Which Ecommerce Platform Is Right for You? The 2026 Pricing, Priced Properly

Nobody picks the wrong platform on features. They pick it on a headline monthly price, then discover the GMV threshold, the transaction fee on their chosen payment provider, and the plan that auto-upgrades underneath them at a number nobody mentioned.

So this comparison starts with the money, in the small print, from the pricing pages themselves. Features later. The money is what actually decides this.

The pricing, as published

Shopify

UK pricing, billed yearly: Basic £19/month, Grow £49, Advanced £259, Plus from £1,800. Card rates fall as you go up, from 2% + 25p on Basic to 1.7% on Grow and 1.5% on Advanced^[1]. Billed monthly instead, those become £25, £65 and £344^[1].

Two things buried in there that matter more than the headline. Semantic search in Search & Discovery requires Grow or above, so a Basic merchant has keyword matching only^[2]. And POS Pro is £69/month per location on top^[1].

Shopify Tax is free on your first $100,000 of global sales a year, then 0.35% per order (0.25% on Plus), capped at $0.99 per order and $5,000 a year per region, where the regions are US, EU and UK separately^[3].

BigCommerce

Core $29/month annual or $39 monthly, Growth $79 or $105, Scale $299 or $399, Performance custom from $1,499 on annual billing only^[4].

Now the part that catches people. Each plan carries a GMV ceiling and auto-upgrades when you pass it. Core auto-upgrades to Growth above $30,000 trailing-twelve-month GMV. Growth auto-upgrades to Scale above $100,000. Scale carries a 0.9% overage on GMV above $33,333 a month. Performance kicks in at $2 million TTM GMV^[4].

And there's an Open Payment Provider Fee for using a non-integrated payment provider: 2.0% of eligible order GMV on Core, 1.0% on Growth, 0.6% on Scale, none on Performance^[4].

Read those two together. A store on Core doing $28,000 TTM GMV through a non-integrated provider is paying $29/month plus 2% of GMV, which is $560 a month, not $29. The headline is 5% of the real bill.

WooCommerce

The software is free. That is genuinely true and it's also the most misleading fact in ecommerce.

What you actually pay for: hosting (£20 to £300+/month depending on traffic), a theme, extensions, a developer or agency, and your own time on updates and security. Woo's own documentation covers product and inventory settings clearly^[5], and its tax handling is honest about its limits: it calculates rates across the US, Canada, Australia, the UK and the EU, and it explicitly does not tell you when or what to charge, does not file returns, and does not track nexus^[6].

The realistic all-in for a serious Woo store is £150 to £600 a month once you count hosting and extensions, which is roughly Shopify Grow to Advanced territory. The difference is where the money goes and what you own.

Adobe Commerce

No published price. Quote-based and scaled primarily by annual GMV. Third-party estimates put licences roughly from $22,000/year at low GMV up to $190,000+ for enterprise cloud deployments, with total cost of ownership typically two to three times the licence once you add hosting, development and extensions^[7].

Those are third-party estimates, not Adobe figures, and the spread is wide enough to be a range rather than a quote. Treat them as an order of magnitude.

One structural cost to know before you buy. Adobe's agentic layer runs on Adobe Experience Platform through Agent Orchestrator, working across Real-Time CDP, Experience Manager, Journey Optimizer and Customer Journey Analytics^[8]. Each of those is separately licensed. Your Commerce licence does not include the AI.

What we found: the fee that isn't on the comparison table

We priced one profile across all four, using only published figures. £1M annual revenue, 15,000 orders a year, £67 average order value, UK, using Stripe rather than the platform's own payments.

Platform	Plan cost	Platform transaction fee	Notes
Shopify Advanced	£3,108/yr[1]	Applies when not using Shopify Payments	Plus Shopify Tax above $100k, capped[3]
BigCommerce Scale	£3,588/yr equivalent[4]	0.6% of GMV on non-integrated providers	Plus 0.9% GMV overage above $33,333/mo[4]
WooCommerce	£0 licence	None from the platform	Hosting, extensions, dev time
Adobe Commerce	~$22,000+/yr estimate[7]	None from the platform	TCO typically 2–3× the licence[7]

The 0.6% on BigCommerce Scale is worth £6,000 a year on a £1M store. That's larger than the plan fee. Stripe is an embedded provider on BigCommerce and so wouldn't attract it^[4], but plenty of merchants use providers that aren't, and the fee never appears on a comparison table because it depends on a choice made three screens later.

The finding

Every platform has one cost that scales with revenue and is invisible at the point of decision. On Shopify it's the transaction fee for not using Shopify Payments. On BigCommerce it's the Open Payment Provider Fee plus the GMV overage. On Woo it's hosting and developer time. On Adobe it's the GMV-scaled licence and the separately-licensed AI layer.

None of those are hidden exactly. All of them are published. They're just never on the page where you compare monthly prices, which is the page everyone actually reads.

Who each platform is genuinely right for

Shopify

Right for: most stores under £20M with a standard product model and a small team. The checkout is the best in the industry, the app ecosystem is deep, and the operational burden is close to zero.

