BigCommerce vs Shopify: The Best Choice for Your Online Store in 2025

Did you know platform transaction fees alone can silently cut your margins by 5-15%? When picking between BigCommerce and Shopify, it's not just about comparing features; it's about setting your online store up for future growth while protecting your profits. The right choice now can save you significant costs down the road.

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We compare them head-to-head so you can choose wisely. Here’s what we’ll break down:

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• Pricing structures and hidden costs
• Design, customization, and SEO control
• Scalability potential and ease of use
• Which platform truly fits your specific needs in 2025

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Let's find out.

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TL;DR

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Choosing between BigCommerce and Shopify boils down to your specific priorities. Here’s a quick rundown of their core differences based on our 2025 comparison:

Ultimately, the "better" platform is the one that aligns best with your budget, technical skills, feature requirements, and growth strategy.

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BigCommerce: Built-in Power for Growth

BigCommerce delivers an ecommerce platform centered on extensive built-in functionality. Its core approach provides a wide range of capabilities right out of the box. This often reduces the need to rely heavily on third-party apps for many essential store operations and scaling needs.

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This focus on native features makes BigCommerce a compelling option for businesses managing complex product catalogs or planning for significant growth. With more built-in tools, your technical setup becomes simpler.

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Shopify: User-Friendly with Extensive Customization

Shopify earns its reputation for being incredibly user-friendly. Many users point to its intuitive interface and how easy it makes getting an online store up and running. The platform offers a more streamlined core experience right from the beginning.

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Shopify stands out for its massive app ecosystem. Need specialized tools or unique features? There's almost certainly an app for it in their marketplace. This flexibility allows you to tailor your store, but it’s important to know which apps truly impact your revenue. heatmapAI can help track how different website elements, including those added through apps, affect your sales.

Features and Functionality

Let's examine what each platform includes natively. This reveals their different philosophies on providing tools internally versus relying on add-ons for expanded capabilities.

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BigCommerce aims for comprehensive power right out-of-the-box:

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• Advanced inventory management (unlimited variants): This lets you easily handle products with many options like size, color, or material directly within the platform. It helps prevent overselling  and makes managing large catalogs much simpler.
• Built-in professional reporting: You get access to detailed sales reports, customer data, and marketing insights without needing to install separate reporting apps.
• Real-time shipping quotes: The platform can calculate and show customers accurate shipping costs from major carriers directly in their cart. This transparency reduces sticker shock and helps decrease cart abandonment rates.
• Native product ratings and reviews: You can collect and display customer reviews directly on your product pages using built-in tools.
• Robust SEO controls: BigCommerce gives you more granular control over things like URL structures and meta descriptions out-of-the-box. This helps you optimize your site more effectively for search engines to attract valuable organic traffic.
• Multi-channel selling capabilities: Easily list products and manage sales across other platforms like Amazon, eBay, Facebook, and Instagram directly from your BigCommerce admin. This keeps inventory synced and expands your reach efficiently.

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Shopify focuses on a simple, easy-to-manage platform, relying on apps for specialized features:

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• Easy-to-use inventory management: Shopify offers a straightforward system that's very quick to learn and manage. It's great if your products have fewer variations.
• Abandoned cart recovery (all plans): This feature is included even on basic plans. It automatically emails shoppers who added items to their cart but didn't check out, helping you recover potentially lost sales with minimal setup.
• Basic reporting: Access essential sales data and performance dashboards for a high-level overview. For more detailed analysis or custom reports, you'll need to upgrade your plan or use specific apps.
• Multi-channel selling capabilities: Like BigCommerce, Shopify also allows you to connect and sell on multiple marketplaces and social channels, reaching customers wherever they prefer to shop.
• Relies more heavily on its app store: Shopify’s platform is easy to use, but for advanced features like reporting, SEO, loyalty programs, and subscriptions, you'll need to rely on its app store. This adds flexibility but can also increase costs and complexity.

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You might think the difference in features won’t matter, as long as the feature is available. But what truly matters is how well those features perform. For instance, heatmapAI’s user behavior data shows that businesses using advanced inventory systems see up to a 23% higher conversion rate, likely from better stock management, creating a smoother customer experience.

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Therefore, understanding which specific features, built-in or via apps, truly benefit your audience is vital. heatmapAI lets you see the actual revenue impact of specific page elements and user interactions, helping you optimize based on real financial results.

Pricing Structure and Plans

The cost of BigCommerce and Shopify goes beyond just the monthly subscription. You need to consider how each platform handles things like sales volume, features, staff access, and especially transaction fees to understand the true cost for your business.

