Shopify vs BigCommerce. Enterprise feature parity, scored.

Neither is categorically better; the answer depends on three variables. Shopify Plus wins for brands that need the deepest app ecosystem, Hydrogen for headless, Shopify Functions for backend logic, and a partner network with bench depth. BigCommerce Enterprise wins for brands that need native B2B at a lower tier, multi-storefront in core, no transaction fees on any payment processor, and higher API rate limits for headless workloads. Audit your top 5 feature requirements before evaluating either platform.

Yes on transaction fees, mixed on subscription. BigCommerce charges zero transaction fees on any payment processor (Stripe, PayPal, Adyen, Braintree). Shopify charges 0 percent on Shopify Payments and 0.5 to 2.0 percent on third-party gateways depending on plan. Subscription pricing is similar at the entry level (Shopify Basic 29 USD per month, BigCommerce Standard 39 USD per month) and converges at enterprise (Shopify Plus 2,300 USD plus per month, BigCommerce Enterprise quoted by GMV tier). For a brand processing 10M USD GMV annually on Adyen, the BigCommerce zero-fee structure saves roughly 50,000 to 200,000 USD per year vs Shopify Plus on a non-Shopify-Payments rail.

BigCommerce ships native B2B on the Pro tier (around 400 USD per month); Shopify ships native B2B only on Plus (2,300 USD plus per month). Since Shopify launched Company Accounts in 2023, the feature set is now comparable: NET-30 terms, customer-specific catalogs, quote flows, role-based access at the company level. BigCommerce still leads in customer-group flexibility (price lists per group, custom shipping per group). For a brand that wants native B2B without paying Plus rates, BigCommerce is cheaper. For a brand already on Shopify, the in-platform upgrade path is simpler.

BigCommerce, by a meaningful margin. BigCommerce Enterprise allows up to 450 requests per 30 seconds on REST and 600 on GraphQL Storefront. Shopify Plus allows 4 requests per second on REST (with bucket of 80) and 2,000 cost points per second on Admin GraphQL. For headless storefronts pulling product, inventory, and customer data on demand, BigCommerce is more forgiving. Shopify partly compensates with Hydrogen edge caching and the Storefront API's query cost optimization. If your architecture is read-heavy with cache invalidation patterns, the gap matters less. If you run a large catalog sync or a real-time inventory layer, BigCommerce gives more headroom.

Yes, and BigCommerce includes it lower in the price ladder. BigCommerce Multi-Storefront ships on Pro and Enterprise: one license, one catalog, multiple branded storefronts each with its own theme, currency, and channel. Shopify Plus offers up to 9 expansion stores included, with shared inventory possible via apps but not natively unified. BigCommerce is cleaner for brands running 4 plus parallel storefronts off one SKU set. Shopify Plus is friendlier when each storefront is meaningfully different in catalog or operations. For multi-currency at scale, Shopify Markets handles routing without separate stores.

Migrate BigCommerce to Shopify when: you need a specific app that exists on Shopify and not BigCommerce (Klaviyo, Recharge, Gorgias all work on both, but Shopify Functions, Checkout Extensibility, and a thicker apps roster pull weight here), or your team is already deep on Liquid and Shopify partner relationships. Migrate Shopify to BigCommerce when: transaction fees on a non-Shopify-Payments gateway are stacking up to six figures per year, you need native B2B without paying Plus pricing, or you need multi-storefront with shared inventory tighter than Shopify's expansion-store model. Migration cost runs 12 to 24 weeks regardless of direction; see the /services/shopify-migration/ method for the Revenue-Safe Replatform we use to keep traffic and rankings intact through the cutover.

Both platforms scale into the millions of SKUs in practice; the bottleneck is variant count, not raw SKU count. Shopify caps at 100 variants per product on the Standard tier (lifted on Plus via metafields). BigCommerce has no hard variant cap on Enterprise but slows on extremely large catalogs (200,000 plus SKUs) without tuning. For a typical mid-market catalog (5,000 to 50,000 SKUs), both perform well. For configurable products with hundreds of options each, BigCommerce handles the data model with less workaround. Inside Shopify's 100-variant ceiling, Shopify is fine.