Wrong for: complex B2B pricing, unusual product models, businesses that need control of checkout, and anyone whose margin can't absorb the payment fees at scale.

The genuine downside nobody says: you're renting a business-critical system from a company that ships two Editions a year and periodically absorbs paid app categories or retires its own free tools. Stocky, given away free for six years, retires on 31 August 2026^[9]. Free from a platform is not a commitment.

Also worth planning for: Shopify ships a new API version quarterly with a minimum 12 months support and at least nine months of overlap^[10], and every new public app since April 2025 must use GraphQL^[11]. If you have custom integrations, that's an ongoing commitment.

WooCommerce

Right for: content-led businesses where the blog or the editorial is the acquisition engine, teams with a developer, unusual requirements, and anyone who genuinely wants to own their data and their code.

Wrong for: teams with nobody technical. That is the whole answer and it isn't a small caveat. A Woo store with no maintainer is a security incident waiting for a date.

The gap that most Woo comparisons skip: core search is a database LIKE query against title and content. No relevance ranking, no typo tolerance, no attribute understanding. On a catalogue over a few hundred products that's a real commercial problem, and it's fixable, and almost nobody fixes it.

The counterweight: Woo gives you your own database. Every analysis in every other article on this site is a query you can actually run on Woo, and can't on Shopify without an export.

Adobe Commerce and Magento

Right for: complex B2B, multi-store, multi-region, heavy ERP integration, businesses with an internal dev team or a long-term agency relationship. Adobe's inventory model with sources and stocks handles multi-location properly, with concurrent checkout protection built in^[12].

Wrong for: anyone under about £10M, and anyone without dedicated engineering. The total cost of ownership at two to three times the licence^[7] is a real number and it's mostly people.

The honest complication in 2026: Adobe stopped actively developing PWA Studio, which was the recommended headless path, and moved focus to Edge Delivery Services^[13]. If you're choosing Adobe Commerce now, choose the storefront direction deliberately^[14].

BigCommerce

Right for: API-first builds, businesses that want headless without leaving a hosted platform, and merchants who want no transaction fee on an embedded provider. Catalyst is MIT-licensed and technically decent^[15].

Wrong for: anyone near a GMV boundary who hasn't modelled it, and anyone who needs a specific app that only exists on Shopify.

The consideration is ecosystem depth. Catalyst sits at 242 GitHub stars against Hydrogen's 2,069^[15][16]. That's not a code quality judgement. It's how many other teams have hit your bug before you, which matters at 11pm on a Friday.

Custom and headless

Right for: genuinely unusual models, or scale where the platform fee exceeds a team's cost. Wrong for almost everyone else. If you're considering it, the open-source backend options are real: Medusa sits at 35,290 GitHub stars with 21 commerce modules^[17].

The questions that actually decide this

Lift this. Answer all eight before you look at a single feature list.

#	Question	Why it decides things
1	Do you have anyone technical, on staff or on retainer?	Rules Woo and Magento in or out immediately
2	Which payment provider will you use?	Transaction fees can exceed the plan fee[4]
3	What's your projected GMV in 24 months?	Plan auto-upgrades trigger on it[4]
4	How many SKUs, and how many variants each?	Search and filter ceilings bind here
5	B2B pricing, quotes or account-specific catalogues?	Pushes you toward Adobe or custom
6	Multiple regions, currencies or storefronts?	Changes the answer completely
7	Which specific apps do you depend on today?	App availability is a platform lock-in
8	Who maintains this in three years?	The question nobody asks and everybody regrets

The five things that are harder than the platform comparison admits

Every platform will take an order. The differences show up in the jobs that sit either side of that, and these are the five where the gap between platforms is genuinely large.

Search

The widest gap of the five, and the one nobody puts on a comparison table. Shopify gives you Search & Discovery free, with semantic search on Grow and above for stores under 200,000 products^[2]. Magento requires OpenSearch or Elasticsearch as a hard dependency, so you have a real engine by default. BigCommerce has competent native faceted search.

WooCommerce core runs a database LIKE query against post title and content. No relevance ranking, no typo tolerance, no attribute awareness. Given Baymard's finding that 56% of ecommerce sites already fail their shoppers' searches^[23], starting from a LIKE query is a meaningful handicap you'll have to spend money or time to remove.

Multi-location inventory

Adobe is strongest here by design, with an explicit sources-and-stocks model and concurrent checkout protection^[12]. Shopify handles multi-location well natively. BigCommerce is competent. Woo needs an extension and the extensions vary.

B2B pricing and account catalogues

Customer-specific pricing, quote workflows, purchase orders on account, restricted catalogues per customer group. Adobe and Shopify Plus handle this properly. Below Plus on Shopify it's an app. On Woo it's several extensions and some code.

Tax and compliance

Shopify Tax calculates and monitors liability^[3]. WooCommerce Tax calculates rates and explicitly does not track nexus or file returns^[6]. That difference matters more than it sounds, because on Woo nothing warns you when you cross a threshold.

Who patches it when a vulnerability lands

On Shopify and BigCommerce, they do, and you find out afterwards. On Woo and self-hosted Magento, you do, and if nobody's assigned to it then nobody does it.

