BigCommerce vs WooCommerce

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.

WooCommerce is the open-source e-commerce plugin for WordPress, owned by Automattic since it acquired WooThemes in 2015, and one of the most widely used e-commerce platforms in the world by number of stores. Installing it turns any WordPress site into a store with products, cart, checkout, payments, shipping, taxes and coupons, while the merchant keeps full ownership of the code, data and hosting choice.

The core supports physical, digital and variable products, inventory, customer accounts, order management and a block-based checkout, and a large marketplace of free and paid extensions adds subscriptions, bookings, memberships, product bundles, multi-vendor marketplaces and B2B pricing. Payment gateways such as Stripe, PayPal and local providers plug in as extensions, and because it runs on WordPress, content marketing, SEO plugins and a blog sit next to the store. The plugin itself is free; costs come from hosting, premium themes and extensions, and developer time for maintenance.

WooCommerce fits merchants and agencies comfortable with WordPress who want flexibility, ownership and strong content-led SEO. In return you handle updates, security, backups and performance, and plugin conflicts can cause problems as a store grows. Shopify is easier to run with hosting and security included, BigCommerce offers more built-in features for larger catalogs, and in Turkey ikas, Ticimax and IdeaSoft provide hosted stores with local integrations.