BigCommerce vs Payhip

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.

Payhip is a London-based e-commerce platform for creators selling digital products. Writers, educators, designers and coaches use it to sell ebooks, templates, software, online courses, coaching sessions and memberships from a hosted store or through buy buttons embedded on their own website, and it can handle physical products too.

Payhip processes payments through PayPal and Stripe, issues license keys for software, and calculates and collects EU and UK VAT on digital sales, a common headache for creators selling internationally. Marketing features include coupons, upsells, affiliate programs, email marketing and a built-in store and page builder. Pricing is unusual: every plan has the same features, and you choose between a free plan with a 5 percent transaction fee, Plus with a 2 percent fee and Pro with no transaction fee, so the right plan depends purely on sales volume.

Payhip fits independent creators who want a simple store with VAT handled and costs that stay low as sales grow. It offers little marketplace discovery, so you bring your own audience, design customization is limited and analytics are basic. Gumroad has a marketplace and broader brand recognition but charges higher fees, Lemon Squeezy targets software sellers as a merchant of record, and Podia or Kajabi suit creators building larger course businesses.