Is Shopify genuinely cheaper in total cost of ownership than BigCommerce Enterprise or Adobe Commerce at the same $50M/year GMV, once all fees are counted?
Shopify is the only one of the three that publishes a plan fee. Shopify Plus starts at $2,300 per month on a three-year term; BigCommerce publishes Performance at $1,499 per month billed annually and nothing for Enterprise; Adobe publishes no Commerce price at all (vendor pricing pages, September 2026). No honest TCO comparison exists at $50M GMV.
What each vendor actually publishes
| Vendor | Published plan fee at your scale | Published transaction terms | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shopify Plus | "Starting at $2,500 USD/month" (1-year term), "$2,300 USD/month" (3-year term), "or a variable platform fee for more complex business structures" | 0.20% per transaction to Shopify on a third-party processor; third-party fees waived on Shopify Payments; card rates not published | shopify.com/plus/pricing, Sep 2026 |
| BigCommerce | Performance: "Custom pricing starting at $1,499 per month, billed annually." Enterprise: no number, "Contact Sales" | Open Payment Provider fee on GMV: 0.6% on Scale, "None (contracted terms)" on Performance. Scale also charges "0.9% on GMV above cap" | bigcommerce.com/pricing, Sep 2026 |
| Adobe Commerce | Nothing. Three editions listed (Cloud Service, Cloud PaaS, Optimizer), each with "Get pricing" | Nothing | business.adobe.com/products/commerce/pricing.html, Sep 2026 |
The finding, stated plainly
At $50M a year, all three vendors put you in a quoted tier. Shopify's floor is published and its ceiling is not. BigCommerce publishes a floor for Performance and nothing for Enterprise. Adobe publishes neither.
So the honest answer to "is Shopify genuinely cheaper" is: nobody outside those three sales teams can know, including us, and any published comparison you read was built from quotes the author could not verify.
We are not going to model it. A modelled total at this scale is a guess with a decimal point.
What to do instead: the RFP line-item schedule
This is the deliverable that replaces the number. Demand every line below, in writing, from all three vendors, for the same term length. Two of them will resist the third and fourth rows, which is itself information.
- Platform fee, with the term length and the renewal uplift cap stated.
- The GMV formula, if any. Ask directly: at what revenue does my fee stop being fixed? Shopify publishes that this happens without publishing when.
- Payment processing, as a committed percentage and fixed fee per transaction, per card type, per region. Not "competitive rates."
- Overage and above-cap fees. BigCommerce publishes "0.9% on GMV above cap" on its Scale tier, which is the shape of thing to ask every vendor about.
- Third-party processor penalty. Shopify charges 0.20% on Plus; BigCommerce's Open Payment Provider fee runs 2.0% / 1.0% / 0.6% by tier and is contracted on Performance.
- Hosting, infrastructure and PCI scope, which is zero on the two SaaS platforms and a real budget line on self-managed Adobe Commerce.
- Version upgrades. Ask who performs them, how often they are forced, and who pays.
- Apps, extensions and marketplace fees at your actual volumes, not at entry tier.
- Implementation and integration, separated from licence.
- Exit. Data export format, contractual notice, and what happens to your storefront code.
Rows 6, 7 and 10 are where the platforms genuinely differ, and none of them appear on a pricing page.
The one comparison that can be made honestly
The shape of the cost, not the size. Shopify Plus and BigCommerce Performance are SaaS: the vendor carries hosting, patching and PCI scope, and the cost is mostly a fixed fee plus payment percentages. Self-managed Adobe Commerce moves hosting, security patching, PCI scope and version upgrades onto your budget and your team's calendar. That is a difference in who holds the risk, and it is decidable without a price.
When NOT to run this comparison at all
- When the driver is a capability, not a cost. Platform migrations justified on TCO and executed for B2B depth or catalog complexity end up measured against the wrong number in year two.
- When you have fewer than three written quotes. One quote plus two published floors is not a comparison.
- When the incumbent contract has more than a year to run. Early termination is a line item too, and it is usually the largest one in year one.
The Deploi point of view
Our own position, from building on Shopify. Separate from the facts above.
- Our take: Ask for the ten rows, in writing, same term, from all three. A vendor who will not put row 3 in writing has told you something more useful than a spreadsheet would have.
- What we’ve seen: TCO decks in this space compare a published Shopify floor against a modelled Adobe figure and call the gap a finding. The Adobe figure is always the one with no source, because there is no source to have.
- Where we disagree: The standard move is to model the unpublished numbers so the comparison can be completed. We think completing the comparison is the failure. Leaving the cell empty and naming which vendor left it empty is the more useful output, and it is the one that changes how the negotiation goes.
- What this page adds: that BigCommerce publishes a Performance floor of $1,499 per month billed annually and an above-cap GMV fee, which is one more published data point than the parent's Shopify-only arithmetic has, and still not enough to complete a comparison.
Reviewed by Martin Dejnicki, Director of SEO & AI Search. Facts verified 2026-09-14.
Where we worked this out
Our decision records