BigCommerce Alternatives: 6 Challenges Driving Brands To Switch (and How Shopify Compares)

BigCommerce markets its platform as a highly customizable software-as-a-service (SaaS) ecommerce platform, framed for businesses with unique needs or niche requirements. It also touts its open approach and potential for cost savings. 

But providers that claim openness, flexibility, and low platform fees often shift development responsibilities onto their customers. 

The more features and capabilities a business needs to add, the more developer work is needed. Over time, websites and tech stacks become both complex and fragile, full of technical debt. Operations get bloated, launch timelines stretch, shoppers get frustrated, and outages and errors start cutting into margins.

As new features and integrations are added, complexity multiplies, and development costs and timelines rise fast. For example, laboratory supply company Filtrous took a full year to launch their website with BigCommerce—and after launch, even simple changes crashed their website. 

This guide explains why brands evaluate BigCommerce alternatives, and how leading options compare on cost, conversion, and speed.

Best BigCommerce alternatives at a glance

Before going into the full breakdown, here’s a brief overview of the BigCommerce alternatives that merchants typically evaluate: 

• Shopify: For scaling omnichannel brands. Ranked the best commerce platform for performance, agility, and conversion, Shopify is trusted by enterprise brands like Gymshark, Huel, and Polaroid. Its all-in-one solution uses a unified data model to power every aspect of your business, including DTC, retail, and B2B, from one centralized “brain.”
• Salesforce Agentforce Commerce (formerly Commerce Cloud): A platform that combines ecommerce, POS, and order management into one AI-powered solution. 
• Adobe Commerce (formerly Magento): A cloud-based ecommerce platform that powers B2B and DTC. It uses a composable infrastructure that lets you cherry-pick components through APIs. 
• WooCommerce: An open-source commerce platform designed to plug into WordPress. It requires integrations to unlock extra functionality. 

Challenges with BigCommerce, and why merchants migrate

Scalability and innovation become limited

When a platform highlights its openness and flexibility, it’s important to consider what that means for development costs and time to market. For BigCommerce, this means a platform that can be heavily customized—but with developer support.

When an initial build relies on custom integrations and code, scaling adds technical debt, which leads to more demand on IT. Here’s a common scenario:

• A highly specialized storefront is built on a platform that is flexible, but still requires developers to create the integrations and make extensive code customizations.
• As more features and integrations get added, more code gets written, and the overall ecommerce solution gets more complex.
• IT spends more time maintaining, updating, and fixing existing capabilities, taking time away from new feature development.
• Business users get locked out of even the simple tasks as complexity grows, creating IT bottlenecks.
• In a worst-case scenario, the build becomes fragile, and even small updates can lead to slowdowns, outages, and lost revenue.

Much of this happened to former BigCommerce customer 4ocean, a nonprofit with both an online store and memberships. They built their first store on Shopify, but migrated to BigCommerce after rapid growth, thinking it would be a better fit for their new, larger size. However, the move proved to be a costly mistake.

“We ended up migrating off of Shopify, and our business plummeted,” said Alex Schulze, cofounder and CEO of 4ocean. “Nothing felt right from the get-go. The migration process was a nightmare. Not only did it take an incredible amount of time and money, but we lost a ton of organic traffic, about 80%”

Some of the impacts were:

• Small changes, such as updating a product SKU or making website updates, could no longer be handled by business users.
• Table-stakes functionality like showing that a product was sold out, letting shoppers swipe left or right on product photos, or enlarging a product photo, required custom development.
• Tens of thousands of dollars had to be spent on development for features that come out of the box with Shopify.

Realizing that operating on BigCommerce wasn’t sustainable, 4ocean replatformed back to Shopify. After a swift migration back, their new initiatives were back on the table. Their technical team launched an innovative trash tracker instead of spending time maintaining core ecommerce functionality. 

Their marketing team now creates and runs campaigns without any IT involvement. This has allowed 4ocean to focus more on their mission of cleaning the world’s oceans instead of navigating unnecessary technical complexity.

Shopify invests heavily in improving core ecommerce capabilities, taking the burden off of its customers. Since 2020, Shopify has released more than 800 significant features and improvements, and in 2025 alone, invested more than $1.5 billion in research and development. 

