Many businesses settle on which SaaS ecommerce platform to use before looking closely at how much payment gateways and other third-party applications or custom build-out hours associated with that provider will cost. This results in a large portion of potential profits being lost due to bad architecture and a slow checkout process.
This article will take apart traditional marketing messages provided by vendors in this space to provide concrete data regarding how well each of the leading vendors actually performs when they are forced to process actual transaction volumes.
In addition to that information, this guide will replace everything but the basic feature checklist from each vendor with concrete metrics supporting revenue increases, migration fees, and API realities based upon transaction volumes and processing speeds.
What to Look for When Evaluating a SaaS Ecommerce Platform
The market for selling products digitally is flooded with identical claims around speed, scalability, and ease of use by numerous vendors. The reality is that based on significant data, this, unfortunately, could not be further from the truth.
While performing due diligence around evaluating any SaaS ecommerce platform, many businesses focus primarily on the initial monthly fee of each vendor, failing to run the proper GMV analysis for their business.
They will look primarily at visual layouts offered by each vendor and gloss right over the high-level technical challenges associated with the URL structure and the call limits on each vendor’s API.
It is precisely this limited view that leads businesses to experience untold amounts of operational leakage.
As an example, when moving from one system to another, there are often significant risks associated with losing organic traffic during the migration. Most guides that are related to a website migration list out the 301 redirect plan; however, very few contain all of the details around the actual transfer of organic traffic, including exact windows when the site will be down, DNS gap issues, and order synchronization failures between each vendor.
To be successful, you need to stop relying on just the basic feature lists of each vendor. Instead, calculate the true cost of your payment processing fees plus your required application stack as your total cost for using that vendor.
To properly assess how a given platform manages complex product data along with determining if the code will let you achieve peak speed on mobile phones, consider these things: the platforms outlined here are rated against the same criteria that your business will face, not only as promised by the marketing departments of each platform.
12 Top SaaS Ecommerce Platforms
1. Shopify
Shopify is currently the default platform for most physical and digital product brands. It is the easiest and fastest way to set up a new live store and offers the largest app marketplace of any ecommerce platform.
Shopify reported $3.6 billion in revenue in Q2, showing it is an industry leader in market share. Monthly plans range from $39 to $399.
Shopify's major drawback is the way it structures its SEO. Shopify restricts URL paths to formats like /products/ and /collections/, which means that businesses are unable to create a custom flat site architecture (for example, for content-heavy stores) with Shopify.
2. BigCommerce
BigCommerce is a fully open-ended SaaS solution. Their native features outwin the majority of competitors.
BigCommerce does not charge transaction fees on its end, and it has built essential B2B features into its platform. Monthly plans range from $39 to $399.
BigCommerce's SEO capabilities provide unlimited flexibility in URL structures.
Stats from Mizuno USA show a 33% growth in organic traffic and a checkout time increase of 90% over previous performance after they migrated to BigCommerce's platform. Therefore, it shows clear proof of BigCommerce's technological superiority.
3. WooCommerce
WooCommerce does not have a traditional hosted SaaS product. However, with an estimated market share of between 14% and 39%, it is the largest open-source WordPress plugin used for ecommerce.
It enables complete control of your code, as well as granularity when it comes to SEO. It is the best choice for a company that has an intense focus on increasing organic search traffic before anything else.
However, you also gain this control at the cost of a significant amount of burden. You will have to manage hosting, security updates, and plugin conflict tracking yourself.
The only downside of this platform is that it provides ease of operation at the expense of technical freedom.
4. Wix
Wix is built with a design-first mindset and is heavily focused on the small business and creator market. They account for 14% to 24% of the all-in-one marketplace.
They offer a simple SEO setup, as well as the drag-and-drop functionality that so many small businesses desire.
The subscription price of $29/month to $159/month for selling simple digital products and small catalogs is reasonable.
They do not have complex database modeling for large enterprise stores; however, they do offer everything that small operators need to get up and running quickly.
5. Squarespace
Squarespace is mostly about visually appealing brands and integrated marketing tools. They have captured approximately 17% of the all-in-one market and primarily market to brand-focused businesses with small product lines or digital portfolios.
