BigCommerce review 2026: new plan names, sales caps and the real 3-year cost

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What BigCommerce is and who it’s for

BigCommerce is a hosted ecommerce platform. You pay a monthly fee, and BigCommerce runs the store, checkout, hosting, security certificate and updates. It was founded in 2009 and is based in Austin, Texas.

The company behind it has a new name. On July 31, 2025, BigCommerce Holdings, Inc. renamed itself Commerce.com, Inc., and its stock moved from the ticker BIGC to CMRC on or about August 1, 2025. BigCommerce carries on as a product brand next to Feedonomics and Makeswift. That is why its legal pages now sit on commerce.com. Your store, plans and login are still BigCommerce.

Our verdict: BigCommerce is a strong pick for stores with large catalogs, B2B and wholesale sellers, and brands that run several storefronts. It builds in many features other platforms sell as apps, and it lets you keep a long list of payment providers without a platform fee. The catch is that every self-serve plan is capped by your yearly sales, so a growing store pays more each time it crosses a line.

Plans and what they really cost

There is no free plan. BigCommerce offers a 15-day free trial with no credit card. If you do not upgrade, the BigCommerce pricing page says it keeps the trial store’s data for 90 days, then deletes it and cannot restore it.

The June 1, 2026 plan rename

On June 1, 2026, BigCommerce renamed all four plans and changed how sales caps work. The base prices did not change.

Performance is a custom quote, “starting at $1,499 per month, billed annually,” with a contract. Scale stores move to Performance once yearly GMV reaches $2 million.

The same change raised the GMV reduction from 3% to 10% on self-serve plans, added a new payment fee (below) and allowed self-serve downgrades. Existing annual plans moved to the new structure at the end of their term. The help center still uses the old names in places, such as the Platform Limits article.

Before the change, Standard was capped at $50K and Plus at $180K, according to BigCommerce’s plan update page. Pro had a $400K cap plus $150 a month for each extra $200K block.

What each plan adds

• Core: a blog, single-page checkout, 70+ discount options, gift cards, reviews, real-time UPS, USPS and FedEx quotes, 100+ currencies, and 24/7 chat and email support. No phone support, customer groups or abandoned cart saver.
• Growth: adds customer groups, the abandoned cart saver, a persistent cart, stored credit cards and phone support.
• Scale: adds custom product filtering and Google customer reviews.
• Performance: adds price lists (SKU-level B2B pricing), advanced promotions, a Customer Success Manager and API support.

Staff accounts are included on all four plans. The pricing page shows a checkmark, not a number, and the word “unlimited” does not appear.

How the sales caps force upgrades: a worked example

BigCommerce measures your sales as “Inclusive GMV.” GMV means gross merchandise value. Here it is your gross order value (products after discounts, plus taxes and shipping) minus 10%, counted over the last 12 months. Orders from Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter and the native eBay and Amazon integrations count too. BigCommerce checks it on the 1st of each month and measures each store separately.

Because the 10% comes off the top, Core fits a store taking in up to about $33,333 a year in total orders, and Growth up to about $111,111.

Now take a store that brings in $35,000 a year in orders, tax and shipping included. Its Inclusive GMV is $35,000 minus 10%, or $31,500. That is over Core’s $30K cap, so BigCommerce moves it to Growth. Monthly plans move at the start of the next service period, with notice. Annual plans can be moved mid-term, and you pay the price difference at the upgrade.

• Growth costs $50 a month more than Core billed yearly, or $600 a year ($792 a year more on monthly billing).
• Growth’s lower card rate (2.59% instead of 2.89%) saves 0.3% of $35,000, or $105 a year.
• Net effect: about $495 a year more, or $1,485 over 3 years, for crossing the line by $1,500.

You do get more for it (abandoned cart saver, customer groups, phone support). But the move is not your choice. From June 1, 2026 you can downgrade yourself, but only to a plan whose cap is above your last 12 months of GMV.

The fee on non-approved payment providers

A payment gateway is the service that moves money from your customer’s card to your bank. BigCommerce’s Embedded list is long: BigCommerce Payments, PayPal Braintree, PayPal Complete Payments, PayPal Wallet, Stripe, Adyen, Checkout.com, Worldpay, Global Payments, Amazon Pay, Klarna, Afterpay, Affirm, Sezzle and others. These pay no BigCommerce fee. Anything not listed is an Open provider; BigCommerce’s own example is NMI.

The fee is worked out on the prior calendar month and billed monthly in arrears. It includes offline orders such as purchase orders, and you must not pass it on to shoppers. The fee is charged on Inclusive GMV (explained below), so a Core store taking $25,000 a year through an Open provider pays 2% of $22,500, or $450 a year. Our glossary explains transaction fees in more detail.

Card rates: two official numbers

BigCommerce’s two official pages give slightly different card rates. The pricing page says cards “begin at 2.89% + $0.29 per transaction for all BigCommerce plans.” The BigCommerce Payments by PayPal rates page lists, for eligible US merchants:

• Core: 2.89% + $0.30
• Growth: 2.59% + $0.30
• Scale and Performance: 2.39% + $0.30
• PayPal button and Venmo: 3.49% + $0.49; Afterpay and Klarna: 4.99% + $0.30

American Express has a standard online rate of 3.50%. We use the rates page ($0.30) in our math because it is the higher figure and is broken down by plan. The 1-cent gap is small: $5 a year on 500 orders. Stripe is on the Embedded list, and BigCommerce publishes no special Stripe rate, so Stripe’s standard US rate applies: 2.9% + 30 cents for domestic cards.