When you compare that to BigCommerce’s investment of $80.8 million in 2024, it becomes clear which platform is investing more heavily in new features.

Read more: Beyond Custom: When Innovation No Longer Competes with Maintenance

A higher total cost of ownership (TCO)

When comparing costs and pricing models, BigCommerce can initially appear to be an affordable ecommerce choice. However, direct developer costs are often left out of the equation because teams often pay for them separately. BigCommerce also has a complex pricing structure that merchants find challenging to untangle. 

When deciding on the right platform for your business, it’s critical to compare more than just platform fees or licensing costs. Total cost of ownership (TCO) means evaluating every related cost, including:

• Implementation and setup costs
• Platform fees and ecommerce stack costs
• Operational and support costs
• Conversion rates and revenue uplift
• Transaction fees 

A recent study* compared the average TCO on BigCommerce to stores built on Shopify. The results were significant: Overall costs are 45% higher on BigCommerce. 

BigCommerce's pricing is based on API call volume, average order value (AOV), and order volume. When thresholds are exceeded, additional fees get tacked on.

Nutritional supplement supplier BPI Sport is just one of many merchants that have saved TCO after migrating to Shopify. With BigCommerce, there were technical headaches that they kept having to hire developers to fix. They ended up with a pile of messy code and customer data. Error codes on the website were frustrating customers. Small feature improvements took a long time to implement. 

“You pull your hair,” said Oliver Haroun, director of technology for BPI Sports. “You hear your team just complaining 24/7 anytime you mention, ‘Hey, can you do this?’ That’s kind of the way discussions went, where we really didn’t want to improve or do anything to the site because it was such an endeavor to do anything simple,” remembered Oliver Haroun, director of technology for BPI Sports.

Worst of all, they were spending more than $6,000 per month in direct development costs in addition to platform and other fees. After a smooth migration to Shopify, BPI Sport saved $4,000 a month in direct costs.

“Our team had a lot of things we wanted to do before migrating—things like better testing, being able to replace things on the fly,” said Oliver. “Before Shopify Plus it was, ‘Eh, let’s see if we can figure something else out.’ Now it’s, ‘Okay. We know we can do it.’”

Lower checkout conversion rates

Few parts of ecommerce matter more than a fast, seamless checkout. Yet BigCommerce’s checkout functionality isn’t as optimized for conversions as platforms like Shopify. Mattress retailer Lull experienced this firsthand. 

Lull started out on a fully custom platform, managed by an in-house team. As they scaled, their build became complicated and costly to manage. When they decided to move to an ecommerce platform, they chose BigCommerce first.

“Initially, we tried to do a headless integration with BigCommerce,” said Matt Walker, president of Lull. “That project failed quite miserably, quite honestly. We had to abandon ship.”

During their yearlong rollout on BigCommerce, they could see that their bottom line would take a hit. There were drops in sales, and they lost hundreds of thousands of dollars to developers and platform fees. BigCommerce’s checkout was problematic: conversions plummeted by 15% compared to Lull’s legacy custom website.

After moving to Shopify, which has the world’s best-converting checkout, and integrating Shop Pay, Lull saw a 14% conversion lift during Black Friday and Cyber Monday of 2023. They had 80% of express checkouts coming through Shop Pay.

Ecommerce businesses that build on Shopify not only get a secure checkout that is optimized for conversions, but also get faster stores overall. On average, Shopify stores are up to 1.4 times faster than BigCommerce stores. Site speed is a key factor in ecommerce success. In ecommerce, every conversion matters, and Shopify invests in delivering a robust, future-ready foundation for its customers.

Good to know: A study completed in April 2023 in partnership with a Big Three global management consulting company found that Shopify’s checkout converts 12% better on average than BigCommerce.*

Limited out-of-the-box features and app ecosystem

Ecommerce websites need to scale and adapt as market demands change. When a platform has a lot of native features and a large ecosystem of partners, enterprise businesses can activate new, advanced functionality much faster. 

But when compared to platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce offers fewer capabilities out of the box and a much smaller ecosystem. This slows customers down, forcing them to rely more on IT and developers.

