AfterShip vs BigCommerce

AfterShip is a post-purchase platform for ecommerce brands, started in Hong Kong around 2011 to 2012 by Teddy Chan, Andrew Chan and Dante Tsang after Teddy built a script to cut where-is-my-order emails in his own store. It raised a $66M Series B led by Tiger Global in 2021. Its core job is keeping shoppers informed after checkout and reducing support tickets about deliveries, returns and delays.

The suite is sold as separate products: Tracking (branded tracking pages, delivery notifications, estimated delivery dates and analytics across 1,300+ carriers), Returns (self-serve returns and exchanges), Shipping (label printing and rate comparison), Protection (shipping insurance), plus personalization and warranty tools. AI features and an MCP server give assistants read access to shipment and return data. Each product has its own tiers, and the Shopify App Store versions are priced differently from direct plans.

AfterShip fits Shopify, BigCommerce and WooCommerce brands that ship thousands of orders a year and want to turn tracking emails and pages into a marketing channel. Brands mainly needing cheap labels should look at Shippo, Easyship or ShipStation, and EU merchants often pick Sendcloud.

Buying tip: in mid-2026 AfterShip cut its direct Tracking plans from four to three, renamed Pro to Premium at $59 a month billed yearly, and moved to annual shipment quotas (6,000 a year on both paid tiers). API and webhooks start on Premium. On Shopify, compare the app's own plans, which include a free tier for 50 shipments a month.

BigCommerce is a hosted e-commerce platform founded in Sydney in 2009 and now based in Austin, Texas. It is a publicly listed company and, in 2025, its parent company renamed itself Commerce while keeping BigCommerce as the platform brand alongside the product feed service Feedonomics and the visual site builder Makeswift. Its pitch against Shopify is openness: no transaction fees on orders through its embedded payment providers, open APIs and strong headless and B2B capabilities.

The platform includes more out of the box than most rivals: product options and variants, faceted search, customer groups and price lists, multi-currency and multi-storefront management. Core, Growth and Scale plans have fixed monthly prices but cap sales (GMV) per tier and charge a small fee on orders through outside payment providers, so a growing store is moved to a higher plan or to Performance, which adds custom pricing and contract terms. Channel Manager connects listings to Amazon, eBay, Google Shopping and social platforms.

BigCommerce suits mid-market brands, B2B wholesalers and companies building a headless storefront with Next.js or a CMS. Beginners usually find Shopify easier, with a larger theme and app ecosystem, while WooCommerce gives more control to teams that want to self-host. For Turkish merchants, local payment, marketplace and e-fatura integrations are thin, so local platforms such as ikas or T-Soft are often more practical.