Four years. Two platforms.
A gap that widened every
single period.

Two platforms, four periods,
and a gap that widened
every single time.

Between fiscal 2023 and the June quarter of 2026, BigCommerce's take rate fell from 1.22% of merchant GMV to 0.96%. BigCommerce now reports as Commerce.com, Inc. (Nasdaq: CMRC), so both names appear below. Over the same four periods Shopify's take rate rose from 2.99% to 3.10%. The gap between them went 1.77, 1.86, 1.97, 2.14 points, widening at every observation with no reversals.

That is unusual. Most competitive comparisons are noisy, and you can normally find a quarter that cuts the other way. Here there isn't one.

The financial gap between these two shows up in the install base as well as the filings. For where each platform actually sits by US store count, alongside Wix, Squarespace and WooCommerce, see the 2026 ecommerce platform market share numbers.

If you don't work in finance, that chart can look like a stock thing. It isn't. It is the most useful single picture of what each company has decided to be. It also predicts what will land in your admin over the next two years better than any roadmap either of them publishes.

The next section explains every term in plain English, with a worked example on a real-sized store. Then the rest works out why the two lines moved apart, and what that means if you run the shop.

What do these words
actually mean?

Skip this if you read filings for a living. If you don't, these six terms carry the entire piece, and none of them are complicated once someone says them without the jargon.

Now the useful part. Here is what those take rates mean on an actual store rather than in the abstract. The example is a business doing $2 million a year through the checkout.

That footnote is the hinge of the whole piece, so here it is again. The money leaves your business either way. The question is whether it goes to a company that reinvests it in the software you use every day. Or to a payments processor that does not.

Four honest caveats before
you quote any of these
numbers at anyone.

This comparison is built from primary filings only, and it is still not perfectly like for like. Four things limit it, two of them material enough to move a take rate by several basis points. I would rather put all four at the top than bury them in a footnote where nobody reads them.

One more, on Shopify's side. Its fiscal 2023 operating loss of $1,418 million includes a $1,340 million impairment on the sale of its logistics businesses. Its net income also swings hard on mark-to-market gains on equity investments it does not control. Where profitability comes up below, watch the operating line rather than net income.

What do four years look
like side by side?

Here are fifteen measures across four periods on a single plate. Read it by band rather than by row. Scale first. Then how much of that scale each company converts into revenue, what each spends to do it, and what is left at the end.

The Q2 2026 column is a single quarter next to three full years, so the dollar figures are not comparable across the row. The ratios are, which is why the ratios are what the rest of this piece uses.

One pair of numbers is worth sitting with. Across these four periods Shopify's GMV went from 9.3 times BigCommerce's to 13.2 times. Its revenue went from 22.8 times to 42.4 times. So the revenue gap widened roughly twice as fast as the volume gap. That difference is precisely the take-rate divergence in the first chart.

Which platform actually
charges more for the
software?

Split each take rate into the subscription piece and everything else, and the result inverts the headline. BigCommerce's subscription take rate was higher than Shopify's in all four periods. It ran 0.90% against 0.78% in fiscal 2023, and 0.72% against 0.69% in the June quarter.

So BigCommerce has never been the cheap option on software. It has been the more expensive one per dollar of merchant volume, by a premium that has now almost disappeared. That premium was 13 basis points in 2023 and is 3 basis points today.

Now look at the second block in each bar. BigCommerce's partner and services take rate went from 0.32% of GMV to 0.24%. Shopify's merchant solutions take rate went from 2.21% to 2.41%. The ratio between them widened from 7.0 times to 9.9 times.

There is a bigger point hiding in the subscription row, and it applies to both companies. Shopify's subscription take rate also fell over these four periods, from 0.80% in 2024 to 0.69% now. Software priced per seat, per store or per plan does not keep pace with merchant volume. It never has. Every platform faces the same erosion.

What differs is the response. Shopify built a second revenue engine that scales directly with merchant sales. Attached services grew faster than GMV and more than covered the subscription decay. BigCommerce never built one at the same rate, so the erosion showed up undiluted in its top line.

Why is Shopify winning?
Both saw the same future.
They bet different layers.

Shopify grew revenue 34% last quarter against BigCommerce's 0.1%, and the easy explanation is a better product funded by more money. Both are true. Neither explains much, because the money followed the strategy rather than the other way round. The more useful answer sits in what each company shipped for agentic commerce, because they both saw it coming and both built for it.

They just built at different layers of the stack.