This lack of agility impacted shoe retailer Rollie Nation. They built an ecommerce site on BigCommerce, but it was complex and inflexible. Just creating a new page or small automation required contacting and waiting for developers. Customers were unhappy, and sales were dropping. They had a vision for a better, more intuitive user experience, but knew BigCommerce couldn’t get them there.

“At the time, there was complacency around the business and our technology,” said Vince Lebon, founder, designer, and CEO of Rollie Nation. “At that point, we had to stop and reboot, because we quickly realized what worked for us in those initial phases wouldn’t carry us forward in the exciting direction we had planned.”

Rollie Nation ultimately moved to Shopify and made the transition in just a few weeks, thanks to Shopify Plus Solutions Partner Disco Labs. 

Shopify’s ecosystem helps Rollie Nation deliver on their vision for a better buying experience while driving revenue and operational efficiency. With little to no technical support, they can use a number of Shopify and Shopify-integrated solutions, including:

• Shopify Flow for ecommerce automation
• Gorgias for customer service
• Smile for loyalty programs
• Klaviyo for growth marketing
• Okendo for user experience and reviews

“It's one of those things where we look back and wish we’d done it sooner,” said Vince. “We feel limitless now, as there's just so much you can do with the Shopify Plus platform.”

Shopify’s app ecosystem is more than 16,000 strong, enabling customers to rapidly add and configure new functionality, and speeding time to market. Customers on BigCommerce only have access to an ecosystem of about 1,300 apps, making it more likely that something will have to be custom-built. 

That said, 1,300 apps may still seem like a good number of options. But the quality and depth of integration also determine how much stays with developers. 

Shopify’s unified commerce also gives customers with both physical and online stores an advantage. Unlike BigCommerce, Shopify offers an in-house POS solution that doesn’t rely on pricey middleware. 

A lack of native functionality also impacts the operational efficiency of customers on BigCommerce. For instance, Shopify customers gain access to built-in tools like Flow and Launchpad, enabling them to modernize their operations and streamline buying without additional technical resources. On BigCommerce, enabling this functionality would likely take additional time, effort, and resources.

Difficulty empowering business users

The faster an ecommerce website can be modified, the more competitive and responsive to market opportunities a business can be. But some businesses on BigCommerce struggle to navigate the platform. The platform may also require back-end development, which means business users must go through IT teams for every change and update.

Online clothing retailer Grace & Lace launched their first ecommerce site with BigCommerce. It wasn’t long before they felt stifled by how hard it was to make changes. Even basic features, like upselling and cross-selling, were difficult to execute. During peak traffic times, they experienced outages, which hurt their bottom line. 

“It was not what we needed,” says Chris Cowden, Grace & Lace’s director of operations. “Nothing ever felt like a great fit. We just knew that we needed to get off the platform.”

Once they moved to Shopify, Chris could tailor the website on demand, without any outside developer help. The Shopify App Store provided ready access to the tools needed to support upsells and cross-sells. Chris is thrilled by his newfound agility, powered by the thousands of apps and third-party tools he can access at any time. 

“I don’t have an IT staff, and I want to keep it that way,” said Chris.

Empowering a business user also means ready access to analytics and reporting. This allows them to launch personalized campaigns, understand customer behavior, and make better, more strategic decisions. However, businesses on BigCommerce only have access to basic data analytics and reporting, especially compared to the readily available data on Shopify’s intuitive dashboard.

Business users on Shopify also gain access to integrated management tools like Shopify Flow and Fulfillment Network to automate tasks and processes. This includes returns, order management, email notifications, product storage, and more. All of this can be built and managed with a low-code editor that users across the business can use.

Slow time to market

Some businesses on BigCommerce can face delays and slow implementation times. Filtrous was mentioned earlier, highlighting their BigCommerce launch timeline: a full year. 

"We did a full year of custom development for our site, but walked away unhappy with the way the site looked and performed. BigCommerce lacked the flexibility for us to fully control our site, and managing the customer experience was time-consuming,” said Yin Fu, director of ecommerce at Filtrous. 

After that long year, the site launched, but the team quickly grew frustrated by the lack of new B2B features and slow product updates. Their ecommerce website was so complex that it broke whenever they tried to make a simple change. Customers found the site hard to use, so they contacted customer service to place orders. The team at Filtrous realized this was unsustainable.

