Shopify Alternatives: What You Actually Pay Elsewhere

Almost nobody leaves Shopify because a feature is missing. People go looking for Shopify alternatives when the invoice stops matching the story they told themselves: a plan price they budgeted for, plus six apps they forgot they were paying for, plus a percentage skimmed off every order because their payment processor is not the one Shopify wants them to use.

So this compares the thing that actually drives the decision. Not feature checklists. Total monthly cost of running the same store on each platform, the exact transaction-fee terms as each vendor publishes them, and the migration work nobody prices in until they are three weeks into it.

Fair warning up front: for a large share of stores, Shopify still wins on total cost once you count your own time. That conclusion is in here too. TopTut sells none of these platforms and takes no position beyond what the numbers support.

Which Shopify alternatives are actually credible

Six platforms are worth real consideration: WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Wix, Squarespace Commerce, Ecwid and an open-source headless stack such as Medusa. Everything else in the typical fifteen-item listicle is either a niche regional tool, a marketplace pretending to be a platform, or a product that will not survive your next replatform.

The one-line rule: switch when your platform fees plus app subscriptions plus payment penalties exceed what the same store costs elsewhere by enough to fund the migration in under a year, or when you have a hard requirement to own and modify the code. Anything softer than that and you are paying a five-figure tax in time to solve a three-figure problem.

Why people leave Shopify, accurately

Four reasons hold up under scrutiny, and two of the popular ones do not. The four real ones are app-stack creep, third-party payment penalties, theme and checkout customisation limits, and ownership. The stated reasons that usually collapse on inspection are “it is too expensive” as a bare statement, and “we outgrew it”.

The app stack that accumulates quietly

The plan is the small number. A working store typically ends up paying separately for product reviews, email and automation, subscriptions or memberships if it sells them, a better on-site search, a page builder, and often a bundling or upsell app. Each one is a modest monthly line. Together they routinely exceed the plan several times over, and each one bills whether or not it earned anything that month.

The failure mode is not price, it is that nobody owns the list. Apps installed for a campaign in 2023 are still billing. Before you evaluate any alternative, export the app charges from your last three invoices and sort by cost. That audit alone frequently closes the gap you were trying to close by replatforming.

The payment penalty

Shopify charges an additional fee when you take payments through a provider other than Shopify Payments. On the published rates it is 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced and 0.2% on Plus, on top of whatever your processor charges you. This is the single largest and least visible cost difference between Shopify and everything else, and it gets its own section below.

Customisation limits and the ownership question

Theme and checkout customisation on a hosted platform is bounded by what the vendor exposes. That bound is generous now, and it is still a bound. If your business model depends on doing something the platform has not anticipated, you will feel it as a series of workarounds rather than one blocking wall.

Ownership is the honest reason, and the one people are least likely to say out loud because it sounds ideological. It is not. If your storefront is a strategic asset, renting the platform that runs it is a genuine business risk, and open source is a genuine answer. It is also the most expensive answer, which the ownership argument tends to skip.

Platform comparison: fees, hosting and where the cost hides

Here is each platform on the five things that decide the bill, with Shopify as the baseline. Entry prices are the vendor’s own published figures, checked September 2026, on the billing terms noted.

Platform	Entry price	Transaction fee terms	Hosting	Where the cost hides	Skill needed	Best fit
Shopify (baseline)	Basic $39/mo monthly, $29/mo billed annually	0% with Shopify Payments; 2% Basic, 1% Grow, 0.6% Advanced, 0.2% Plus with a third-party provider. Online card rate 2.9% + 30c on Basic	Included	App subscriptions, and the third-party payment fee if Shopify Payments is not an option for you	Low	Most stores, honestly
WooCommerce	Plugin is free to download	None from WooCommerce; you pay your processor directly	You buy it	Hosting at real order volume, paid plugin renewals, and the hours you spend on updates	Medium	Stores already on WordPress with content and SEO to protect
BigCommerce	Core $39/mo monthly, $29/mo billed annually	$0 on orders through embedded providers including BigCommerce Payments, Stripe, PayPal, Klarna and Affirm; 2.0% Core, 1.0% Growth, 0.6% Scale on open payment provider GMV	Included	Annual GMV bands force plan upgrades before you feel ready	Low to medium	Stores whose processor sits on the embedded list
Wix	Core is the entry tier that accepts payments; Light and Free do not	No separate platform revenue share documented. Wix Payments US: 2.9% + 0.30 USD on cards excluding Amex, 3.7% + 0.30 USD on Amex	Included	Ceiling on catalogue depth and merchandising rather than a fee	Low	Small catalogues, design-led sites
Squarespace Commerce	Basic is the entry commerce plan	2% on physical and service products on Basic; 0% on Core, Plus and Advanced. Digital products: 7% Basic, 5% Core, 1% Plus, 0% Advanced. Squarespace Payments 2.9% + $0.30 on Basic and Core	Included	The digital-product fee, which is much steeper than the physical one	Low	Content-led brands with a shallow product range
Ecwid by Lightspeed	Starter $5/mo, up to 10 products; Venture $35/mo monthly or $29/mo annually, up to 100 products	$0 transaction fees on every tier	Embeds into a site you already host	Product-count ceilings push you up tiers fast	Low	Adding a store to an existing site
Medusa (open source)	MIT-licensed, no licence fee	None; you contract with your processor directly	You build and run it	Engineering time, which dwarfs every other line	High, developer required	Developer-led businesses with unusual commerce logic

