Choosing an eCommerce Platform: An Honest Comparison of the Real Costs

If you are already on WordPress and your catalogue is small, use WooCommerce. If you want to be taking orders next week and you do not want to think about hosting, use Shopify. Almost every other answer is a special case. That is the honest version of a question that usually gets answered with a feature grid nobody reads, so this post works through the numbers instead: who actually runs what, what the platforms publish as their prices, and the fee most comparison articles skip.

Three questions that actually decide it

Before you look at a single feature list, answer these three. They eliminate more options than any comparison table can.

1. Who maintains it at 2am? Self-hosted platforms such as WooCommerce and PrestaShop give you complete control and hand you the updates, backups, PHP version and security patching. Hosted platforms such as Shopify and BigCommerce take that away and charge you monthly for the privilege. Neither answer is wrong. Pretending you will do the maintenance when you have no one to do it is wrong.
2. How weird is your catalogue? Twenty products with one variant each will run on anything. Configurable industrial parts, per-customer pricing, bundles that change stock in three places, or 40,000 SKUs with daily feed updates narrow the field fast.
3. Where is the money going to arrive from? If you sell into several countries you need local payment methods, multi-currency pricing and a tax story. That pushes you towards platforms with built-in international tooling rather than a plugin stack you assemble yourself.

Notice that none of those questions is about themes. Design is the part you can change cheaply later. The maintenance model and the data model are the parts you cannot.

What the usage data says about your shortlist

Market share is not a quality score, but it is a very good proxy for how easy it will be to hire help, find a plugin, or get an answer at 11pm. W3Techs surveys the technology behind the top ten million sites and publishes the numbers daily. In its survey of 1 October 2026, WooCommerce is used by 47.7% of all the e-commerce systems it can identify, which works out to 8.0% of all websites. Shopify sits on 32.1% of e-commerce systems and 5.4% of all websites.

The tail matters less than it looks. Adobe Commerce, the platform formerly sold as Magento Commerce, is on 1.6% of e-commerce systems and 0.3% of all websites in the same survey. That is a small number attached to some very large stores, which tells you exactly who it is for. BigCommerce, at 0.6%, is smaller still by site count and is chosen mostly for its B2B and multi-channel features rather than its popularity.

The five platforms worth your time

Here is the shortlist with the prices each vendor publishes, read in September 2026. Prices move, so treat these as a snapshot and check the vendor’s own page before you commit. The currencies differ because the vendors publish in different currencies; we have not converted them, because the conversion would be the first thing to go stale.

One detail in that table deserves its own sentence. BigCommerce’s Scale plan is published at $399 a month for up to $33,333 of monthly gross merchandise value, with a 0.9% overage rate above it rather than a jump to the next tier. Usage-based pricing like that is becoming normal, and it changes how you model a good month.

The real cost is subscription plus processing plus the gateway penalty

Platform comparisons love the monthly fee because it is a single number. Your bank statement tells a different story. Run the arithmetic on a store doing 300 orders a month at a $60 average basket, so $18,000 of monthly turnover.

At Stripe’s published US domestic rate of 2.9% + 30¢, that is $522 in percentage fees plus $90 in fixed fees, so $612 a month before anything else. A BigCommerce Core subscription at $39 is 6% of that number. Shopify’s UK standard online rate of 2% + 25p produces a visibly smaller percentage line, which is the point of a platform owning its own payment rails.

Two surcharges are worth planning around. Stripe’s published pricing adds 1.5% for an international card and a further 1% where currency conversion is required, so a £60 order paid on a card issued abroad costs meaningfully more than the headline rate suggests. And Shopify’s UK pricing page lists a 2% third-party transaction fee if you route payments through a gateway other than Shopify Payments. If you are set on a particular acquirer, that 2% is the price of the argument.

Where this choice goes wrong

Four failure patterns show up again and again when we are called in to clean one up.

• Buying for the catalogue you hope to have. Teams choose an enterprise platform for 80 products because they plan to have 8,000. They then spend two years paying for complexity they do not use, and the 8,000 products never arrive.
• Treating a marketplace as a competitor. Eurostat’s 2024 figures show 85.65% of EU enterprises with web sales use their own website or app and 45% also sell through a marketplace. Your own store is where margin and customer data live; a marketplace is where discovery happens. Most businesses need both.
• Ignoring who will do the updates. Self-hosted is genuinely cheaper until an unpatched plugin takes the store down during a campaign. Price the maintenance, or buy hosted.
• Choosing on theme screenshots. Every platform has attractive themes. None of them will fix a checkout that asks for information you do not need, which is the thing that actually costs you orders.

That last point has the most money in it. Before you spend a month migrating, read our guide to boosting your eCommerce conversion rate — the published checkout research suggests the fix is usually in the form, not the framework.

What it costs to change your mind later

You can change platform. It is not free, and the cost is rarely the migration tool. Budget for four things: moving products and customers with their order history intact, rebuilding every integration that touches orders, keeping your URLs alive so you do not lose the search traffic you have already paid for, and re-earning any payment or tax approvals that were tied to the old stack.

The URL part is the one people underestimate. If your product pages rank, a migration that changes their addresses without redirects will cost you more in lost traffic than the entire project saved. Map the old paths to the new ones before launch, not after.

If the move is also your first step into new markets, do the tax and duty homework at the same time. Our cross-border eCommerce checklist covers the import rules that will shape your pricing, and it is much cheaper to design for them than to retrofit them.

How we would pick for you

Our default recommendation is boring on purpose. For a business with fewer than a few hundred products, an existing WordPress site and someone who can take maintenance seriously, WooCommerce plus Stripe is hard to beat on cost and control. For a business with no technical capacity that needs to be live quickly and sells into several countries, a hosted platform is worth the subscription, and you should use its own payment product rather than fighting the gateway fee.

The exceptions are real but narrow. B2B pricing tiers, approval workflows or a large feed-driven catalogue justify BigCommerce or Adobe Commerce. A European self-hosted shop with a team that already knows PrestaShop should stay on PrestaShop. And if your conversion problem is trust rather than technology, the platform will not help you at all — our notes on building trust in an online store are the better starting point.

Eudora works remotely with clients worldwide, so we build, migrate and maintain stores on all of these platforms without ever needing to be in the room. Our eCommerce services page sets out what that looks like in practice, from a first build to taking over a store somebody else left half-finished.

Tell us your catalogue size, your order volume and the countries you sell into, and we will tell you which of these platforms we would actually put you on — including when the answer is to stay where you are. Get in touch with Eudora Technology to talk about your project.