As with Wix, Squarespace's pricing is between $29/month and $159/month.
They are not designed for large SKU catalogs or for complex quote workflows, but they do offer a good option for digital creators who sell high-value courses, guides, or digital art files.
6. Adobe Commerce (Magento)
Adobe Commerce is classified as the enterprise class and is designed for extremely large-scale and highly-customizable implementations combined with heavy ERP (enterprise resource planning) integration.
This platform requires a substantial investment to use. A typical small to mid-sized deployment starts at $500,000, and that figure includes the cost of licensing, specialized hosting, and developer fees.
Small digital sellers do not need a large digital price list, but globally, thousands of customer-specific price lists that manage a customer base of many disparate revenue streams need a huge database depth to support their operations.
7. Salesforce Commerce Cloud
Salesforce Commerce Cloud unifies the sales data across the Salesforce ecosystem and is integrated into its Commerce Cloud.
It is driven by AI-based personalization and targets the enterprise tier at a price point based on usage.
As illustrated in recent quarters, Salesforce Commerce Cloud's B2B GMV grew 17% YOY, indicating a strong direction toward increasingly complex corporate selling.
Companies that have relied extensively on Salesforce's broader CRM ecosystem to run their day-to-day business generally use this platform most effectively.
8. commercetools
In the market's transition to modular solutions, commercetools is at the forefront of the API-first composable architecture space.
Instead of providing an all-in-one solution, commercetools enables developers to build their own highly-customized, multi-touch, microservices-based digital stores.
As pricing is custom and based on API calls, the system requires an engineering team to create and support the front-end storefront, making it a more technical option specifically for enterprise-level teams.
9. Shopify Plus
Shopify Plus is the enterprise tier of Shopify and is designed for high-volume direct-to-consumer brands.
Pricing starts at approximately $2,000 per month, with a 0.25% commission fee added to gross merchandise value after monthly revenue has reached $800,000.
Depending on the level of traffic a company experiences, this fee structure has the potential to leak revenue if not monitored closely.
However, this performance is backed by proven results. In the past 12 months, a redesign of Gymshark's Plus storefront increased session volume by 140% and total sales volume by 91%, primarily due to exceptional stability built into the checkout experience.
10. BigCommerce Enterprise
BigCommerce Enterprise targets the mid-market and enterprise sector through open APIs and provides a B2B Edition specifically for companies who use their platform for B2B business.
The average annual price for a BigCommerce Enterprise deployment ranges from $60,000 to $100,000, depending on your needs. It also includes features to execute complex quote-to-order workflows on their platform natively.
According to a case study by DMI, their B2B portal cut manual order entry by 45% and increased online orders by up to 27%.
Additionally, the DMI system cut the turnaround of quotes from 48 hours to only 4 hours, demonstrating the value of properly modeling internal workflows.
11. VTEX
VTEX is a very focused, specialized system designed specifically for the Latin American market; however, the company also competes globally for enterprise clients.
VTEX combines standard retail ecommerce offerings with a marketplace component.
Therefore, for companies interested in launching two-sided marketplaces (such as Amazon) or focusing heavily on expanding into LATAM marketplaces, VTEX’s pricing model is competitive with both Shopify Plus and BigCommerce Enterprise.
12. Spryker
Spryker is designed for more complex business types. It is designed as a composable platform to handle deep B2B ecommerce and marketplace opportunities.
Standard ecommerce solutions often do not provide the necessary functionality to support large catalog structures, diverse digital product licensing models, or the ability to offer different regional pricing options.
Spryker is the best option when additional technical depth is needed to complete your ecommerce implementation.
As with all composable systems, pricing is not standard and will typically require significant upfront development costs before successfully launching your solution.
What is the True Cost of Your SaaS Ecommerce Platform?
Do not rely on comparing the monthly subscription costs to determine the best choice for your organization. A number of SaaS ecommerce platforms that charge $39 a month can quickly add up to thousands of dollars in hidden processing fees and required application subscriptions for a business.