What the same store costs to run on each platform

This is a worked example, not a measurement. The arithmetic below models one hypothetical store across every platform so the comparison is like for like, and the assumptions are stated so you can replace them with your own figures.

• 400 orders per month, average order value $60, so $24,000 in monthly GMV and $288,000 trailing twelve months.
• Card processing assumed at 2.9% + $0.30 per order, which is the published US rate for Shopify Payments on Basic, Squarespace Payments on Basic and Core, and Wix Payments on non-Amex cards. That works out at $816 per month and is identical on every row, so it is shown but is not the differentiator.
• Four app functions needed: product reviews, email and automation, subscriptions, and improved on-site search. Budgeted at an assumed $120 per month total on hosted platforms and $110 per month on WooCommerce, taking annual plugin licences and dividing by twelve.
• Self-hosted infrastructure assumed at $60 per month for managed WooCommerce hosting at this order volume, and $150 per month for a Medusa stack covering application server, database, CDN and a search service.
• Annual billing where the vendor offers it. Engineering and maintenance time is not costed, which is exactly why the cheapest rows are misleading.

Setup	Plan	Extra platform fee	Hosting	Apps or plugins	Processing	Monthly total
Shopify Grow, Shopify Payments	$79	$0	Included	$120	$816	$1,015
Shopify Basic, third-party processor	$29	$480 (2%)	Included	$120	$816	$1,445
Shopify Grow, third-party processor	$79	$240 (1%)	Included	$120	$816	$1,255
BigCommerce Scale, embedded processor	$299	$0	Included	$120	$816	$1,235
Ecwid Unlimited on an existing site	$119	$0	$30	$120	$816	$1,085
WooCommerce, managed hosting	$0	$0	$60	$110	$816	$986
Medusa, self-run	$0	$0	$150	$0	$816	$966 plus engineering time

Read the spread, not the winner. Between the cheapest and most expensive row is roughly $479 a month, about $5,700 a year. That is real money, and it is also less than a competent migration costs when you count agency fees or your own weeks. The Shopify row that loses badly is not Shopify generally, it is Shopify on Basic while paying a third-party processor.

Note also what BigCommerce did to itself in this model. At $24,000 a month the store has $288,000 trailing GMV, well past the $100,000 band that Growth covers, so it lands on Scale at $299 a month. The plan price is set by your revenue, not your feature needs, and that surprises people at renewal.

Transaction fees, precisely

Shopify’s published third-party transaction fees are 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced and 0.2% on Plus, charged on top of your processor’s own rate whenever you do not use Shopify Payments. Merchants hit this either because Shopify Payments is not offered in their market, because their category is not supported, or because they hold a negotiated rate elsewhere that they do not want to give up.

On WooCommerce and Medusa, the equivalent figure is zero. You contract with Stripe, PayPal or an acquirer directly and pay only their rate. That is the entire structural difference, and it is worth doing the arithmetic on before you conclude anything.

Monthly GMV	Shopify Basic at 2%	Shopify Grow at 1%	Shopify Advanced at 0.6%	WooCommerce or Medusa	Does it matter yet?
$2,000	$40	$20	$12	$0	No. Noise against your time.
$10,000	$200	$100	$60	$0	Worth a plan change, not a platform change.
$24,000	$480	$240	$144	$0	Yes. Now it exceeds every plan price.
$60,000	$1,200	$600	$360	$0	Yes, and Advanced now pays for itself.
$150,000	$3,000	$1,500	$900	$0	Yes. This is the real replatform trigger.

