs about your pages as they appear on search engines).

BigCommerce lets you edit your webpages’ meta descriptions via its control panel

Overall, BigCommerce is slightly better at creating SEO-optimized sites. It lets you fully customize your URLs, which means you can give them descriptive titles and help search engines index the information. 

Shopify automatically adds ‘/products’, ‘/collections’, or ‘/pages’ to your URLs, and won’t let you edit the structure to remove it.

As for blog posts and written content, if you’ve already got a WordPress blog and want to use it to send users to your ecommerce store, both platforms offer an integration.

Shopify’s WordPress integration costs an extra monthly fee and simply allows you to add a ‘buy now’ button to your blog, whereas BigCommerce’s is free, and lets you integrate your pages to a greater extent.  

8. Sales channels 

BigCommerce and Shopify help you sell your products on Facebook, Instagram, and Amazon with no additional costs, and both have free integrations so you can sell your products on Google Shopping. BigCommerce also lets you sell products on Pinterest and eBay. 

Both platforms also allow you to accept payments in the physical world too, which is handy if you plan to take your small business to markets, or want to set up a temporary pop-up store.  

However, you’ll need a device to accept payments made in the physical world. If you use BigCommerce, you’ll need to buy that hardware via a third party, like PayPal Zettle, Square, or Hike, whereas Shopify offers its own option.

Shopify’s hardware tool for taking your ecommerce store offline is called Shopify POS

🏆 Overall winner: it depends on which marketing strategy you plan to prioritize. Shopify offers simpler email marketing options, while BigCommerce is a better setup for bloggers.

Logistics   

Some ecommerce platforms offer features to hold your hand through the day-to-day administration of your business, while others expect entrepreneurs to find their own solutions to manage shipping, taxes, and inventory monitoring. Here’s how Shopify and BigCommerce compare logistically:

9. Security

As you’d expect from major platforms, BigCommerce and Shopify are both pretty hot on security measures. They both use 128-bit SSL encryption—software that encrypts customers’ sensitive data—like credit card information, passwords, and personal messages, so third parties can’t see them. 

They both also follow Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS)—a set of policies that 5 major credit card companies developed, which sets out how to protect financial transactions. 

10. Shipping 

When it comes to sending your customers the goods, BigCommerce has a free feature for generating real-time shipping quotes to display on your storefront. There’s also an option to generate, purchase, and print USPS labels for orders directly from your control panel.

Shopify also lets you generate live shipping costs, but only if you’re on an Advanced Shopify or Plus plan and via a third party. You can print shipping labels from multiple carriers directly through Shopify—and not just from USPS—but several industry-leading carriers, like UPS and DHS, too.

Buy and print USPS shipping labels directly through both Shopify and BigCommerce

11. Inventory management   

Shopify has better out-of-the-box inventory management options than BigCommerce. You can easily manage your stock between different locations, and keep tabs on what should go out from where on your dashboard. To get the same functionality in BigCommerce, you’d need to buy a third-party app.  

Shopify is a favorite among dropshippers—people who run ecommerce websites, yet never touch the goods they sell, outsourcing all handling and shipping to a third party. If that’s you, there are apps to connect your Shopify site to dropshipping suppliers that provide stock and can ship products to customers for you. 

12. Tax calculations

Shopify’s options for automatically calculating tax are very comprehensive. You can choose to set taxes that are automatically included for different regions, including the complicated VAT MOSS rules in Europe. If you’re running a business with a very small team, Shopify is very strong in this arena and can save you from hiring an accountant. 

You can also calculate tax automatically on BigCommerce, but only by integrating a third-party app—such as Avalara, Vertex, TaxJar, or TaxCloud—with your store. 

🏆 Overall winner: Shopify makes your life slightly easier when it comes to fulfilling orders and calculating taxes.

Pricing and payments  

Here’s how much Shopify and BigCommerce would charge you, and their policies on how you charge your customers: 

13. Monthly subscription fees 

Shopify’s and BigCommerce’s subscription fees look pretty similar at first glance:

For most small-to-medium-sized ecommerce retailers, starting on the $39 tier of either platform gives you all the features you need. 

However, BigCommerce forces you to upgrade to a Plus package once you turn over more than $50,000 per year.

Shopify doesn’t tie its packages to store income, but upgrading from the Basic to the Grow plan gives you access to more features, including detailed analytics reports and up to 5 staff accounts. 

Shopify offers a Starter version, but it’s got very limited capabilities—it’s more for adding a ‘buy now’ button to an existing site than for launching an ecommerce store. 

BigCommerce is great for those on a tight budget who want to pay less for app subscriptions, but they’re also marketed toward businesses at the other end of the scale. BigCommerce’s Enterprise package offers plenty of perks for customers who turn over millions of dollars, like access to technical support.

14. Payment options 

Shopify Payments lets you integrate over 100 payment methods from around the globe, whereas BigCommerce only allows you to integrate 65, alongside many alternative payment methods. Both include all the usual favorites: ApplePay, PayPal, Google Pay, and debit card payments. 

However—and this is a big one—Shopify charges transaction fees on each purchase, unless you use their own payment portal, Shopify Payments, which isn’t available in all countries. BigCommerce doesn’t charge transaction fees. 

🏆 Overall winner: BigCommerce is usually the cheaper option since you’ll be paying fewer plugin subscriptions and no transaction fees. 

The verdict: Shopify or BigCommerce? 

If a choice is really difficult, sometimes it’s because both options are pretty great. That’s certainly the case with these 2 platforms. 

Shopify is a huge name in ecommerce for a reason—it’s super easy to use, allowing you to create an incredible site without altering a single line of code. It’s an excellent choice if you don’t have a technical background, or just run a small operation and don’t want to waste time setting up. 

However, you certainly can’t dismiss BigCommerce without a fair trial. It’s great if you don’t want to be saddled with transaction fees or a bunch of monthly app payments—as long as you’re prepared to hire a developer from time to time. It really excels if you’re a huge corporation looking to move your shop online and value personalized attention.

But the success of your ecommerce store doesn’t depend on whether you choose Shopify or BigCommerce. It depends on how well you understand and respond to your customers’ behavior. Whichever platform you decide on, watch session replays of where your customers click in the moments before a sale, and survey them regularly to understand where you can improve. 

This way, you’ll be confident you’re giving customers exactly what they want—and give yourself every possible opportunity to make a sale.

FAQs about Shopify vs BigCommerce