A 3-year cost example

Here is a small US store on Core, billed yearly. It takes in $25,000 a year in orders (Inclusive GMV $22,500, safely under the cap) at an average of $50, which is 500 orders a year. It uses BigCommerce Payments, a .com bought at an outside domain registrar (BigCommerce has no free domain offer), and one Google Workspace inbox, since BigCommerce no longer sells email.

The same store at $35,000 a year would be forced onto Growth. Its 3-year total would be $6,493.74 instead of the $5,008.74 Core would have cost. Monthly billing, an Open provider, extra storefronts, apps and paid themes all push it up. Try your own numbers in our website cost calculator.

What you can build

Design and pages

Stores use Stencil themes from the Theme Marketplace, which has free and premium themes; the default is Cornerstone. A drag-and-drop Page Builder places widgets (text, images, video, banners, carousels, buttons, custom HTML, 1 to 6 column layouts) on the homepage, product, category, brand and web pages, blog posts, and search and cart pages. Limits are 150 widgets per page and 100,000 per store. Developers can edit Stencil theme code locally with the Stencil CLI.

Blog

A built-in blog is on every plan. It is fine for store news and buying guides, but content-first sites with few products are a poor fit.

The store

This is the core. The Platform Limits article lists 600 SKUs (variants) per product, 250 option values per option, 16,000 categories per store and 8 MB per image. No product-count limit is published. Inventory locations are 4 on Core, 5 on Growth, 8 on Scale and custom on Performance.

Multi-storefront lets you run several storefronts from one store. Extra storefronts cost $30 a month each (max 3) on Core, $50 (max 5) on Growth and $100 (max 8) on Scale, and you cannot cancel them yourself; you have to contact BigCommerce.

For wholesale, B2B Edition adds company accounts with buyer roles, a buyer portal, sales-rep quotes, an invoice portal with payment terms and purchase orders. Its price is “Contact us for pricing.”

Headless and WordPress

Catalyst is BigCommerce’s open-source (MIT) Next.js storefront for a headless setup, where BigCommerce runs the catalog and checkout and a separate front end shows the pages. Native Hosting for Catalyst was announced April 30, 2026 for an open beta in summer 2026. The BigCommerce for WordPress plugin was last updated about 2 years ago, and wordpress.org warns it may no longer be maintained.

SEO

BigCommerce’s SEO page lists automatic SEO-friendly URLs, automatic 301 redirects when you change or move pages, simplified robots.txt editing, built-in product microdata (rich snippets) and a CDN. Localized URLs and sitemaps were announced with multi-language support on April 30, 2026.

AI features

BigCommerce Companion, an AI assistant in the control panel, is listed as “Now Available,” but BigCommerce does not say which plans get it or what it costs. Catalog Enrichment (bulk AI titles, descriptions and metadata) is in Early Access. On April 30, 2026 its parent company also announced sending product data to AI shopping tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and Perplexity.

What happens when you leave

WebDAV is a way to browse your store’s files from your computer. It is why BigCommerce scores one point above Shopify overall, though the images come out renamed and are hard to match to products. Customers will have to reset their passwords on any new platform.

On cancelling: Core, Growth and Scale can cancel any time in the control panel, and the pricing FAQ says “we’ll stop billing you immediately.” How long a paid store’s data is kept after that is not published, and the refund policy is not stated on the pricing FAQ. Export everything first. Our guide to leaving your website builder covers the full move.

Gotchas

• Sales caps force upgrades. GMV counts taxes, shipping and marketplace orders (minus 10%), and annual plans can be upgraded mid-term.
• Scale has overage. It charges 0.9% on GMV above $33,333 a month.
• Core is thin on support. No phone support; a phone add-on is “coming soon” with no price announced.
• No email. Google Workspace resale is deprecated for new customers. See our guide to websites and email.
• Domains are one-way. BigCommerce does not accept domain transfers in, and domains bought from it have basic DNS only, with no forwarding.

Who should pick BigCommerce, and who should not

Pick BigCommerce if:

• You have a big catalog and want discounts, reviews, carrier rates and currencies built in rather than bought as apps.
• You sell B2B or wholesale and want quotes, price lists and an invoice portal.
• You run several storefronts or want a headless Next.js front end.
• You want to keep Stripe, PayPal Braintree, Adyen or another Embedded gateway with no platform fee.

Look elsewhere if:

• You are a fast-growing small store that does not want forced price jumps at $30K and $100K.
• You are tied to a gateway that is not on the Embedded list.
• You want a WordPress-based store, or your site is mostly content with few products.

Alternatives worth a look

• BigCommerce vs Shopify: the same plan prices, very different sales caps, with 3-year math for a $50,000 and a $120,000 store.
• Shopify review: no sales caps on its pricing page, but a 0.2% to 2% fee on third-party payment providers instead of Shopify Payments.
• WooCommerce: a store on self-hosted WordPress that scores 10 out of 10 for leaving. We build on WordPress every week, but you run the hosting and updates.
• Best website builders for online stores: the full shortlist.