Two crossovers fall out of that table. Moving from Basic to Grow on annual billing costs $50 more per month and halves the fee, so it pays for itself once monthly GMV passes about $5,000. Moving from Grow to Advanced costs $220 more per month and saves 0.4% of GMV, so it only wins above roughly $55,000 a month. Below $5,000 a month the whole argument is worth less than a hundred dollars and you should ignore it.

The migration reality every listicle skips

Products and customer records move cleanly; almost nothing else does. This is the section that decides whether the saving in the table above is real, and it is the section that comparison posts leave out because it makes switching look unattractive.

What moves and what does not

• Moves cleanly: products, variants, images, categories, customer names and addresses, and usually your blog posts.
• Moves badly: order history, which typically imports as flat records with no working refund, fulfilment or reorder path against the new system.
• Does not move: active subscriptions. Recurring billing lives with the app and the payment processor, and moving it means re-authorising customer payment methods on the new stack. Expect to lose some subscribers in the handover.
• Does not move by default: product reviews, loyalty balances, wishlists, saved carts, and any data held inside an app rather than the platform. Reviews can often be exported and re-imported, but the star ratings in your search results are attached to the old URLs.
• Never moves: discount code history, abandoned-cart flows mid-sequence, and app-specific metafields that your theme reads.

Build the redirect map before you touch anything

URL structures differ between every platform, so every indexed page changes address on migration day. Shopify uses /products/, /collections/, /pages/ and /blogs/name/. WooCommerce defaults to /product/, /product-category/, a bare slug for pages, and your WordPress permalink structure for posts. That is a full-site URL change, and unmanaged it is the single most common cause of a post-migration traffic collapse.

1. Pull every indexed URL. Start with sitemap.xml on the live store, then cross-check against Search Console’s Pages report and your analytics landing-page report for the last twelve months so you catch URLs the sitemap has already dropped.
2. Sort that list by organic sessions, descending. The top 200 URLs deserve a hand-checked one-to-one destination. The long tail can follow a pattern rule.
3. Write the map as a two-column CSV of old path to new path. Never point a product at a category as a shortcut; a redirect to a non-equivalent page is treated as a soft 404 and you lose the page either way.
4. Ship them as 301s, not 302s, and test a sample with curl before you flip DNS.
5. Keep the redirects live for at least twelve months. Removing them at six months to tidy up is how people lose the recovery they already paid for.

# redirects.csv, one row per URL
/products/blue-merino-scarf,/product/blue-merino-scarf
/collections/winter,/product-category/winter
/pages/shipping,/shipping
/blogs/news/how-to-wash-merino,/how-to-wash-merino

# pattern rules for the long tail, Apache
RedirectMatch 301 ^/products/(.*)$ /product/$1
RedirectMatch 301 ^/collections/(.*)$ /product-category/$1

# verify before switching DNS
curl -sI https://staging.example.com/products/blue-merino-scarf | head -n 1

Expect a visible dip in organic traffic while search engines recrawl and reconcile the new addresses, and plan cash flow for a recovery measured in weeks to a few months rather than days. The variables are site size, crawl frequency and how clean the map is. Work through the on-page and technical items in our ecommerce SEO checklist on the new build before launch rather than after, because fixing template-level problems post-migration means a second recrawl.

The self-hosted question: ownership costs something

WooCommerce and Medusa remove the platform fee and hand you hosting, security, updates and performance in exchange, and that is a trade rather than a discount. The licence being free is the least interesting fact about either of them.

What you take on is concrete: choosing hosting that survives a traffic spike, applying core and plugin updates without breaking checkout, maintaining a staging environment because testing in production on a store is indefensible, monitoring uptime, holding backups you have actually restored from, and owning PCI scope decisions rather than inheriting them. None of that is hard. All of it is recurring, and it lands on someone.

If you already run WordPress, the trade is far more favourable because you are paying most of that overhead anyway. Our guide to building a WordPress ecommerce site covers the build, and the WooCommerce SEO work is where a self-hosted store earns back the difference, since you control the templates, the crawl paths and the page speed rather than filing a feature request. Run a WordPress health check before you commit, because the state of your existing install is a fair preview of how the store will be maintained.