Shopify built the discovery layer and the protocol, then gave both away for free

Shopify Catalog structures merchant product data so that any AI agent can query it directly. On the Q2 2026 earnings call, president Harley Finkelstein described what that is worth (Shopify's Q2 2026 earnings call transcript).

Alongside it sits the Universal Commerce Protocol, an open standard Shopify co-developed with Google and announced in January 2026. Merchants publish a profile declaring what they support, agents publish what they can handle, and the two transact (Shopify's developer documentation for UCP). By June 2026 it was switched on by default across every Shopify store (Shopify, Spring '26 Edition).

Read that last sentence as a merchant rather than as an analyst. Hundreds of thousands of businesses became addressable by AI shopping agents without filing a ticket, hiring a developer or changing a setting. The platform did it for them overnight, at no extra charge.

BigCommerce built a pipe into somebody else's discovery layer

BigCommerce moved on the same trend and moved early. Feedonomics Agentic Catalog Exports syndicates merchant catalogs into agentic channels including OpenAI and Google Gemini, and Dell is among the names using it. That is a real product solving a real problem, and Feedonomics remains the most genuinely differentiated asset either company owns outside Shopify's payment rails.

But look at where it sits in the stack. Feedonomics moves your data to a discovery engine somebody else owns, and charges a feed-management subscription for the service. Shopify built the discovery engine, owns it, and charges nothing for access because it earns on the transaction that follows.

One of those business models gets paid more when the strategy works. The other gets paid the same.

This is the take-rate chart, expressed as product decisions

Put the two bets next to the two lines in the first chart and they are the same picture. Shopify's agentic bet monetises the purchase an AI agent completes. That lands in merchant solutions, the line that went from 2.21% to 2.41% of GMV. BigCommerce's bet monetises the movement of data, which lands in subscription and partner fees, the line that went from 1.22% to 0.96%.

Shopify's management says this out loud. On the same call it explained why three quarters of AI-attributed purchases came from outside the top 100 product categories. The framing was explicit. Merchants on Shopify will disproportionately benefit from the new surface area, and as they grow, we grow with them.

Not a slogan. An accounting identity. When your revenue is a percentage of merchant sales, every dollar you spend making merchants sell more comes back to you. When your revenue is a plan fee, it does not.

What does a take-rate gap
feel like from inside
the admin?

A 2.14-point take-rate gap is abstract until it shows up in your working week. It reaches you in four ways, in rough order of how fast you notice. What arrives already switched on. What the app and agency ecosystem chooses to build. How your bill behaves in a good quarter, and how often the roadmap ships anything.

New capabilities arrive switched on rather than as a project. The UCP rollout is the cleanest example anyone has produced recently. A merchant on Shopify became agent-addressable in June 2026 by doing nothing at all. The equivalent on a platform without an owned discovery layer is an integration you scope, budget, configure and maintain. Multiply that across five years of new surfaces and the gap is not features, it is elapsed time.

The app and agency ecosystem follows the installed base. This one is slower and matters more. Developers build where the customers are and where the customers are growing. Net revenue retention below 100% tells partners that the base is contracting before new logos, which changes where they point next year's roadmap. You feel that as fewer high-quality apps in the category you need, and as a harder time hiring an agency that already knows your stack.

Your platform bill behaves differently in a good quarter. On Shopify, more sales means a bigger bill, because most of what you pay is a percentage. On BigCommerce, more sales mostly does not, because most of what you pay is a plan fee. Merchants often read that as BigCommerce being cheaper in a growth year, and on the platform line it is. The offset is that your processing bill still scales, and it goes to a company with no roadmap for your storefront.

Roadmap funded from margin feels like a roadmap that got quieter. This is the one nobody announces. When product development is funded out of cost cuts rather than out of growth, releases get smaller and further apart before they stop. Watching R&D as a share of GMV is how you see it a year before you feel it. That is exactly why it is one of the six panels above.

What a sales and marketing
dollar buys at each
company.

In fiscal 2025 BigCommerce spent $137.0M on sales and marketing, which is 40.0% of its revenue, and added $9.4M of revenue. Shopify spent $1,663M, which is 14.4% of its revenue, and added $2,676M.

Per dollar of sales and marketing, that is 0.07 dollars of new revenue against 1.61.

Two caveats keep this fair. Shopify's growth is not purely bought. A large share of its new revenue comes from existing merchants selling more, which costs nothing extra to acquire. And BigCommerce's enterprise sales motion converts more slowly than a self-serve signup, so any single year understates it.

