Game of Ecom­merce Thrones: Big­Com­merce vs Shopi­fy Plus

Take a seat. Showdown’s about to begin.

Both Shopi­fy and Big­Com­merce are heavy­weights in SaaS-based eCom­merce solu­tions for enter­pris­es. But this hasn’t always been so. Orig­i­nal­ly, Shopi­fy was more focused on entre­pre­neurs and small busi­ness­es (at one point claim­ing to be the ​“anti-enter­prise com­merce plat­form”) so it’s quite new to large enter­pris­es, to B2B and to the con­cept of com­pos­abil­i­ty. The Shopi­fy Plus cus­tomer base accounts for less than 1% of Shopify’s total merchants. 

On the oth­er hand, Big­Com­merce has con­sis­tent­ly focused on becom­ing the world’s most flex­i­ble and easy-to-deploy B2B plat­form and matured into a com­plete enter­prise plat­form in func­tion­al­i­ty and com­pos­able flex­i­bil­i­ty, as not­ed in their 2022 annu­al report that you can check here, or our sum­ma­ry of key points here.

In one cor­ner, Shopi­fy Plus. 

Shopi­fy Plus is an enter­prise-lev­el eCom­merce plat­form that offers a range of fea­tures to help busi­ness­es grow their online sales. The plat­form is designed for busi­ness­es that need more advanced fea­tures than what’s offered by the stan­dard Shopi­fy plan.

In the oth­er cor­ner, BigCommerce.

Big­Com­merce has become a lead­ing Open SaaS ecom­merce plat­form for fast-grow­ing and estab­lished B2C and B2B brands:

Big­Com­merce is par­tic­u­lar­ly well-suit­ed for B2B com­pa­nies look­ing for a val­ue-priced, part­ner-cen­tric, mul­ti-ten­ant SaaS eCom­merce solu­tion that lever­ages an exten­sive open appli­ca­tion mar­ket­place to deliv­er com­ple­men­tary functionality.

Andy Hoar, CEO at Par­a­digm B2B

Big­Com­merce VS Shopi­fy Plus…FIGHT!

As we men­tioned, both Big­Com­merce and Shopi­fy are tar­get­ing the same upmar­ket strat­e­gy, but their approach­es dif­fer sig­nif­i­cant­ly. Shopi­fy aims to cre­ate a more closed ecosys­tem with a focus on ease of use, where­as Big­Com­merce focus­es on pro­vid­ing more flex­i­bil­i­ty and free­dom of choice.

Big­Com­merce is like Android in the sense that it’s con­sid­er­ably more open. It offers more gran­u­lar con­trol over store­front design and func­tion­al­i­ty, allow­ing users to cus­tomize their online stores accord­ing to their pref­er­ences. Shopi­fy Plus is like Apple in the sense that it is a closed ecosys­tem that is high­ly designed and easy to use. It removes a lot of free­dom from the user in order to pre­vent them from mak­ing mis­takes or doing some­thing unexpected. 

Shopi­fy is good at remov­ing choice for mer­chants who aren’t ready for it. Big­Com­merce is great for those who are. By focus­ing on open­ness and flex­i­bil­i­ty, Big­Com­merce aims to bet­ter cater to busi­ness­es with more com­plex needs, while Shopi­fy may be bet­ter suit­ed for more straight­for­ward requirements.

Ease of use vs total cost

Shopi­fy is a lit­tle more user-friend­ly, yes. It makes it the ide­al choice for new busi­ness­es that only need very light fea­tures and can make do with the app store to plug in any need­ed extra func­tion­al­i­ty, as it becomes nec­es­sary. A solu­tion, yes. Not a very cost effec­tive one though. Com­pared to hav­ing the nec­es­sary func­tion­al­i­ty from the start. For exam­ple, if you need a dif­fer­ent pay­ment proces­sor, like Pay­pal, Shopi­fy will charge a trans­ac­tion fee.

On the oth­er hand, Big­Com­merce caters to grow­ing mer­chants with native func­tion­al­i­ty like robust cat­a­log struc­ture, fil­ter­ing, order, and cus­tomer man­age­ment. And a user-friend­ly UX.

We’ll com­pare fea­tures and func­tion­al­i­ties lat­er, but when it comes to cost, bear in mind that with Shopi­fy Plus you will have to fac­tor in the costs of trans­ac­tion fees and of the third-par­ty apps you will need to com­bine with Shopi­fy Plus to reach fea­ture par­i­ty with BigCommerce.