That’s when they reached out to Shopify. A large app network and more native capabilities helped them launch a fully integrated B2B website in just 63 days. They took full advantage of Shopify’s suite of core B2B features, like Shopify Flow and vaulted credit cards. This allowed them to automate more of their back-office operations, including sending invoices and collecting payments, all without developer support.

Good to know: When a business migrates to Shopify, Shopify experts work to make launch faster and lower risk. Shopify's data migration tools such as templated CSV files, the Shopify API, and third-party data migration apps ensure migrations are low-risk and highly efficient. This also makes it easy for Shopify customers to launch new websites for testing products and entering new markets.

What to look for in a BigCommerce alternative: A practical checklist

Comparing BigCommerce alternatives requires a deep dive into how these factors impact your "velocity"—the speed at which you can grow without hitting a technical or financial ceiling.

To do this, look for:

• Total cost of ownership (TCO): Licensing is only the tip of the iceberg. Factor in web hosting, maintenance, security patches, and agency fees to calculate the platform’s TCO. A cheaper platform often becomes more expensive if it requires a massive team of developers to keep it running.
• Features: What features come out-of-the-box, and which need custom development? Don’t just think short-term. If a platform lacks native B2B tools or multi-storefront capabilities, you’ll spend your budget building what should have been included when you expand. 
• Checkout: A rigid checkout can kill conversions. Check whether your shortlist has a customizable checkout with one-click and guest options. Shop Pay, for instance, stores a customer’s details in a secure digital wallet. It’s used by 150 million customers and has been proven to outperform all other accelerated checkouts by at least 10%. 
• Site speed: Conversions live and die by how fast your site is. Compare how the platform handles bloat and whether its content delivery network (CDN) infrastructure can handle high-traffic surges like Black Friday.
• R&D investment: A commerce platform spending heavily on R&D is likely to stay ahead of trends and security threats. A stagnant R&D budget runs the risk of investing in a legacy tool that will eventually be obsolete.
• App and integration: A large app network means you can plug in world-class tools for enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), or marketing. A limited one forces you to build expensive, custom middleware integrations that contribute to technical debt and inflate TCO. 
• Partners: Are there certified agencies and developers available if you need help? If only a few partners know how to use the platform, you’ll face vendor lock-in and be at the mercy of specialist pricing when you need support. 
• Merchants using it: Seeing which other enterprise brands use the platform helps you understand its scale. If no one in your specific industry (e.g., B2B or luxury ecommerce) uses it, there may be a functional reason why.

Exploring BigCommerce alternatives: How do they stack up?

Here’s how Shopify compares to BigCommerce, as well as other major ecommerce players in the market. Consider three key areas: total cost of ownership, checkout conversion, and site speed. You can learn more about our research methodology in the article comparing ecommerce platforms.

Comparing the total cost of ownership (TCO) of ecommerce platforms

The following data is according to research commissioned by Shopify and conducted from November 2023 to February 2024 by a leading independent consulting firm that studied TCO across major platforms in North America.

Salesforce Agentforce Commerce 

Over five years, Salesforce’s TCO is 54% higher than Shopify’s on average. Salesforce customers experience 16% higher implementation costs, 14% higher platform costs, and 6% higher operating costs than Shopify customers.

Adobe Commerce (Magento)

Over five years, Adobe Commerce (formerly Magento’s) TCO is 41% higher than Shopify’s on average. On average, Adobe Commerce customers experience 42% higher implementation costs, 42% higher platform costs, and 24% higher operating costs than Shopify customers.

WooCommerce

Over five years, WooCommerce’s TCO is 57% higher than Shopify on average. On average, WooCommerce customers experience 49% higher implementation costs, 41% higher platform costs, and 32% higher operating costs than Shopify customers.

BigCommerce

Over five years, BigCommerce’s TCO is 45% higher than Shopify’s on average. On average, BigCommerce customers experience 88% higher implementation costs, 32% higher platform costs, and 21% higher operating costs than Shopify customers.

Comparing the checkout conversion of ecommerce platforms

The following data is based on a study completed in April 2023 in partnership with a Big Three global management consulting company.