Even allowing for both, a spread this wide is not a measurement artefact. BigCommerce is spending 40.0% of revenue on sales and marketing, roughly 2.8 times Shopify's share, to produce 3% growth against 30%. That is the sound of a go-to-market engine running against a product that no longer prices itself into the growth.

A shrinking research budget
against a growing merchant
base.

BigCommerce's research and development spend fell from $83.5M in fiscal 2023 to $73.0M in fiscal 2025, a decline of 13%. Over the same two years the GMV its merchants pushed through the platform grew 25%. More volume to support, less money to support it with.

Be fair about Shopify here, because the same ratio moved against it too. Its R&D per dollar of GMV went from 0.73% to 0.39%, a bigger proportional fall than BigCommerce's. The difference is the absolute number underneath: $1,536M a year against $73.0M, roughly 21 times as much money aimed at broadly the same problem set.

Shopify also got more out of each person. Revenue per employee went from $0.85 million in 2023 to $1.52 million in 2025. Headcount fell from about 8,300 to about 7,600 over the same span (Shopify's Form 10-K filings).

Two conversations, and only
one of them is about
the product.

I went looking on X and LinkedIn for reaction to both quarters in the week after they landed. The most-reacted post I found on either network drew about fifty reactions, which sets the scale of this conversation before we start. The professional audience splits into three camps that barely talk to each other, and only one is discussing the financials.

The investors have written BigCommerce off

On X the tone is bleak and entirely financial. The account @Finsee_main summarised the quarter on August 6 as core growth stalling while the pivot to agentic commerce falters, with guidance slashed. SaaS investor Jared Sleeper listed it in a thread rounding up a rough week of software earnings. A four-word reply about CMRC being dead drew more engagement than most of the analysis around it.

On LinkedIn, Jeremy Horowitz of Because Ventures, who buys Shopify brands and apps for a living, was blunter still. He put the market capitalisation at $174 million and called a delisting or take-private within eighteen months. His list was flat revenue, a shrinking customer base and compressing gross margins, with a note that the company was at least profitable in the quarter. His closing line: remarkable that this was ever considered a Shopify contender.

The agency side thinks Shopify's pitch is overstated

The most useful counterweight came from Sergei Ostapenko of Mira Agency. His post arguing that Shopify's marketing overstates the case picked up roughly fifty reactions and nine reposts. Three of his points deserve a direct answer rather than a dismissal.

He argues Shopify's headline claim of 31% lower total cost of ownership rests on an unreleased study fielded in early 2024. By 2026 that is stale. It is a fair hit. Any vendor TCO figure resting on two-year-old fieldwork should carry the date on its face. Which is why this piece builds its cost comparison from filings rather than from either company's battle cards.

His strongest point is on research spending, and it is the best argument against my section 09. Measured as a share of revenue, BigCommerce reinvests roughly 21% against Shopify's 13%, so on that basis BigCommerce is the more committed engineering organisation. He puts Shopify nearer 10%, which understates it, but the direction is right and the underlying claim is true.

Here is why I still think it is the wrong denominator. Revenue is the thing being contested. Shopify's revenue base is roughly 34 times BigCommerce's precisely because it monetises merchant volume better. So measuring R&D against revenue quietly rewards the company that collects less. The denominator a merchant should care about is the volume the platform has to support, which is GMV. On that basis Shopify spent 0.406% of GMV on R&D in fiscal 2025 against BigCommerce's 0.230%. That is about 1.8 times as much per dollar of merchant sales. Both framings are honest. They answer different questions, and the GMV one is what a merchant is asking.

His third argument is that BigCommerce offers protocol neutrality so merchants retain control of catalog data, in contrast to Shopify's single-vendor stack. The data-sovereignty concern is legitimate and it is the real reason to choose an open platform. The specific example is awkward, though, because UCP is the protocol Shopify co-developed with Google. Neutrality is a strong argument for BigCommerce generally. It is a weak one on the exact standard its larger rival helped author.

He also claims that nearly 30% of high-volume brands leaving Shopify move to custom composable builds rather than another SaaS platform. I could not verify that against a primary source, so treat it as his figure rather than an established one.

The practitioners are talking about AI, not earnings

The third camp barely mentions either company's financials. What circulated instead were the agentic-commerce numbers from Shopify's call. AI-driven traffic and orders tripled year over year. Half of AI-referred sessions landed directly on a product page, against a fifth for traditional search. Three quarters of AI-attributed purchases came from outside the top 100 categories. Finkelstein framed AI as a complement to search rather than a substitute for it.

