Shopify vs Magento vs Commercetools vs WooCommerce vs BigCommerce vs ...

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Thirty years old.

Sold in 40 countries.

A NZ kids shoe brand competing against Nike and Skechers in export markets.

Bobux went into receivership in April 2023.

Three reasons cited by the receivers. COVID supply chain disruption. Overstocking. An IT system overhaul that didn't deliver.

They survived three decades of global competition.

They didn't survive the tech implementation.

Target Canada is the bigger one. US retail giant. 133 stores. A $7 billion expansion into Canada. At the centre of the collapse was a SAP implementation so badly executed that only 30% of the product data in the system was accurate. Warehouses full. Shelves empty. Filed for bankruptcy protection in January 2015. 133 stores shut by April.

The technology didn't work because nobody asked the right questions before they bought it.

That's the pattern.

Not the platform. The decision.

Actually, Don't Google It

Search "Shopify vs Magento."

Actually don't.

You already know what you're going to see.

Feature tables. Green ticks. Red crosses.

SEO optimization, AEO rankings.

A winner at the bottom.

Then a contact form.

A contact form that routes directly to the agency that wrote it, who happen to be a certified partner of whichever platform won.

These articles are not analysis. They're lead generation dressed up as research. A replatform at a mid market business runs $150,000 to $500,000 in implementation costs before you touch ongoing development, licensing, or the migration you'll almost certainly do in year four when you realise you picked wrong.

The agency needs the project.

The article gets the click.

The platform they recommend is the one they build on.

Not necessarily the one that fits your business.

I've been on both sides of this.

Magento operator. Recommended Magento.

Shopify partner. Got the hoodie. Recommended Shopify.

BigCommerce exposure. Suddenly BigCommerce made a lot more sense.

It's not dishonest. It's gravity.

You know what you've built. You build what you know.

You pick what you like.

You pick what you like, even when you know its wrong.

The agency recommending you commercetools at $200K year one licensing plus a nine-month build needs a commercetools project, not a Shopify Plus setup that would have done the job at a tenth of the cost. The agency with a composable practice needs complexity whether or not your business actually has it.

Ask your agency how many times they've recommended a platform they don't have a partner relationship with.

The answer is almost always zero.

It's Not Just B2B

Every time someone tries to write a version of this article, they narrow it to B2B.

It's not just B2B.

D2C brands get sold the wrong platform constantly.

The Shopify certified agency that builds fashion sites recommending Shopify to a business with 400 product configurations and no consumer channel.

The WooCommerce developer insisting that open source is the right call for a brand doing $15M who hasn't thought seriously about the ongoing maintenance cost or what happens when their one developer leaves.

Mid market B2C retailers getting pitched composable architecture because the agency that pitched them has a headless practice and needs projects to staff it.

The wrong platform for the wrong business looks different depending on what you're running. The incentive structure producing the wrong recommendation is identical.

Figure out your business first.

Pick the platform second.

That order matters more than anything else in this article.

The Shopify B2B Thing

In April 2026 Shopify rolled B2B features to all paid plans.

The announcement made the rounds. B2B on the $39/month Basic plan. Company accounts. Price lists. Net terms. Purchase orders. The commentary was positive. Shopify opening up wholesale to businesses that couldn't previously afford the enterprise tier.

Three active catalogs.

That's the limit. Across every B2B market you operate in. Combined.

Bronze, Silver, and Gold tiers for NZ customers. You've used all three. Nothing left for Australia. Nothing for the UK. Nothing for the large account that negotiated a custom rate two years ago and will notice immediately if you change it.

Need more? Shopify Plus. $2,300/month. That's a 58x price increase to get your fourth price list.

Then a paradox statement comes directly from Tobi Lutke, the founder of Shopify.

He was on the Cheeky Pint podcast with John Collison from Stripe. He said Shopify is really good if you're running a D2C business with products. He didn't build it with subscription based grocery stores in mind. He'd rather people didn't use it if it was bad for them, because he built Shopify to stop people using bad software, not to add to the pile.

The founder of the platform.

Telling you it has limits.

His sales team is selling it into wholesale distribution and grocery regardless.

Agencys all over linkedin telling you ‘B2B on Shopify’ is the only way.

That's what happens when a public company needs quarterly growth and wholesale represents a new market surface. The product team knows the constraints. The GTM team has targets. The operator reading the press release finds out at month three of implementation when they try to configure their fourth customer tier.

Shopify is genuinely excellent, and I have no doubt they will take on B2B in meaningful ways. The checkout is the best in the market. Shop Pay converts above everything else.

It's a demo if you're running real wholesale.

The "Magento Is Dead" Economy

This one has been running since about 2020.

"Magento is dead."

It's not. But the narrative exists because it's useful to specific people.

105,000 stores are actively running on Magento right now. They're not confused or stuck. They're running complex catalogue operations that Magento handles natively and that every alternative would require significant custom development to approximate.

The "Magento is dead" article is the top of the funnel for a replatforming project. Agency writes the headline. You panic. You book a discovery call. Six months later you're on Shopify Plus, which will serve you well for 18 months before you start bumping into its edges.

Here's what's actually true.