With Shopi­fy, TCO can be unclear. Gart­ner reports that Enter­prise mer­chants find they require addi­tion­al func­tion­al­i­ty not includ­ed in the Plus plan from Shopify’s app store and cus­tom inte­gra­tions” that great­ly impacts their TCO. As a rule of thumb, Mer­chants con­sid­er­ing Shopi­fy Plus should fac­tor in an addi­tion­al $1k-$5k in month­ly fees for third par­ty apps. BigCommerce’s pric­ing plans enable you to make finan­cial plans with no surprises.

Design and customization

While Shopi­fy Plus is built on a pro­pri­etary plat­form that pro­vides less flex­i­bil­i­ty than Big­Com­merce’s Open SaaS archi­tec­ture, it still offers a wide range of cus­tomiza­tion options for inte­gra­tions with third-par­ty systems.

Big­Com­merce offers more flex­i­bil­i­ty in design with a greater selec­tion of themes, more design options, and a best of breed Head­less frame­work. This can be a huge advan­tage for brands that require a unique design or have spe­cif­ic require­ments. On the oth­er hand, Shopi­fy has a more sim­pli­fied and user-friend­ly approach to cus­tomiza­tion, which may be bet­ter suit­ed for small­er busi­ness­es with less com­plex design needs.

Oper­a­tion: B2B functionalities

Big­Com­merce has one sin­gle focus: eCom­merce. Shopi­fy Plus offers mul­ti­ple ser­vices such as pay­ment gate­way, ship­ping and ful­fill­ment provider, email mar­ket­ing ser­vice, etc. This all-in-one approach may be a good thing for some busi­ness­es, but this dif­fer­ence under­stand­ably affects each plat­for­m’s abil­i­ty to serve B2B mer­chants in par­tic­u­lar. Big­Com­merce’s focus on eCom­merce means that it can pro­vide more depth and flex­i­bil­i­ty in its B2B features.

For exam­ple, Big­Com­merce allows mer­chants to man­age B2B cus­tomer accounts and run a robust B2C chan­nel from a sin­gle store.

Although both plat­forms offer sup­port for mul­ti­ple lan­guages and cur­ren­cies, Big­Com­merce has more native sup­port for mul­ti­ple cur­ren­cies and lan­guages than Shopi­fy Plus, mak­ing it a bet­ter option for inter­na­tion­al B2B businesses.

Shopi­fy has his­tor­i­cal­ly strug­gled with pro­vid­ing robust B2B and inter­na­tion­al­iza­tion fea­tures, which have been strengths for BigCommerce. 

Shopi­fy has been mak­ing strides in the B2B space, but Big­Com­merce is still in the lead here from a ​“default out of the box” per­spec­tive and mar­ket mind­share point of view. Big­Com­merce has a sig­nif­i­cant­ly more robust fea­ture set out-of-the-box com­pared to Shopi­fy Plus. Its native func­tion­al­i­ty includes robust cat­a­log struc­ture, fil­ter­ing, order and cus­tomer man­age­ment, price lists, category/​subcategory struc­ture, bread­crumbs, and faceted search.

Big­Com­merce Enter­prise offers robust B2B fea­tures such as cus­tom pric­ing, bulk order­ing, and quot­ing, mak­ing it the ide­al choice for mid-mar­ket B2B eCom­merce com­pa­nies. Now, while many of these B2B fea­tures are avail­able on Shopi­fy Plus through third-par­ty apps, these dri­ve up your costs and slow down your sys­tem. Here, let us explain.

Hous­ton, we have a Shopi­fy Plus

Many of Shopi­fy’s native fea­tures don’t offer the lev­el of com­plex­i­ty that most enter­prise busi­ness­es need. Mer­chants sell­ing in mul­ti­ple cur­ren­cies can set fixed pric­ing for dif­fer­ent mar­kets or use cus­tom round­ing rules, but they can only do this if using Shopi­fy Pay­ments, while Big­Com­merce sup­ports price lists that allow mer­chants to set spe­cif­ic prices in a giv­en cur­ren­cy down to the SKU lev­el. Mer­chants on Shopi­fy can only have a sin­gle auto­mat­ic dis­count applied at a time, while Big­Com­merce sup­ports the abil­i­ty to have mul­ti­ple auto­mat­ic dis­counts enabled.