Two honest qualifications on all of it. None of these are large conversations. They run from a handful of reactions into the low dozens, so this is a professional niche rather than a public debate. And the voices are overwhelmingly investors, agencies and analysts.

Which is the finding worth keeping. Across both networks I could not find merchants discussing the BigCommerce quarter at all. The agency-side defence is real and well argued. But it comes from people who sell services on the platform rather than people who sell products on it. For a company whose net revenue retention sits below 100%, an installed base with nothing to say is not a neutral signal.

What does it mean when a
company stops publishing
a metric?

Tracking BigCommerce over four years means tracking a moving set of disclosures. Four metrics have been retired since 2021 and one significant one added, so a four-year trend line has to be rebuilt across three separate reporting regimes. The pattern is clearer with the dates attached.

Read charitably, this is a company simplifying its reporting around a new strategy, under a chief executive who arrived in October 2024. GMV plus net revenue retention is a defensible pair to run on.

Read less charitably, the metric that got introduced is the one growing fastest, and several of the ones retired had flattened. Both readings come from the same filings. What is not in dispute: a four-year trend line here has to be rebuilt from three different metric regimes. Which is why section 03 exists.

The guidance cut that got
almost no coverage.

In February 2026, alongside its fiscal 2025 results, Commerce guided full-year 2026 revenue to $347.5 million to $369.5 million (Commerce.com's fiscal 2025 results). In August, alongside the second quarter, it guided the same year to $336.5 million to $344.5 million (Commerce.com's Q2 2026 release).

The new top of the range sits below the old bottom of the range. At the midpoint that is a cut of $18.0 million, or 5.0%, on a six-month-old forecast for a year already half over.

Set against that, the promise the company has kept. In February it said it expected GAAP profitability for the full year 2026, the first time in its history. Through six months it has delivered, with GAAP net income of $4.8 million across the first half. The profit commitment is on track. The revenue commitment moved.

A cost line runs underneath all of this. Restructuring charges were $6.4 million in fiscal 2023, $13.7 million in 2024 and $11.0 million in 2025. Roughly $6.5 million more is guided for 2026, for a plan committed to on December 31, 2025 (the company's realignment filing). That is a fourth consecutive year of restructuring at a company with roughly $340 million of revenue.

What could BigCommerce
change in 2027 to close
this gap?

Four periods of the same trend does not make a fifth inevitable, and a 26 basis point decline is not a law of physics. Here are the four changes I would want to see, in the order I think they matter, with the honest odds on each one.

1. Attach a revenue line that grows when merchants grow. This is the whole ballgame and everything else is secondary. It does not have to be payments, and copying Shopify Payments head-on at this scale would be difficult. But Feedonomics could price on catalog throughput or on agentic transactions influenced rather than on seats. That converts its best asset from a flat fee into a participation in merchant success. Until some line on the income statement rises with GMV, the take rate keeps falling by arithmetic.

2. Stop funding the roadmap out of cuts. R&D fell 13% between 2023 and 2025 while merchant GMV grew 25%, and sales and marketing still absorbs 40.0% of revenue to produce 3% growth. That mix is backwards. Moving even ten points of revenue from go-to-market into product would be the clearest signal available that the company intends to compete on capability again.

3. Price the specialism like a specialism. Here is the encouraging fact buried in section 05: BigCommerce's subscription take rate is higher than Shopify's and always has been. Merchants who choose it for open architecture, complex catalogs and B2B genuinely will pay more for the software. The company has spent four years discounting into a general-purpose fight it cannot win instead of charging properly for the narrow one it can.

4. Keep opening up the reporting. Publishing GMV was the right call and it made this entire study possible. Retiring the enterprise metrics in the same breath undercut it. A company with a genuine specialism should want the market measuring the specialism.

The odds are not good, and it is worth being straight about why. Every one of those moves costs money in the near term. This is a company that has spent four years promising profitability to a market that has already marked it down hard. Doing the right thing for 2029 means breaking the promise it made for 2026. That is a difficult board conversation at any company, and a much harder one at a small cap.

Is there anything Shopify
should be taking from
BigCommerce?

I am not a neutral party here and it would be silly to pretend otherwise. I spent years inside Shopify's partner ecosystem, most of my clients are on it, and everything above says the strategy is working. That is exactly why this section is worth writing rather than skipping.

