The merchants leaving BigCommerce this year aren’t doing it because they got a sales call from Shopify. They’re doing it because the math stopped working.
Here’s what actually changed. BigCommerce refreshed pricing at the end of 2025. Features that had been available at mid-tier plans moved up-market. Renewal quotes started arriving with 20 to 40 percent effective increases for merchants who actually used the feature set. For merchants already sitting in the middle of a growth curve, where every dollar of platform spend trades against dollars of marketing spend, the increase wasn’t a marginal annoyance. It was the tipping point.
Meanwhile, on the destination side of the equation, Shopify Plus spent 2024 and 2025 quietly closing every feature gap that used to justify staying on BigCommerce Enterprise. Native B2B with company accounts, price lists, quote workflows, and net-terms payment. Checkout Extensions and Shopify Functions for custom logic that used to require Plus Scripts. Hydrogen for merchants going headless. Multi-store included in the base Plus plan. Two years ago a thoughtful merchant could reasonably argue that BigCommerce Enterprise offered deeper enterprise capability. That argument barely holds up today.
The Shop Pay factor, quietly
There’s one number that keeps coming up in these decisions: Shop Pay converts 5 to 10 percent higher than standard hosted checkouts, according to Shopify’s own data. For a mid-market DTC brand running $5M a year, that conversion differential, applied across a full year, is real money. Enough money to pay for the migration twice over in the first 12 months.
Talking to the agencies doing the work
We spoke with Netalico, a Shopify Plus Partner that’s been handling BigCommerce migrations for nearly a decade, about what they’re actually seeing on the ground. Their migration volume has increased meaningfully through 2025 and into 2026, with their BigCommerce to Shopify migration services handling a growing share of mid-market and enterprise demand.
A few patterns have emerged across the 2026 project cohort, per the Netalico team.
Merchants are arriving with tighter scope documents. The category has educated itself. Two years ago, merchants asked open-ended questions like “should we consider migrating?” Now they show up with specific platform comparisons, known app-replacement paths, and a realistic sense of what the project costs. The market has matured.
B2B configuration is increasingly in base scope, not an enterprise add-on. Shopify Plus B2B has become capable enough that mid-market merchants with wholesale operations now include B2B in the core project, rather than deferring it as a post-launch phase. This reflects both the platform’s feature expansion and the merchants’ operational reality.
Hydrogen and headless architectures are showing up in roughly a quarter of new enterprise scopes, up from well under 10 percent two years ago. This is the quieter shift. Merchants migrating now are more likely to use the migration as an opportunity to re-architect the storefront for performance, not just port the existing site to a new backend.
The SEO fear, and why it’s mostly wrong
If there’s one thing that keeps merchants on BigCommerce longer than they should be, it’s the fear that migrating will tank organic search. Ask any specialist agency that does this work daily, and they’ll tell you the same thing: properly executed migrations preserve 90 to 100 percent of organic traffic within 30 to 45 days of launch.
The mechanics are straightforward. Every URL from the old platform gets a 301 redirect to its Shopify equivalent. Metadata, structured data, and canonical tags port over completely. A rank-monitoring window runs for 60 days post-launch to catch any drift. When this work is done rigorously, SEO survives the migration. When it’s done sloppily, merchants lose 20 to 40 percent of organic traffic for three to six months.
The difference between those two outcomes isn’t the platform. It’s the agency. Which is why agency selection is the highest-leverage decision in the whole migration process.
Standard Shopify versus Shopify Plus: who goes where
Most 2026 migrations land on Shopify Plus, but the choice of which Shopify tier to target isn’t automatic. Merchants under roughly $1M in annual revenue often migrate to standard Shopify with an upgrade path to Plus later. Mid-market merchants between $1M and $10M usually benefit from Plus from day one, particularly if B2B, multi-currency, or checkout customization is part of scope. Enterprise merchants above $10M are almost always on Plus.
The practical advice: make this decision based on features you actually need in the next 18 months, not on what might be useful someday.
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The parallel WooCommerce story
Alongside the BigCommerce exodus, 2026 has produced a steady stream of WooCommerce-to-Shopify migrations. The drivers are different (hosting fatigue, app fragmentation, the operational burden of self-hosted infrastructure) but the destination is the same. Netalico’s moving from WooCommerce to Shopify practice specifically addresses the plugin-rebuild challenges that characterize WooCommerce exits, which are materially different from BigCommerce’s quirks.
What merchants should actually do
Three practical steps before committing to a BigCommerce migration in 2026. First, get scoped pricing from two or three specialist agencies (not general Shopify agencies). Real specialists can give you a price range during the first conversation. If they can’t, that’s a signal. Second, treat the migration as a chance to audit and improve, not just to port. Migrations are expensive; make the most of the moment. Third, budget for a two to three week post-launch stabilization window. Every migration produces small fixes in the first month, and agencies that include this window in base scope produce materially better outcomes than those that charge hourly for post-launch work.
The bigger picture
The 2026 BigCommerce exodus isn’t a referendum on BigCommerce being bad. It’s a reflection of Shopify Plus having matured into a genuinely competitive enterprise-tier alternative at the same moment BigCommerce’s pricing made staying harder. For merchants caught in that specific intersection, migrating now, with the right specialist agency, usually pays back in the first year and compounds from there. The quiet part: this trend isn’t slowing down.
