Hosted e-commerce platforms: Shopify, BigCommerce and the rest

A hosted e-commerce platform is one you rent rather than run. The vendor supplies the software, the servers, the security updates and the checkout, and you pay a monthly fee plus payment charges. For most UK retailers Shopify is the default choice, BigCommerce is the main alternative, and Wix and Squarespace suit a small catalogue attached to a content-led site.

The trade is simple. You give up some control over how the platform works, and in return you stop paying people to keep it running. For the great majority of retailers that is a good trade, because very few of them win customers on the strength of their server configuration.

It stops being a good trade when your business depends on something the platform will not let you change. That is rarer than it used to be, but it still happens.

The short version

• Hosted (also called SaaS) means the vendor runs the platform and you rent it. You never patch a server or plan an upgrade.
• Shopify is where we would start most retailers turning over less than about £5m online, and plenty above it.
• BigCommerce is worth a look when the catalogue is complex, the business is B2B-heavy, or you want freedom over payment providers.
• Wix and Squarespace are website builders with a shop attached. Fine for a few dozen products, limiting beyond that.
• The subscription is the small number. Apps, payment fees and agency time are the real cost of a hosted store.
• Hosted runs out when you need to change core behaviour: unusual pricing logic, deep ERP-driven processes, or a checkout the vendor does not allow.

What does "hosted" actually mean?

With a hosted platform, everyone is on the same software, run by the vendor. New features and security fixes arrive without you doing anything. You customise the store through a theme, through settings, and through apps that plug into the platform's interfaces. You do not get to edit the platform itself.

The alternative is to run the software yourself, which is what open-source platforms such as Magento and WooCommerce involve. There you can change anything, and you are responsible for everything.

The line has blurred a little: Adobe now sells a fully hosted edition of Adobe Commerce. The question to ask of any platform is the same. Who is on call when it breaks, and who pays for the upgrade.

What you get

• Hosting, scaling and uptime handled by the vendor, including on your busiest day of the year.
• Security patches applied for you, and a checkout the vendor keeps compliant with card-industry rules.
• A large market of apps and themes, so common requirements are a subscription instead of a build.

What you give up

• Access to the core code and the database.
• Full control of the checkout on the lower plans.
• Some freedom over data structure: how products, variants and prices are modelled is the vendor's decision.
• Independence: prices, terms and features change on the vendor's timetable.

How do the main hosted platforms compare?

Prices below are the vendors' published figures at the time of writing (October 2026), in the currency each vendor quotes. Check the Shopify pricing page and the BigCommerce pricing page before you budget, because both change.

Shopify

Shopify is the platform the others are measured against. The checkout converts well and is maintained for you, the app market covers nearly every common need, and there are more experienced developers and agencies for it in the UK than for any other hosted platform.

The standard plans are Basic, Grow and Advanced. Card rates fall as you move up, and so does the surcharge Shopify applies when you take payment through a third-party provider instead of Shopify Payments (2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced, 0.2% on Plus at the time of writing). Two old objections have gone: a product can now have up to 2,048 variants on every plan, and basic wholesale features such as company accounts and trade price lists are no longer reserved for Plus. International selling is handled through Shopify Markets, which sets currencies and pricing per country from one store.

Shopify Plus is the top tier. It adds deeper checkout customisation, up to nine expansion stores, unlimited B2B catalogues and higher limits throughout. Whether it is worth the jump is a calculation, not a status question, and we cover it in Shopify vs Shopify Plus.

BigCommerce

BigCommerce is the serious alternative. It tends to include more in the platform itself where Shopify would send you to an app, it handles large and complicated catalogues comfortably, and it has long been strong for trade selling. It is also more relaxed about payments: it charges no platform fee on orders taken through its embedded payment partners, although its self-service plans now carry a fee for other providers.

The plans are Core, Growth, Scale and Performance (older articles call them Standard, Plus, Pro and Enterprise). Each self-service plan has a sales ceiling, and you are moved up when you pass it, so your platform bill tracks your turnover. The honest drawback in the UK is the size of the community. There are fewer apps, fewer themes and fewer agencies, so more of your project is custom work.

Wix and Squarespace

Both are website builders first. For a maker, a venue or a consultant selling a short product list they are entirely reasonable. Neither is where we would put a retailer whose main business is the online shop: stock control across channels, warehouse and accounting integrations, and international pricing all become hard work early.

Who does a hosted platform suit?

Almost every retailer selling a conventional catalogue to consumers. If your products have sizes and colours, your pricing is a price list with promotions, and your operations run through common tools (a courier platform, an accounting package, a stock system such as Linnworks), a hosted platform will do the job at a lower total cost than building and running your own.

It also suits teams without developers. A marketing lead can launch a campaign page or schedule a sale without raising a ticket.

We have moved retailers in this direction for exactly these reasons. When we replatformed Simply Sound and Lighting from Magento to Shopify, the driver was Magento's rising running cost and a site that was not keeping up with the business. The move delivered a 180% increase in revenue, pages loading 50% faster and a 40% uplift in conversion.

Where do hosted platforms run out?

This is the section to read twice. A hosted platform is the wrong choice, or at least a compromised one, when:

• Your pricing is genuinely unusual. Thousands of customer-specific contract prices, prices calculated from dimensions or live commodity costs, or quotes negotiated line by line. Hosted platforms can approximate these with apps, and the approximation is where projects go wrong.
• Your ERP runs the business and the website must obey it. If stock, pricing, credit limits and order rules all live in an ERP and the store is a window on to it, you may need more control over data and logic than a hosted platform allows.
• You need to change the checkout itself. On Shopify, deep checkout changes need Plus. If the requirement is beyond what even that allows, no amount of budget fixes it.
• Your product is configured, not picked. Made-to-measure goods, complex bundles and kits with dependent options can outgrow the standard product model.

If two or more of those describe you, read the open-source guide before you choose. If only one does, it is usually cheaper to solve that one problem with a small custom app than to take on a whole platform to avoid it.

Common mistakes

• Budgeting for the subscription only. A typical store carries a stack of paid apps for reviews, search, subscriptions, returns and so on. Add them up before you compare platforms. Our guide to what an e-commerce platform really costs has the full list.
• Installing an app for every request. Each one adds cost, script weight and another supplier. Many requirements are better met by a setting, a theme change or a few lines of code.
• Treating a migration as a redesign only. Redirects, structured data and order history decide whether you keep your search traffic. See our replatforming guide.

How we'd approach it

We start with a list, not a platform. We write down the ten or so things your business does that are not standard: the odd pricing rule, the pre-order process, the trade customers, the integration nobody wants to touch. Then we test each against the platform, in a trial store where possible, and mark it as built in, solved by an app, solved by custom work, or not possible.

If everything lands in the first two columns, we would build on Shopify and get you live quickly. If the custom column is long or the volume is high, we look at Shopify Plus or BigCommerce side by side, with the three-year cost of each worked out in pounds. If anything lands in "not possible", we say so, and we talk about open source instead.

Questions we get asked

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