On June 1, BigCommerce renamed every plan, lowered GMV thresholds, and added a fee of up to 2% on orders processed outside the approved payment list. Sellers were given 60 days’ notice.
Since this is Woo’s blog, our perspective on a better alternative is clear. However, not everyone is affected by these changes should migrate. If migration is the right choice for you, you deserve a transparent understanding of the costs and process before making a decision. That’s what we’ll talk about in this article.
BigCommerce bases its prices on your turnover. Your costs increase as your revenue increases, but also when you use non-preferred payment providers or advanced features. As your business grows, so do your expenses.
BigCommerce makes money by taxing your success.
Higher monthly costs
Recent plan changes have moved some sellers to more expensive tiers. The Standard plan became Core, and the threshold dropped from $50,000 to $30,000 in TTM Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) – a real difference for smaller stores.
Larger stores also came under pressure. Once your GMV exceeds $100,000, you will be moved to the Growth Plan, which uses an overage model. BigCommerce states: “Scale uses a continuous rate of 0.9% on GMV above $33,333/month, replacing the Pro plan’s fixed per-block fee.”
New transaction fees
Previously, BigCommerce promoted “zero transaction fees” as an advantage over Shopify. It now charges up to 2% in transaction fees for sales processed through payment gateways that are not on the list of embedded payment providers. Specialty stores and regional merchants that require unique gateways will be most affected.
These charges also apply to offline and manual payment methods. For wholesalers, this can result in significant costs for B2B purchases, sometimes exceeding the cost of the plan. However, if you use Stripe, PayPal, or another exempt provider and are below the payment thresholds, you likely don’t need to switch based on these changes.
Less access to features
Access to features follows the same pattern: less for more. Saved payment methods are not available on the Standard/Core plan and product filtering requires an upgrade to Scale/Pro.
When considering switching to Woo, you should know that there are no turnover barriers. The software is free and open source, so there are no higher level plans.
That doesn’t mean running a WooCommerce store doesn’t cost anything. You still pay for the components your business needs, such as payment processing, premium extensions, and other operational tools. Some expenses must grow with growth. But there is no list of approved or excluded providers. Additional costs are directly linked to the decisions you make and not to someone else’s mandate.
The result depends on the order volume and traffic in your store and whether you need development assistance. The TCO calculator gives you an estimate for hosting, transactions, extensions and development based on your actual activities.
This is the difference between paying for tools that improve your store and paying more simply because your store is successful.
BigCommerce gets to decide what growth costs, because it controls more than just price: it controls how your store runs. His rules, his instruments.
As your store grows, the decisions that once simplified your setup begin to limit you. Hosting is a good example.
BigCommerce hosts your store on its cloud servers, so performance decisions flow through the platform. That’s useful until Black Friday, when you want to control how resources scale, how caching works, and what infrastructure your store depends on. If the platform can’t keep up, every minute of downtime is lost revenue when it hurts most.
WooCommerce works differently: your store runs in a WordPress environment that you manage. You choose your hosting provider, payment processor and configuration.
When performance becomes the priority, you can move to a host built for high-traffic Woo stores. If you need to connect your data to reporting, fulfillment, or customer systems, you have direct access to the environment in which that data resides.
Owning the foundation means you have control over your database, files, content, products, orders, customers and everything related to it. Your team can change pieces of the stack as the company changes.
When a store is just starting out, connecting it to Google Analytics and an email marketing service may be enough. However, your technology stack will grow as your store grows.
As you grow, you’ll need to integrate with inventory management, POS, fulfillment, subscriptions, taxes, reporting, and customer systems. Reliable integrations are essential for business operations.
Both BigCommerce and WooCommerce offer apps, extensions, and APIs. However, if a required integration is missing or limited to a workflow that doesn’t suit your business, BigCommerce requires you to adapt to the supported connections.
With an open foundation using WordPress, WooCommerce allows teams to connect systems based on business requirements. Middleware is still an option for complex operations, but it is not the only option.
Subscriptions prove this. BigCommerce doesn’t have native subscription billing, so merchants need a third-party platform. With another supplier comes a new layer of transactional economics, and since BigCommerce doesn’t audit those suppliers, they can leave. Traders are not given a say and sometimes have no alternative to fall back on.
WooCommerce plans cost $279 per year, have no platform fees per transaction, and run on the infrastructure you manage.
This is the advantage of building on WooCommerce. The open WordPress ecosystem is supported by developers, agencies, vendors, and software companies. Your roadmap is not dependent on external decisions.
Migrating from BigCommerce to WooCommerce is more manageable if you separate data migration from rebuild decisions. Moving data is easy; the main work includes design, integrations and workflows. Most of the effort goes into deciding what to rebuild, rather than transferring data.
You can transfer product, customer, and order data to WooCommerce using CSV, API, or a migration service like Cart2Cart. Before you migrate, review the fields that matter most to your business, including SKUs, product variations, categories, customer records, order history, coupons, and any custom data your team relies on.
Elements that require more attention are those that should change after leaving BigCommerce. Your design will not be transferred immediately, which is expected. You select a WordPress theme and replace outdated tools with WooCommerce extensions.
Your primary task is to determine which parts of your previous setup are worth rebuilding.
Keep existing URLs wherever possible. For any modified slugs, set up 301 redirects to ensure search engines and customers reach the correct pages.
Review category pages, product pages, metadata, and internal links before launch to avoid disrupting existing traffic paths to your store.
WooCommerce offers extensive migration documentation and the community consists of sellers, builders and agencies with experience with similar transitions. While WooCommerce support doesn’t perform migrations, you won’t be starting from scratch.
Maybe it’s the cost. Maybe it’s the lack of control over hosting, payments or data. Perhaps it’s a catalog that continues to reach BigCommerce’s 600 variant limit.
Here’s how to know: Calculate everything you paid to BigCommerce over the last twelve months (subscription fees, overages, and the new payment fees) as a percentage of GMV. Then run your store’s numbers through the TCO calculator for the Woo side of the equation.
Which costs on each list did you choose and which ones were chosen for you? The ones chosen for you are the price of building on a platform over which you have no control. With WooCommerce you own the infrastructure and you decide what the growth costs. When you are ready, we can help you plan the move.
Do you feel stuck with your ecommerce solution? Let’s talk.
Renzo is product marketing manager at Woo. He is a passionate storyteller with over 8 years of experience formulating and executing successful go-to-market strategies for hardware or SaaS products.