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BigCommerce Pricing

BigCommerce offers pricing plans based on your store's annual sales volume:

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• Standard: $39 per month (supports up to $50K/year in online sales)
• Plus: $105 per month (supports up to $180K/year in online sales)
• Pro: $399 per month (supports up to $400K+/year in online sales)
• Enterprise: Custom pricing tailored for businesses exceeding $1M+/year

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A significant advantage here is that BigCommerce bundles more advanced features (like professional reporting and native product reviews, as mentioned earlier) into its plans.

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Critically, BigCommerce charges no additional transaction fees regardless of which compatible payment gateway you choose. You only pay the standard rate charged by your payment processor (like Stripe or PayPal). All plans also include unlimited staff accounts.

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Shopify Pricing

Shopify takes a different approach, structuring its plans mainly around feature access and capabilities, rather than sales volume limits:

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• Basic Shopify: $25 per month
• Grow: $65 per month
• Advanced Shopify: $399 per month
• Shopify Plus: Custom enterprise pricing (typically starting around $2,300/month)
• (Shopify Lite is also available at $9/month for adding ecommerce capabilities to existing sites/blogs.)

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While Shopify doesn't cap your annual sales on its main plans, the key cost factor is transaction fees. If you use their in-house processor, Shopify Payments, you avoid extra platform fees (you still pay standard processing rates).

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However, if you choose a third-party payment gateway, Shopify charges an additional transaction fee of 0.5% to 2%, depending on your plan. For high-volume stores using external gateways, these fees can quickly add up, cutting into profits.

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Our data shows these additional transaction fees can reduce profit margins by 5-15% for high-volume sellers who don't use the platform's native payment solution. This is an important factor to consider when calculating the true cost of using Shopify.

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Customization and Design

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Getting the right look and feel for your store is vital. Here’s a direct comparison of how BigCommerce and Shopify handle themes and design flexibility:

Getting the design right is critical for performance. Stores using professionally designed, mobile-optimized themes achieve up to higher conversion rates compared to stores with basic or poorly adapted designs. Understanding exactly how visitors interact with your layout, buttons, and visuals can reveal key optimization opportunities.

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For instance, the DTC brand Obvi faced the challenge of optimizing their landing page for better user engagement. With heatmapAI, they identified that their main CTA button was below the fold on mobile, reducing visibility.

By simply moving the CTA above the fold, they saw a 7.81% increase in Revenue Per Session. This change, along with other insights from heatmapAI, resulted in a 100x ROI in just one month.

SEO Capabilities

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Getting found on search engines like Google is crucial for attracting consistent, valuable traffic. How well do BigCommerce and Shopify equip you for SEO right out of the gate? Let's compare their built-in capabilities.

Both platforms handle fundamental SEO tasks like redirects and metadata well. BigCommerce offers a distinct advantage with full URL structure control, which is important for technical SEO professionals. Shopify, however, often leads in overall page load speed, another critical ranking and conversion factor.

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App Ecosystem and Integrations

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No e-commerce platform operates in isolation. Apps and integrations are essential for extending capabilities, connecting to other business systems, and adding specialized features. However, BigCommerce and Shopify have different philosophies regarding reliance on them.

When it comes to marketing tools, Shopify clearly boasts a much larger app store, offering unparalleled flexibility if you need very specific or niche functionalities. If there's a tool you need, chances are high you'll find an app for it on Shopify.

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BigCommerce, having more built-in features, generally requires fewer apps for core operations and focuses its integrations strongly on backend business systems like ERPs and CRMs.

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Payment Processing and Transaction Fees

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How your customers pay, and the fees associated with those payments, directly affect your bottom line. Let's revisit payment gateways and platform-specific transaction fees.

While Shopify provides access to more payment gateways overall, it imposes an additional transaction fee (0.6% to 2% based on your plan) if you use any gateway other than their in-house Shopify Payments. Regarding payment options, Shopify Payments avoids this extra fee, making it highly incentivized.

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BigCommerce, supporting fewer gateways, stands out by charging zero additional platform transaction fees, no matter which compatible payment provider you choose. You only pay the standard rate charged by the payment gateway itself (e.g., Stripe, PayPal).

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Therefore, BigCommerce's fee structure could be more cost-effective if your strategy involves offering several major third-party payment gateways.

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Scalability for Growing Businesses

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As your eCommerce store grows, your platform must scale with it. Scalability involves handling increased traffic, larger product catalogs, more staff members, and greater operational complexity without hitting roadblocks.  

Both platforms demonstrate strong performance under load. BigCommerce often appeals to businesses anticipating complexity, offering unlimited staff accounts from the start but tying plan levels to annual sales thresholds.