• Salesforce Agentforce Commerce: Assuming a 10% margin on goods sold, Shopify's checkout converts 36% better than Salesforce’s on average.
• Adobe Commerce: Assuming a 10% margin on goods sold, Shopify's checkout converts 5% better than Adobe Commerce’s on average.
• WooCommerce: Assuming a 10% margin on goods sold, Shopify's checkout converts 17% better than WooCommerce’s on average.
• BigCommerce: Assuming a 10% margin on goods sold, Shopify's checkout converts 12% better than BigCommerce’s on average.

Comparing the site speed of ecommerce platforms

Statistics are based on Google’s Core Web Vitals (CWV), collected for a representative sample of sites on Shopify and its competitors, covering 200,000 sites across all revenue bands and all major commerce platforms.

Salesforce Agentforce Commerce

Ninety-three percent of Shopify stores are fast** versus only 65% of Salesforce stores, and Shopify stores render 1.5 times faster than Salesforce stores on average. Shopify’s server speed is 2.2 times faster on average than Salesforce’s.

Adobe Commerce

Ninety-three percent of Shopify stores are fast versus 53% of Adobe Commerce stores, and Shopify stores render two times faster than Adobe Commerce stores on average. Shopify’s server speed is 3.4 times faster than Adobe Commerce.

WooCommerce

Ninety-three percent of Shopify stores are fast versus only 34% of WooCommerce stores, and Shopify stores render 2.4 times faster than WooCommerce stores on average. Shopify’s server speed is 3.9 times faster than WooCommerce’s.

BigCommerce

Ninety-three percent of Shopify stores are fast versus 80% of BigCommerce stores, and Shopify stores render 1.4 times faster than BigCommerce stores on average. Shopify’s server speed is 1.9 times faster than BigCommerce’s.

Shopify is a strategic alternative to BigCommerce for businesses at scale

The complexity of BigCommerce can drag down innovative, growing businesses looking to stay competitive. As a business grows, the initial appeal of BigCommerce's flexibility and cost savings can be replaced by over complex codebases, fragile integrations, and development bottlenecks.

Consumer electronics retailer SkullCandy struggled to improve the brittle ecommerce website they had built on BigCommerce. As a brand, they wanted to experiment and move fast to respond to market opportunities, but technical debt slowed them down.

“We noticed some vulnerabilities and an aging code base that was starting to hold us back,” said Jenny Buchar, director of digital strategy and product at Skullcandy.

When they decided to move to Shopify, Skullcandy needed to meet an aggressive deadline of going live in 90 days. Shopify experts helped them move fast, and implementation was a breeze. Shopify’s platform enabled seamless integration with tech partners, reducing the company’s technical overhead and speeding time to launch. 

Today, Shopify has enabled the SkullCandy team to focus on enhancing consumer experience. It now takes them just 30 minutes to launch a new product, down from the day and a half it took on BigCommerce.

“We now have a testing strategy that allows us to iterate, learn, and improve in a highly agile way, whether through Shopify's native tools or by integrating third-party apps,” said Evin Catlett, vice president of global ecommerce and growth marketing. “Even with unique or edge cases, designing tests is straightforward. We can easily say, ‘I want to try this, I want to test that,’ and the ecosystem provides the flexibility to make it happen.”

Shopify customers have a clear advantage. The numbers tell the story: 

• Shopify has a 12% higher checkout conversion rate on average.*** 
• Over five years, BigCommerce’s total cost of ownership was 45% higher on average than Shopify’s. 
• Shopify’s $1.5 billion in R&D investment is powered by a 4,000-team strong R&D department (compared to BigCommerce’s $80.8 million in 2024).

Plus, merchants on Shopify can access an ever-increasing ecosystem of more than 16,000 apps to build sophisticated functionality without developer support. Native tools like Shopify Flow and Launchpad help teams improve operational efficiency and revenue growth, so they can spend less time on customer experience and growth.

—

*According to research commissioned by Shopify and conducted November 2023 to February 2024 by a leading independent consulting firm to study TCO across major platforms in North America.

** Google’s benchmark for a good FCP score is 1.8 seconds or less. For your store to get a good FCP score, the first piece of recognizable content needs to load in less than 1.8 seconds for at least 75% of your site users.

*** Based on a study completed in April 2023 in partnership with a Big Three global management consulting company.