Be equally clear-eyed about what WordPress does not do well at scale. The limitations of WordPress are real, particularly around large catalogues, heavy concurrent traffic and plugin conflict surface area. Medusa answers those by being a developer framework rather than a site, which means it answers nothing at all unless you have a developer.

Hidden costs that make a switch cost more than it saves

Five costs reliably go unbudgeted, and together they usually exceed the annual saving people are chasing. Name them before you decide, not after.

• Theme rebuild. Themes do not transfer between platforms. Your new store needs its design rebuilt, and the closer you want it to match, the more it costs.
• Integration rewiring. Accounting, shipping labels, 3PL, POS, ad platform feeds and your email tool all connect by platform-specific integration. Every one gets reconnected, retested and, in some cases, replaced.
• Staff retraining and error rate. Whoever processes refunds and picks orders will be slower and more error-prone for several weeks on a new admin. That cost is real even though no invoice shows it.
• Duplicate running costs. Both platforms bill during the overlap, and the overlap always runs longer than planned.
• The traffic dip. Even a well-executed migration costs revenue while search engines reconcile the new URLs. Price it as a percentage of a month or two of organic revenue, not as zero.

If you are hiring the work out rather than doing it, judge the quote against the annual saving you calculated above. Ask the agency directly who owns the redirect map and who is on call the week after launch, because those two answers predict how the migration goes better than the quote does.

Who should not switch

If your store works, your team knows the admin, and your app stack is genuinely doing work, stay put. That describes more stores than any comparison post wants to admit, and the migration cost will exceed the saving for every one of them.

Concretely, do not switch if you are under roughly $10,000 a month in GMV, because the fee differences are two-figure and your time is worth more than that. Do not switch if you already use the platform’s native payment processor, because you are not paying the penalty that drives most of the gap. Do not switch if nobody on the team can maintain a server, because you are trading a monthly fee for an unstaffed responsibility.

And do not switch because the platform feels limiting in the abstract. Write down the three specific things you cannot do today. If two of them turn out to be theme work or an app you have not looked for, you have a configuration problem, not a platform problem.

Verdict: which platform to pick, by store profile

The right answer depends almost entirely on order volume, who maintains the thing, and whether your payment processor is on the platform’s preferred list.

Profile	Pick	Why	Avoid
Side project, under 50 orders a month	Ecwid on an existing site, or Squarespace Commerce if the site is already there	Ecwid charges no transaction fee at any tier and starts at $5 a month for a ten-product catalogue. At this volume every percentage argument is noise.	Anything self-hosted. You will spend more hours than the store earns.
Growing store, 50 to 500 orders a month	Shopify on Grow with the native processor, or BigCommerce if your processor is on the embedded list	The plan price is small next to the operational reliability, and at Grow the third-party fee halves if you do need an outside processor.	Migrating for cost reasons alone. Audit your apps first.
Established store on a custom stack, high volume	Stay, but move up a plan tier and renegotiate	Above roughly $55,000 a month, Advanced pays for itself against Grow on the fee difference alone. The migration would cost more than the remaining gap.	Replatforming during a peak season, ever.
WordPress-first business with content and SEO equity	WooCommerce	No platform fee, no transaction fee, and your content and store share one CMS, one template layer and one internal link graph.	Cheap shared hosting. It is the reason most WooCommerce stores feel slow.
Developer-led business with unusual commerce logic	Medusa or another open-source headless stack	MIT licence, full ownership, no per-order platform tax, and you can model commerce rules the hosted platforms do not expose.	Choosing it without a developer who will still be here in two years.

For most stores the best Shopify alternative is a cheaper configuration of Shopify. Upgrade the plan to cut the third-party fee, delete the four apps nobody has opened this year, and you have captured most of the available saving without changing a single URL.

If you are already a WordPress business, WooCommerce is the one I would actually pick. It is free to download, it charges nothing per order, and the maintenance burden it adds is a burden you were already carrying. If your payment processor is on the embedded list, BigCommerce is the strongest hosted alternative, with the caveat that its GMV bands set your plan price for you. For a small catalogue bolted onto an existing site, Ecwid is hard to beat at zero transaction fees.

Avoid Squarespace Commerce if you sell digital products, where the fee on the entry plan is 7% before payment processing. Avoid Medusa, and open source generally, unless a developer owns it as part of their job rather than as a favour. And avoid any migration whose entire business case is a fee percentage you have not multiplied by your own GMV.

Frequently asked questions