Also, Shopi­fy does­n’t sup­port a large vol­ume of API calls per sec­ond. Enter­prise brands have a lot of dif­fer­ent sys­tems they rely on (ERP, OMS, PIM, etc.) and keep­ing every­thing cur­rent can have a huge impact on the expe­ri­ence of the end con­sumer. Sync­ing a prod­uct cat­a­log with 25,000 SKUs would take over 2 hours on Shopi­fy Plus (lim­it­ed to 10 calls per sec­ond) com­pared to a minute on Big­Com­merce (400 calls per second).

This becomes prob­lem­at­ic for large amounts of data and impacts per­for­mance. Shopi­fy relies heav­i­ly on its app store to fill gaps in its core func­tion­al­i­ty, which can lead to slow­er store per­for­mance as more third-par­ty apps and scripts are added, and it may become hard­er to con­trol and man­age store performance.

Unlike Big­Com­merce, Shopi­fy can­not sup­port dif­fer­ent cat­a­logs / store­fronts in a sin­gle instance (MSF). Mul­ti-store­front enables mer­chants to have one store, cat­a­log, etc. and lever­age unique store­fronts for dif­fer­ent brands, lan­guages and cur­ren­cies. Vital for B2B and Hybrid brands.

Anoth­er dis­ad­van­tage is that Shopi­fy does not sup­port BOPIS, local deliv­ery, accel­er­at­ed check­outs (buy now pay lat­er or dig­i­tal wallets).

Pos­si­bil­i­ties: Flex­i­bil­i­ty and Scalability

Big­Com­merce is open SaaS and open SaaS is all about open­ness and flex­i­bil­i­ty. Not every­one wants that. Many peo­ple pre­fer ease of use over the flex­i­bil­i­ty to do some­thing dif­fer­ent, such as the free­dom to bring your own pay­ment provider, or your own point of sale, or mod­i­fy the checkout.

Big­Com­merce has always placed an empha­sis on flex­i­bil­i­ty and the abil­i­ty to cus­tomize the plat­form to meet spe­cif­ic busi­ness needs. The plat­form offers a wide range of APIs that allow devel­op­ers to build cus­tom inte­gra­tions and appli­ca­tions on top of the plat­form. Shopi­fy, on the oth­er hand, has a more rigid ecosys­tem, where every­thing needs to be done through their plat­form, which lim­its the flex­i­bil­i­ty for busi­ness­es with com­plex requirements.

Ver­dict:

Both Big­Com­merce and Shopi­fy Plus are eCom­merce plat­forms with B2B and Hybrid func­tion­al­i­ties. Big­Com­merce wins over Shopi­fy Plus regard­ing flex­i­bil­i­ty, func­tion­al­i­ty, and scal­a­bil­i­ty. It offers more built-in func­tion­al­i­ty, more design flex­i­bil­i­ty, a wider range of inte­gra­tions, and a more open API ecosys­tem, which can be essen­tial for busi­ness­es with com­plex requirements.

Shopi­fy’s weak­ness­es include lim­it­ed free­dom of choice, weak mod­u­lar­iza­tion and choice, large cat­a­log and com­plex prod­uct lim­i­ta­tions, and a lack of focus on B2B and large enter­prise mar­kets. Or per­haps it’s just us? No, it’s not. Big­Com­merce Scores 16 medals in 2021 Par­a­digm B2B Com­bine Mid­mar­ket and Enter­prise edi­tions. It was rec­og­nized as a leader in B2B by indus­try ana­lysts like Gart­ner and For­rester. Shopi­fy Plus is not eval­u­at­ed specif­i­cal­ly for B2B.

How­ev­er, for small mer­chants or mer­chants that pri­or­i­tize brand pres­ence, ease of use, and a wide range of com­merce solu­tions, Shopi­fy may be a bet­ter choice.

We hope you enjoyed a new episode of our Game of e‑Commerce Thrones series, where we com­pare B2B and Hybrid eCom­merce solu­tions in key areas like ease of use, total cost of own­er­ship, flex­i­bil­i­ty, scal­a­bil­i­ty or crit­i­cal fea­tures, and end up rec­om­mend­ing BigCommerce. 

Ulti­mate­ly, the best way to make an informed deci­sion is to talk to an expert to help you find the best course of action. We’ve been Big­Com­merce part­ners for over a decade and we have learned things that can help. Reach out and book a demo.