When building your financial model to make decisions, you will need to calculate the total cost of ownership (TCO) by using an interactive model that includes your specific data to see how much this software will actually cost you.
To do this:
Take your expected overall GMV, and multiply it by the payment gateway rate that is provided by each platform.
Next, add up the monthly subscription costs of all of the third-party applications needed for you to achieve the baseline functionality of your business's current process.
Next, take the total upfront costs of any premium themes, initial developer hours, and expected monthly maintenance costs.
Next, estimate the expected costs for migrating downtime, such as DNS gaps and recovering organic traffic.
For instance, Shopify Plus has a 0.25% GMV fee charged once you reach $800,000 of monthly revenues.
It is very easy to see that once you reach a certain amount of revenue each month at specific high-volume tiers, the percentage scale could rapidly outpace the flat pricing models that are offered by competitors such as BigCommerce Pro.
Therefore, it is critical that you calculate your exact break-even point where your profit margin would be crushed due to percentage-based pricing models.
Lastly, be aware that conversion benchmarks provided by vendors are generally very generic; therefore, do not accept a blanket statement of a "3% conversion rate." Instead, segment your benchmark's expectations based upon your vertical, average order value, and traffic source.
For example, digital direct-to-consumer products and industrial supply are two different animals with very different conversion realities, so you need to ask for specific numbers within your specific market category before you enter into a contract.
Final Thoughts on Digital Commerce Systems
To prosper within digital commerce, one must expect the ultimate data for making decisions. Generalized features lists do not grant strategic differentiation.
The successful platforms that control the market have provided solutions to targeted operational issues, including Shopify's time to launch, WooCommerce's full SEO capabilities, and BigCommerce's out-of-the-box B2B workflows.
Businesses that have developed a precise, gross cost of ownership model, appropriately mapped URL redirects while migrating, and comprehensively tracked their Google Search Console data after launch will have a competitive advantage over their competitors.
Do not choose your SaaS ecommerce platform based upon sales literature. Utilize mathematics, API limitations, and validated performance-based data to determine the best fit for your business.
Finding and Fixing Hidden Leaks in Your Store Operations
When do migration plans lose the most organic traffic?
Organic traffic is lost due to teams considering URL redirects as a simple correlation rather than an architecturally complex activity.
Many traditional plans are unable to create the complete 301 redirect chain, do not incorporate the mapping of images or PDFs, and ignore the temporary crawl error issues that occur during DNS cutoff interruptions.
For a business without establishing a baseline 90-day Google Search Console tracking plan for comparison of prior and current Core Web Vitals and index coverage, their organic revenue will essentially suffer diminishing returns for an extended period of time without knowledge of why.
How does total cost change when a business exceeds $1,000,000 in revenue?
At lower volume levels, the total gross cost of software use and basic applications account for the majority of expenditures.
When businesses exceed the $1,000,000 threshold, the entire equation shifts; percent-based transaction fees now consume tremendous amounts of capital, requiring complex ERP integrations, custom checkout flows, and advanced API usage as part of the business operation.
The software costs will be the least expensive item on the company's profit and loss statement; the costs associated with integrating, maintaining, and processing payments will become the most significant expense.
Why do built-in B2B tools fail without direct ERP connections?
Unlike traditional retail experiences, business customers do not buy like consumers. B2B buyers need highly specialized environments.
While the demos of B2B native features may be impressive, they fail in practice due to their lack of integrating with a real-time ERP system.
Without a physical connection to an ERP system in real time, the buyers' custom price lists become obsolete, inventory levels inaccurate, and the approval process for quotes breaks down.
The only alternative to filling the gaps is through manual intervention, which completely defeats the reason to invest in a digital platform.
How much development work does a composable microservices architecture really take?
When transitioning to a composable architecture based upon an API-first approach, businesses have the ability to develop and design a unique customer experience as well as achieve faster page loads; however, the development burden is significant.
You are not purchasing a store; you are purchasing the components of a store and will need to develop the entire front-end customer experience on your own, manage multiple vendor APIs, and create complex content model logic.
Businesses without a well-qualified, in-house internal engineering team will encounter immediate development delays and budget overruns.
