Merchants sold 14% more.
BigCommerce collected
0.1% more.

Commerce.com sold 14% more
for its merchants and kept
the same money.

Commerce.com, the company that now owns BigCommerce, reported its second quarter on August 6. Revenue was $84.5 million, up 0.1% year over year (Commerce.com, Q2 2026 results, Exhibit 99.1 to Form 8-K, August 6, 2026). Merchant GMV rose 14%, to $8.8 billion. Subscription revenue actually fell about 1%. A day earlier, Shopify had reported revenue up 34% on GMV up 32% (Shopify, Q2 2026 results, August 5, 2026).

The growth gap isn't the interesting part. Merchants on BigCommerce sold 14% more this quarter than they did a year ago. The businesses are fine. The platform just didn't get paid for it.

This is a very specific kind of problem, and not the one most of the coverage described. Nobody is failing here. Commerce posted GAAP net income of $1.1 million against an $8.4 million loss a year earlier, its second profitable quarter in a row. Adjusted EBITDA nearly doubled to $9.7 million.

So this is a company that got healthier and lost share at the same time. Below is what produced that, and what it changes for you depending on which admin you log into every morning.

How do the two platforms
compare on the same quarter?

Both companies reported the June quarter within 24 hours of each other, which makes this an unusually clean comparison. Shopify's GMV is 13 times Commerce's. Its revenue is 42 times Commerce's. The distance between 13x and 42x is the entire story, and everything below explains it.

One caveat worth stating before anyone quotes these side by side. The two companies do not define GMV identically. Commerce reports it gross, before refunds and discounts. Shopify reports it net of refunds. On a like-for-like basis Commerce's denominator would be slightly smaller, so the gaps below are real but a little narrower than the raw arithmetic suggests.

One quarter is a snapshot, not a trend. I ran the same comparison across fiscal 2023, 2024, 2025 and this quarter in the four-year platform financials study. The short version: the take-rate gap widened in every single period, with no exceptions.

Both platforms charge about
0.7% for the software. Only
one charges for the rest.

Divide revenue by GMV and you get the take rate, the share of your sales the platform collects. In Q2 2026 Commerce took 0.96% of merchant GMV and Shopify took 3.10%. Now split that into subscription and everything else. The subscription take rates are almost identical: 0.72% for Commerce, 0.69% for Shopify.

The software costs roughly the same. So what are the other 2.14 points buying?

Shopify collects 2.41% of merchant GMV through merchant solutions, mostly payments, plus shipping, capital and the rest of the attached services. Commerce collects 0.24% through partner and services. Call it a tenfold difference in how much of your business the platform participates in.

Worth being plain about one thing, because it gets misread constantly. None of this means Shopify costs a BigCommerce merchant three times more. A BigCommerce merchant still pays payment processing, it just goes to Stripe or Adyen or PayPal instead of to the platform. The money leaves your business either way. What changes is who receives it, and therefore who can afford to reinvest it in the software you use.

The direction of travel matters more than the level. A year ago Commerce's take rate was 1.10% of GMV. This quarter it was 0.96%. Shopify's went the other way, from 3.05% to 3.10%. One platform is monetising a rising share of its merchants' success and the other a falling one. If you want the pricing-page version of this, it's in the 2026 platform cost comparison.

Where did the profit come
from? Sales and marketing,
cut by a fifth.

Commerce swung from a $6.8 million operating loss to a $2.7 million operating profit, a $9.5 million improvement on flat revenue. Sales and marketing spend fell $7.6 million in the same period, from $35.1 million to $27.5 million. That single line is about four fifths of the swing.

Two things in that table deserve more attention than the headline profit.

Cost of revenue rose 18% while revenue stayed flat, which is why gross margin fell from 79% to 75%. Serving 14% more merchant volume costs more to run, and Commerce isn't charging for the extra volume. The take-rate problem is showing up here as a margin problem, one line lower down.

And sales and marketing is the line that buys next year's merchants. Cutting it 22% is a rational decision for a company that has been told to show profitability. It's also why net revenue retention matters so much now, which is the next section.

Free cash flow tells a related story: $0.05 million this quarter against $11.9 million a year ago. Not a collapse, though. Capital expenditure tripled to $5.0 million as the company capitalises internal-use software. Commerce is building. It's just funding the build out of margin rather than out of growth.

What does 95.8% net revenue
retention mean for the
merchants still on it?

Commerce's net revenue retention was 95.8% in Q2 2026, up from 95.4% last quarter and 94.5% a year ago. Three consecutive quarters of improvement is genuine progress. Still below 100%, though, which means the existing customer base contracts by roughly 4% a year before a single new logo is added.