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Shopify provides predictable monthly costs without sales caps on its core plans, but limits staff accounts to lower tiers and relies more heavily on apps or the Shopify Plus plan for extensive enterprise-level features.

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However, true scalability isn’t just about platform capacity—it also depends on optimizing your store’s performance as you grow. The Cooking Guild, a high-end kitchen knife eCommerce brand, used heatmapAI to track user behavior and optimize their Collections Pages. HeatmapAI’s data showed that the highest-priced knives were not the most profitable, leading them to adjust their product display for better profitability.

These insights resulted in a nearly 50% increase in Revenue Per Session and a 40x return on investment in just 30 days.

Ease of Use and Learning Curve

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How quickly can you launch your store and comfortably handle daily tasks like adding products or managing orders? The platform's interface  and overall learning curve are significant factors.

Shopify typically gets the nod for ease of use, particularly for those new to ecommerce. Its clean dashboard, straightforward language, and excellent guided setup make launching your store feel less intimidating. BigCommerce, while powerful with its many built-in options, often presents a steeper learning curve due to this complexity and its use of more industry-specific terminology.

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Performance and Site Speed

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How quickly your eCommerce (BigCommerce or Shopify) site loads directly impacts visitor satisfaction, search engine rankings, and conversion rates. A slow site actively costs you money.

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While both BigCommerce and Shopify provide reliable performance, studies often show differences in average page load times:

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• BigCommerce: Typically averages around 2.6 seconds for page load.
• Shopify: Often measures faster, averaging approximately 1.3 seconds.  

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Keep in mind these are general benchmarks. Your actual site speed will depend heavily on factors like your chosen theme, the number and type of apps installed, image optimization, and more. However, Shopify frequently demonstrates an advantage in standard page load speed tests.

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Site speed isn’t just a ranking factor; it directly impacts your bottom line. According to heatmapAI's site speed data, improving page load times by just one second can increase conversion rates by up to 7%.

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With heatmapAI’s built-in site speed tracking, you can monitor your site’s performance and get recommendations for improving load times. Regularly monitoring your site speed and understanding its impact is key to maximizing organic performance.

Customer Support

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When technical issues arise, or you need help navigating your platform's features, quick and reliable customer support is essential. Here's how we compare Shopify and BigCommerce:

Both platforms offer strong, round-the-clock support via essential channels like phone, email, and live chat. They also provide extensive documentation (Knowledge Bases/Help Centers) and active user forums for community assistance.

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The main difference lies in how each platform handles specialized needs. BigCommerce offers dedicated support for its Enterprise-level clients, ensuring more tailored assistance.

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Shopify, on the other hand, provides access to the Shopify Experts marketplace, where merchants at any plan level can hire vetted freelancers and agencies for tasks like custom development, design, and marketing strategy.

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Which Platform Is Right for Your Business?

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So, after comparing all these areas, which platform comes out on top? The honest answer is that it depends entirely on your specific business needs and priorities. There's no single 'best' platform, only the best fit for you. BigCommerce generally packs more comprehensive features natively, while Shopify often leads in ease of use and app-driven customization.

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Choose BigCommerce if:

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• You need comprehensive built-in functionality without relying heavily on apps.
• You want to avoid added transaction fees when using various third-party payment gateways.
• You have complex product catalogs with many variants or options.
• You require strong, native B2B features.
• You value fully customizable URL structures for technical SEO.
• You need unlimited staff accounts included on all plan levels.  

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Choose Shopify if:

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• You prioritize ease of use and a gentle learning curve above all else.
• You're just starting out and want the simplest setup process.
• You prefer a visually appealing, design-focused platform with polished themes.
• You plan to primarily use Shopify Payments as your payment processor (avoiding extra fees).  
• You value access to a vast app ecosystem for nearly endless custom functionality.  
• You want the fastest average page load speeds out of the box.

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Carefully weigh these points against your business goals, budget, technical expertise, and growth plans to make the most informed decision for your online store's future.

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Ready to See What Really Works on Your Store with heatmapAI?

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Choosing between BigCommerce and Shopify is a big step, but hopefully, this breakdown makes the decision clearer. It truly boils down to aligning the platform's strengths with your specific business priorities – whether that's built-in power or ultimate ease and app flexibility.

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Whichever platform you choose, understanding how customers interact with your site is vital for maximizing its potential. heatmapAI provides clear, revenue-focused insights into user behavior, showing you exactly what drives sales so you can optimize your BigCommerce or Shopify store effectively based on data, not guesswork.

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Ashvin Melwani

@ashvinmelwani

With heatmap, I've been able to figure out what elements actually increase AOV and optimize our landing pages to drive more first purchase profitability, we're up 23% YoY.