Adobe Commerce is now firmly an enterprise play. Deep catalogue complexity. In-house development teams. Businesses with the budget and the people to maintain it properly. The mid-market merchants who left were right to leave. They were paying enterprise maintenance costs for a business that didn't need enterprise capability.

For a small or medium business without developers on staff, Adobe Commerce is genuinely a terrible idea. Open source does not mean free. It means you own every security patch, every PHP upgrade, every plugin conflict, and every server problem. That's a full-time job before you've built a single new feature, I’ve learnt this the hard way.

Some merchants still on it belong there.

The ones who left probably should have left sooner.

"Magento is dead" was never a product assessment.

It was an agency acquisition strategy.

A Headless Wave

The years 2021 to 2024 produced a lot of composable commerce projects that probably shouldn't have happened.

"Headless." "MACH architecture." "API-first." "Composable."

These are real architectural approaches with real use cases. They're also extremely effective words for selling expensive agency engagements to businesses that needed a better Shopify theme and a CRO specialist.

Commercetools is the reference implementation. Licensing starts at $50,000 to $120,000 a year. Year one total once you add implementation, frontend build, and integrations runs $500,000 to $2 million. Implementation timeline 3 to 12 months.

For a business with genuinely complex, multi region, multi brand, multi channel operations that no monolithic platform can model, commercetools is the right answer. For a D2C brand doing $8 million on a Shopify store with clean catalogue structure, it is a $600,000 project that produces a platform doing exactly what their $2,300/month Shopify Plus store was doing.

This happened. Many times. 2022 and 2023 were peak composable hype. Agencies that had built commercetools and Elastic Path practices needed project volume to staff them.

The sales conversation was "future-proof" and "flexible" and "best of breed."

The hangover is real. There is a generation of mid-market businesses currently maintaining headless builds they don't have the team or budget to properly run.

The architecture is not wrong.

The sales motion that applied it to businesses that didn't need it was.

The Demo Always Works

Every platform looks capable in a demo.

The data is clean. The workflows are frictionless. The pricing engine handles complex customer tiers effortlessly. The ERP integration slide shows real-time sync with no visible effort.

None of it has ever met your actual ERP. Your pricing rules that were set up in 2017 and have fourteen exceptions baked in because the sales manager did deals that got manually overridden. Your product catalogue where 23% of the SKUs have incomplete attribute data because the team that was supposed to clean it up never got the resource.

The single most useful question you can ask in any platform demo is: "Is that live now?"

They will show you something. Three months into implementation you will find out it's on the roadmap. Roadmaps shift. Roadmap features have a habit of not arriving until after you've built everything else around the assumption that they would.

"Yes, we have account management." Every platform says this. Account management can mean a full parent child hierarchy where the parent sets permissions and contract pricing rolls through tiered rules. Or it can mean two people can log in. You won't find out which until month six of a build.

The gap between the demo and the implementation is where the money goes.

Bespoke

There’s also another option.

Gawked at by almost every ecom professional.

‘Im sorry’s from the Agency you are talking to.

You can literally just build what you need.

Not always.

Not often.

Maybe more so with AI.

But for a specific class of business, one with genuinely unique operational logic, pricing models that no off-the-shelf platform supports natively, processes refined over years that actually work, the right answer is a custom build.

The argument against it is always cost and timeline. And those are real. A bespoke build costs more upfront than a SaaS subscription.

But run the numbers.

Commercetools at $120,000/year in licensing. Year one build $400,000. Ongoing development $200,000/year. Over three years you're at $1.2 million minimum, and the platform knowledge lives entirely with the agency that built it.

A well-scoped custom build on a solid framework, built by a team that understands your operation, can hit a similar number and produce something that fits the business exactly rather than something the business has to contort itself to fit.

No comparison article recommends bespoke because there's no referral fee in it.

That's the only reason.

So What.

The platforms are not the problem.

The process that produces the recommendation is.

Before you book a demo, before you invite agencies to present, write down honest answers to these:

What does your pricing actually look like? Not "we need flexibility." Count the distinct pricing structures you run today. That number eliminates or qualifies most platforms immediately. Three price lists and you're out of Shopify standard. Fifty and you need a pricing engine, not a theme.

What does your ERP do and how does it do it? This question kills more implementations than any other. Real-time sync or batch? Which fields, which direction, which triggers? The platform integration that looked seamless in the demo falls apart when it meets your actual data model at month four. Know your ERP before you talk to anyone.

What does your catalogue actually look like at the hard end? Not your standard products. The ones with 200 attribute combinations. The ones with regional exclusivity rules. The ones where price depends on quantity bracket, customer tier, and promotional override simultaneously. What breaks when you put those into a demo environment? Ask them to show you.

Who is maintaining this in three years? Not the agency that built it. After handover. Specifically. If you cannot answer this question before signing, the platform selection is not finished.

What search tool are you using? What PIM? What OMS? The platform is not the stack. The platform is one component of the stack. Picking it before you know the rest of the stack is choosing a car engine before you've decided what the car needs to do.

An RFP helps. Mostly it helps you figure out what you need before someone starts selling you what they have.

The businesses that get this right are not the ones who found the best platform.

They're the ones who did this work before anyone opened a slide deck.

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We built a tool for this. No sponsored results, no affiliate links, no contact form at the bottom.

Just the filter set, the platforms, and what each one actually costs to run.

Click Here