Subscription annual revenue run-rate says the same thing more bluntly. At June 30 it stood at $270.3 million, against $272.4 million at the end of December. Over six months, the recurring base went slightly backwards.

NRR below 100% is not a crisis on its own. Plenty of good software companies have run there through a repositioning. What it does tell you, if you are a merchant, is where the ecosystem attention is going to go. App developers and agencies allocate roadmap to the platform where the installed base is expanding, because that is where next year's customers are. This is the same dependency question I worked through in platform dependency risk for app founders, viewed from the merchant side of the table.

Geography adds a wrinkle. US revenue fell 1% while EMEA grew 12%. The growth is real, but it's happening away from the market where most of the installed base sits. Which is also where North American platform share gets decided.

The case for staying is
better than the numbers
make it look.

You could read the take-rate chart and conclude the platform is finished. You'd be wrong, and the mistake would cost some brands an unnecessary six-figure replatform. Commerce is profitable, holds $157.5 million in cash and securities against $156.5 million of convertible notes, and its merchants grew sales 14%.

The strategic bet is sharper than it was, too. In April the company said merchants including Dell are syndicating catalog data into agentic discovery channels such as OpenAI and Google Gemini. The pipe for that is Feedonomics Agentic Catalog Exports, and Feedonomics remains the genuinely differentiated asset in the portfolio. Feed quality is exactly what decides whether your products surface in AI shopping surfaces.

Add the July partnership with WP Engine for content-led commerce, a fourth consecutive strong showing in the Paradigm B2B Combines, and real B2B Edition wins. What you have is a company that knows which two or three things it's good at. The open architecture argument is legitimate for brands with complex catalogs or heavy ERP integration. Same conclusion I reached in the BigCommerce versus Shopify Plus head-to-head and in the enterprise platform selection guide.

The honest summary: this is a specialist now, not a general-purpose challenger. Are you the specialist's customer? If yes, that's fine. If not, you're paying the price of a narrowing roadmap without getting the benefit of the specialism.

What should you actually
do this quarter?

Nothing in this print says leave. What it says is price the option to leave while leaving is still a choice. Four things worth doing before your next renewal.

1. Work out what you are actually buying. List the BigCommerce-specific capabilities you depend on, then mark which ones are genuinely hard to replace. In my experience the honest list is short: Feedonomics, multi-storefront B2B pricing, and API headroom on large catalogs. If your list is short and none of it is Feedonomics, your switching cost is lower than you think.

2. Get your renewal date and your data-export cadence in the same document. Your negotiating position is a calendar problem. Know the date, know how long a migration takes for your catalog size, and work backwards. A brand that starts looking six weeks before renewal has no room to negotiate and no options.

3. Price the total cost properly, not the licence. Because Commerce takes 0.96% of GMV and Shopify takes 3.10%, a naive comparison says BigCommerce is cheaper. Rebuild it with payment processing, apps and agency hours included and the answer often flips, particularly above $20M. The method is in the enterprise total cost of ownership breakdown.

4. Watch net revenue retention, not the stock. One number tells you whether the ecosystem around your platform is growing or shrinking, and it is NRR. If it crosses 100% over the next two quarters, the repositioning is working and staying is easy to defend. If it stalls in the mid-nineties while sales and marketing stays cut, the roadmap you are counting on gets thinner.

The same chart is a warning
from the other direction.

Shopify's merchant solutions revenue grew 37% while subscription solutions grew 22%, so merchant solutions is now about 78% of the company. Your platform bill is mostly a percentage of your sales, not a fee for your software. Model it as a variable cost of revenue and it will stop surprising you in good quarters.

The line I'd put in front of a finance team is transaction and loan losses: $141 million, up 76%. Sit that against a loan and merchant cash advance book that grew from $1.78 billion to $2.18 billion in six months. Shopify is pushing Capital hard right now. Not a reason to refuse it, but price the money against your own payback period rather than treating it as free working capital.

And what the take-rate chart really shows is why Shopify can outspend everyone. It spends $445 million a quarter on research and development against Commerce's $17.7 million. Per dollar of merchant volume the gap narrows, roughly 0.39% against 0.20%. Still about double, and it compounds every quarter. The full read on that print is in the Shopify Q2 2026 breakdown. Every print from both companies lands in the 2026 earnings tracker.

One last piece of arithmetic, derived from Commerce's own guidance rather than stated by the company. Full-year revenue is guided to $336.5 million to $344.5 million. The first half came in at $171.4 million, with Q3 guided to about $84.0 million at the midpoint. Roughly $85 million is left for Q4, the quarter containing Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Barely above a non-peak Q2. Peak season is supposed to move a commerce platform's revenue. Watch whether it does.