The honest summary of the criticism: none of it undermines the case for Shopify, and I would still put a growing brand there tomorrow. But a merchant reading a piece this positive deserves two facts. The same trend making the platform strong is also making it a bigger line in their P&L every year. And the lending business attached to it is growing faster than anything else in the company.

If you are a merchant,
what do these financials
actually tell you?

Four periods, two companies and a 2.14-point gap compress into six things that should change what you do on Monday. Nothing below requires you to read another filing, and the first one is the only one you have to remember if you forget everything else.

Your platform's take rate is your platform's product budget. That is the one sentence to keep. A platform capturing a rising share of merchant sales can fund a rising amount of product. One capturing a falling share funds product by cutting something else. Shopify's take rate rose in all four periods. BigCommerce's fell in all four. You are choosing which of those two funding models your storefront rides on for the next five years.

Cheaper on the platform line is not cheaper. BigCommerce collects about a third of what Shopify collects per dollar of GMV, and a merchant there still pays card processing to somebody. Compare the whole stack, including processing, apps and the agency hours each option actually needs. The method for that is in the enterprise total cost breakdown, and the pricing-page version is in the platform cost comparison.

If you are on Shopify, budget your platform as a variable cost. Merchant solutions runs at 2.41% of GMV and is still climbing, so your bill grows with your best quarters. Model it as a percentage of revenue in your plan and it stops being a surprise in a good year. Then check you are actually using what the percentage buys. Tax, shipping, fraud and cross-border tools sit inside that number whether you switch them on or not.

On borrowing, from Shopify Capital or anyone else, the rate is the least interesting term. This is the part merchants get wrong most often, and it is worth more than anything else on this page.

Start with the question before the question. What return do you actually expect from the money? Buying deeper inventory to move down a price break improves COGS on every future unit, which is a durable gain. Funding ads buys growth that stops when the money stops. Both can be right, and neither is automatically worth borrowing for. If you cannot state the expected return and the timeframe in a sentence, you are not ready to take the money from anyone.

Then compare the whole agreement rather than the headline cost. Across the lenders a growing brand will actually be offered, the terms that bite are rarely the rate.

• Where the money is allowed to go. Some facilities restrict deployment to inventory, or to specific suppliers, or exclude marketing entirely. A cheaper rate on money you cannot spend where you need it is not cheaper.
• Whether you can borrow again. Negative covenants that block additional debt can lock you out of a better facility for the length of the term. That is the expensive one, because it removes optionality precisely when growth creates the need for it.
• What you are personally on the hook for. Personal guarantees move risk from the company to you and your household. Plenty of founders sign them without registering that they have changed the downside of the whole business.
• How repayment behaves in a bad month. A fixed schedule and a percentage of daily sales feel identical in a good quarter and very different in a slow one.
• What it costs to leave. Prepayment terms, minimum interest, and whether early repayment actually saves you anything.

Run the same checklist over every option, including the platform one. Be honest that a lower advertised rate carrying a personal guarantee and a deployment restriction can be the more expensive deal. Cheap money with strings attached has ended more good brands than expensive money with none.

If you are on BigCommerce, you are not on a burning platform, but price the option to leave. The company is profitable, its merchants grew GMV 14% last quarter, and the open architecture is a real advantage for complex catalogs and B2B. What is thinning is the money aimed at the product and the ecosystem around it. Work out which BigCommerce-specific capabilities you truly depend on. Put your renewal date and a realistic migration timeline in the same document. Do it while leaving is a choice rather than a fire drill. The head-to-head is in the platform comparison.

Watch two numbers each quarter, and ignore the rest. Net revenue retention tells you whether the ecosystem around your platform is growing or shrinking. The spread between GMV growth and revenue growth tells you whether the platform is capturing more or less of your success. Everything else in an earnings release is noise for your purposes.

If you build software in this ecosystem, the lesson transfers directly. Subscription revenue decays against customer growth on every platform, including Shopify's. The only durable answer anyone has found is a second revenue line that grows with the customer rather than with the contract. That is the argument worth having at your next pricing review, and there is more on it in platform dependency risk.

Quarter-by-quarter versions live in the BigCommerce Q2 2026 read and the Shopify Q2 2026 read. Every print from both companies lands in the 2026 earnings tracker. If you are choosing rather than reviewing, start with the enterprise selection guide.

I will rerun this study when both companies have reported fiscal 2026. A first narrowing in five periods would be the most interesting thing to happen in this market next year.