About this Guide

The best platform for your project depends on a wide range of factors and nuances. The differences can best be boiled down to services and integrations. As a general rule, BigCommerce tends to have more built-in functionality and flexibility, whereas Shopify has less built in, but a larger ecosystem of third-party apps. BigCommerce's in-house development team focuses on building website-specific features; for instance, they recently launched a multi-storefront feature useful for having multiple sub-storefronts in different languages or sales markets. Shopify also invests in these types of features, but their focus is often more vertical. For example, Shopify recently acquired Deliverr, a logistics services company, to help merchants better compete with Amazon. Shopify has more verticality, but that sometimes means less depth of options for those features.

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Ultimately, an agency like Empower Ideas can guide you to the best platform through a requirements gathering process. We work on these platforms every day, so we know the minute differences between them and the questions to ask to help you get to the right approach.

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Be wary: Many agencies are partners of either Shopify or BigCommerce but not both. If they don't work with both platforms, they may try to shoehorn you into one even if it isn't the right fit for your store. Empower Ideas works with both of these two most popular e-commerce platforms, in addition to a few others. (Shopify and BigCommerce cover most needs, but smaller options like SquareSpace or Wix may be better suited for very small companies, for example an individual looking to sell their side hustle and move off Etsy; similarly, enterprise-grade options like Magento and Demandware may compete against Shopify Plus, but these are typically very expensive solutions reserved for the largest companies.)

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The third most popular e-commerce platform in the world is WooCommerce. This is actually a plug-in for Wordpress. Because Empower Ideas develops on Wordpress, we can build a WooCommerce store, technically...but we will almost never recommend it. WooCommerce tends to be expensive to develop for since so much of the backend needs to be custom-built; it tends to be very slow and un-optimized, even if hosting is on the fastest servers; and it tends to be confusing to maintain after development is done because there's so many options that are poorly organized and because ultimately Wordpress was built for blogging, not for commerce. And whereas Shopify and BigCommerce offer a large catalog of apps, WooCommerce itself already is an app. For those reasons, we're going to leave WooCommerce out of this comparison.

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Comparison of the Goldilocks Plans

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Shopify and BigCommerce both offer a number of plan options to choose from, and we'll dive deeper into all of them, but first, let's begin with the most common middle-tier plans of each. These plans have all the features that many startups need to be successful for a reasonable price, and allow growth later on.

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The differentiation of plans is different between Shopify and BigCommerce. For Shopify, all plans offer unlimited revenue, while more expensive plans have extra features. Conversely, for BigCommerce, most plans have all features unlocked and your plan tier is determined mostly by the amount of revenue run through the store. Therefore, this comparison is apples-to-apples on price, but not necessarily on other feature-related facets.

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With that said, let's review the high-level features of each option of the midtier plan:

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Differences of Cheaper and More Expensive Plans

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With so many similarities on these high-level features, what's different, and what do you get more or less of with different plans?

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Both Shopify and BigCommerce offer one cheaper plan and one more expensive plan.

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On Shopify, here's what you lose on the cheaper plan ($29):

• Only 2 staff accounts
• Only basic reports
• Lesser shipping discounts
• Shop Pay card processing rates increase to 2.9% + 30c and other payment processing rate surcharge increases to 2%

On BigCommerce, here's what you lose on the cheaper plan ($29.95):

• Abandoned cart recovery is disabled
• Persistent cart save between sessions is disabled
• Storing customer credit cards is disabled
• Available on revenue up to $50k

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On Shopify, the more expensive plan is $299 and gives you the following incremental features:

• Increased staff accounts up to 15
• Advanced reports
• Real-time third-party calculated shipping rates and greater shipping discounts
• Shop Pay card processing rates decrease to 2.4% + 30c and other payment processing rate surcharge decreases to .5%
• International support including duty/import taxes and custom pricing by country

On BigCommerce, the more expensive plan is $299.95 and gives you the following incremental features:

• Reviews on Google
• Product filtering and custom facets on search page
• Available on revenue up to $400k, +$150/month for each additional $200k in revenue

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Exclusive Features

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Each platform has a handful of unique exclusive features. Both platforms also offer more expensive enterprise-grade plans, Shopify Plus and BigCommerce Enterprise, with additional features and functionalities. Most of them are exclusive to that plan and to that platform.

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Shopify Plus starts at $2k per month for up to $1MM in revenue, whereas BigCommerce is custom quoted by client and starts at roughly $1k for up to $600k in revenue.

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Shopify exclusive features include (* indicates Shopify Plus only):

• Multiple inventory tracking locations
• Tags, which can be applied to products, customers, orders, etc. which can be used for grouping in reports, for changing the front-end site, or for functionality such as offering discounts, sending from a specific inventory location, etc.
• Shopify Checkout, one of the best optimized and highest-converting checkout systems on the internet (with Plus, you can further customize the checkout and install checkout apps.)
• Shopify Audiences* which syncs audiences that are most likely to convert to ad platforms like Facebook for better targeting
• Shopify Flow automation system to connect Shopify and other platforms using if/then statements and a simple drag-and-drop interface
• Up to 9 expansion stores at no extra charge*

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BigCommerce exclusive features include (* indicates BigCommerce Enterprise only):

• Available 1 page checkout
• Customer groups, which natively add features like different pricing or product access for specific customers
• Multi-storefront from a single account*

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As previously mentioned, in general, BigCommerce makes almost every feature available on almost every plan, with revenue being the significant driver of plan. Although you can stay on the BigCommerce Pro ($299) plan beyond $400k in annual revenue, it will typically be a better deal at that point to upgrade to Enterprise. On an Enterprise plan, you would get a custom quote for how high your revenue can be and what the extra costs are if you go beyond it. Conversely, all Shopify plans offer unlimited revenue and are differentiated based on their featureset. We typically recommend Shopify's $79 plan as a starting place, but common reasons to need Shopify Plus are access to a custom checkout file or to checkout apps, certain integrations that require Plus (e.g. Avalara tax collection, some enterprise analytics apps, etc.), or additional inventory locations or staff members. Additionally, if you're using a payment provider other than Shop Pay for somewhat high volumes, the math may work in your favor to use Shopify Plus due to the discount in surcharge from Shopify. (Although, if Shop Pay isn't an applicable payment provider for you we typically recommend considering BigCommerce for that reason alone.)

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As you can see, there are a number of segmentations and differences between Shopify and BigCommerce, and across the plans on each platform. If it feels like too much for you to decipher, reach out to Empower Ideas and we can help you zero in on the best choice for your business.