This is the least glamorous item on the list and the one that ends businesses. A Woo store with no maintainer isn't cheaper than Shopify. It's Shopify's price deferred, plus interest, payable at a moment of someone else's choosing.

The migration cost, honestly

If you're moving rather than starting, the migration is usually a bigger number than the platform difference.

Published implementation data puts a mid-market ecommerce replatform at $150,000 to $300,000 all-in over 5 to 10 months, with enterprise and composable rebuilds above $500,000^[18]. That comes from an agency that sells replatforming work, which means read the number as informed rather than neutral, and note they've no incentive to inflate the low end.

The costs that get missed: URL structure and 301 redirects, which is where SEO gets destroyed. Historical order data, which finance needs and which rarely migrates cleanly. Customer passwords, which never migrate, meaning every customer has to reset. And the apps, which is usually the largest single line.

Rough rule: if the platform saving is under £20,000 a year, migration probably doesn't pay back inside three years.

The agentic question you should ask every vendor

This is new enough that most sales teams don't have a rehearsed answer, which makes it a good question.

Google's Universal Commerce Protocol launched at NRF on 11 January 2026, co-developed with Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target and Walmart^[19], and Shopify has published its engineering account of building it^[20]. The Agentic Commerce Protocol maintained by OpenAI and Stripe is at spec version 2026-04-17^[21].

Shopify is a UCP co-developer, which is a genuine and durable advantage for merchants on it. The question worth asking every other platform: what's your protocol support, is it on by default, and what do I have to configure?

Keep it in proportion though. Adobe Analytics reports AI-referred traffic to US retail sites up 138% year on year in May 2026^[22], which is fast growth from a small base. This should influence a platform choice at the margin. It shouldn't drive one.

What to do this week

1. Model 24 months of GMV against each platform's thresholds. Not today's revenue. The one that triggers the auto-upgrade^[4].
2. Pick your payment provider first, then price the platform. The order matters, because the fee depends on it.
3. List every app you depend on and check availability on each candidate. This is usually the deciding constraint.
4. Answer the technical-staff question honestly. It rules two platforms in or out on its own.
5. If you're migrating, price the redirect map and the order history migration. Both get forgotten, both hurt^[18].
6. Ask each vendor what their AI layer costs on top. On Adobe it runs on Experience Platform, not on Commerce^[8].
7. Ask about agentic protocol support. The answers vary a lot right now^[19].

The takeaway

The platform comparison that matters isn't features. Every one of these will sell products competently. It's the cost that scales with your revenue and doesn't appear next to the monthly price, and the honest answer to whether you have someone to maintain the thing.

My stance, and it's the unfashionable one: platform choice is significantly less important than most people believe, and most replatforming projects are an expensive way of avoiding a merchandising problem. The stores that struggle usually struggle for reasons the platform didn't cause and won't fix.

If you're considering a move, what's the specific thing you can't do today? Write it in one sentence. If you can't, you have your answer.

Sources

1. Shopify Pricing (UK). Shopify. Accessed 22 July 2026.
2. Modifying search with Shopify Search & Discovery. Shopify Help Center. Accessed 22 July 2026.
3. Shopify Tax. Shopify. Accessed 22 July 2026.
4. BigCommerce Pricing. BigCommerce. Accessed 22 July 2026.
5. Managing Products. WooCommerce documentation. Accessed 22 July 2026.
6. WooCommerce Tax documentation. Woo. Accessed 22 July 2026.
7. Adobe Commerce Pricing: License Costs, Cloud Fees & Total Cost of Ownership. Swell. Third-party estimate; Swell sells a competing platform.
8. Adobe Launches Adobe Experience Platform Agent Orchestrator. Adobe newsroom, March 2025.
9. Migrating from Stocky to Shopify inventory management. Shopify Help Center. Accessed 22 July 2026.
10. API versioning. Shopify developer documentation. Accessed 22 July 2026.
11. Starting April 2025, new public apps must use GraphQL. Shopify developer changelog.
12. Inventory Management introduction. Adobe Commerce documentation. Accessed 22 July 2026.
13. PWA Studio FAQ. Accessed 22 July 2026.
14. Adobe Commerce Storefront documentation. Adobe Experience League. Accessed 22 July 2026.
15. bigcommerce/catalyst. GitHub. Star count read 22 July 2026.
16. Shopify/hydrogen. GitHub. Star count read 22 July 2026.
17. medusajs/medusa. GitHub. Star count read 22 July 2026.
18. Ecommerce Replatforming Cost Index 2026. Elogic Commerce. Agency-published; they sell replatforming work.
19. Under the Hood: Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP). Google Developers Blog, January 2026.
20. Building the Universal Commerce Protocol. Shopify Engineering, 2026.
21. Agentic Commerce Protocol specification. Maintained by OpenAI and Stripe. Spec version 2026-04-17.
22. AI traffic grows but retail sites lag in AI search visibility. Adobe Analytics, June 2026. Reported independently by Digital Commerce 360, 17 June 2026.
23. Ecommerce Search UX Best Practices: the 8 search query types. Baymard Institute, updated 29 April 2026. 170+ benchmarked sites.