Shopify alternatives for DTC brands: the six real options Shopify alternatives for DTC brands: the six real options

Nothing here comes from a rival's comparison page, and every price records its billing basis, because almost every platform here shows the annual-equivalent by default while the month-to-month rate runs a third higher. Three questions, asked of every platform: what it costs when you grow — thresholds, overages and the cut of each sale, not the sticker; what it ships for finding out why people didn't buy; and what it takes to change a page. Mtrix makes one of the six. We put Shopify first anyway.

The verdict

The six alternatives at a glance

Every figure read 26 July 2026 from the vendor's own pricing page, except Wix's plan prices — wix.com/plans renders its prices in JavaScript and returned truncated content on every attempt, so $17 / $29 / $39 / $159 come from our 26 July read of the plans page cross-checked against the wix.com/ecommerce/website FAQ, not from a clean live render. Confirm them in a US browser before this ships.

That middle column is the platform's cut, and only the platform's cut. Card processing is separate and broadly the same everywhere: Wix Payments, Squarespace Payments and WooPayments each publish 2.9% + $0.30, plus 1.5% on an international card and 1% on a currency conversion, in their own fee documentation. Nobody here is cheap on processing; no single row should be read as if the others were free.

Mtrix doesn't publish a list price, so that cell says so instead of inventing a band. It is not the cheap option here and isn't trying to be.

What none of these platforms gives you

Read what each publishes — Shopify's and BigCommerce's plan tables, Squarespace's full feature comparison, Wix's plan cards, Medusa's and Saleor's pricing pages. Between them they list hosting, staff seats, API limits, inventory locations, storage, GMV allowances, compute hours and support tiers. None lists session replay. None lists heatmaps. None lists error tracking. None lists real-user Core Web Vitals. WooCommerce has no plan table at all — and no first-party A/B testing extension in its own catalogue.

So the thing most brands are unhappy about survives the switch intact. You rebuild the storefront, migrate the catalog, re-point the DNS — then buy the testing app, the replay tool and the analytics tool again, on the new platform, with five dashboards still disagreeing about what a conversion is.

Replatforming for a storefront problem makes sense. Replatforming for a measurement problem is the most expensive way to not fix it. The bill for buying it all separately is itemised in what a Shopify CRO stack actually costs.

Shopify itself — the option most readers of this page should take

Shopify is the default for reasons that are still true: thousands of third-party apps, a checkout that has survived a decade of BFCMs, payments, fraud and tax handled at scale, POS for physical retail, and a developer ecosystem you can hire from in any city. Nothing below matches all five, and Mtrix matches neither the marketplace nor the POS.

One correction, because most pages ranking for this query are out of date. On 5 June 2026 Shopify's changelog extended Rollouts to "schedule, publish, and A/B test new themes and checkout and customer account configurations." Anyone still telling you Shopify can't test its checkout is quoting 2025.

Where Rollouts stops, from Shopify's own Help Center on 26 July 2026: experiments require the Grow plan or higher; there are three change types (edit the main theme, replace the main theme, replace the checkout and accounts configuration); and "Rollouts support only online store checkouts. Headless and custom storefront checkouts aren't supported and can't be tested with rollouts." It swaps one whole configuration for another — not element-level testing, audience targeting, or server-side bucketing.

Stay on Shopify if the apps, the checkout and the POS are why you're there, and one theme swap a quarter is the cadence you actually run.

One fork this page doesn't take: if you're on Advanced pricing the Plus upgrade rather than leaving Shopify altogether, the option set is a different one — Shopify Plus alternatives covers it.

1. BigCommerce — the closest like-for-like, and the one every other page is now wrong about

Same shape of product, fewer constraints on how you take money. Twenty-plus embedded payment providers — Stripe, PayPal, Adyen, Klarna, Checkout.com, Worldpay — carry no BigCommerce fee. Core, Growth and Scale carry no contract: their pricing FAQ says self-serve plans are cancel-any-time, against Shopify Plus's 1- or 3-year term. And Performance publishes a starting price — "$1,499 per month, billed annually", the only enterprise commerce tier here you can budget from.

Two things changed on 1 June 2026. The plans were renamed — Standard, Plus, Pro and Enterprise are now Core, Growth, Scale and Performance. And the fee-free promise became conditional: the Open Payment Provider Fee in the table above now applies to GMV processed through anything off the embedded list.

Read that in both directions. It is not "BigCommerce charges transaction fees like Shopify" — Stripe, PayPal, Adyen and Klarna are all fee-free and most DTC brands will never pay it. It is also no longer "BigCommerce has no transaction fees." And plans are now metered on trailing GMV, so the platform upgrades you automatically at each threshold.

Pick BigCommerce if you're tied to a specific acquirer, you run B2B and B2C from one backend, or you need multi-storefront without an enterprise negotiation.

2. WooCommerce — the free licence with the $70,000 store

Free, open source, 0% revenue share at any volume, and you get the database. For a technical founder who wants to own the store outright — no platform fee, no vendor who can reprice you — it's the right answer and we won't pretend otherwise. At high GMV nobody takes less of your money.

You don't have to take our word on the cost, because WooCommerce publishes it. Their pricing page carries total-cost models from their agency partner StuntCoders. For a $2M-revenue boutique brand: $70,000 of initial development, a first-year total of roughly $139,000 — 6.95% of revenue by their own arithmetic — and $35,000 a year of maintenance after that. All before a single experiment has run or a single session has been watched.

Extensions are the other line nobody budgets. A realistic DTC basket — Subscriptions $279, Bundles $79, Product Add-Ons $79, AutomateWoo $159, all off their own product pages — is $596/year in licences alone, renewed forever. "Free" is the licence, not the store.

Pick WooCommerce if you have a developer on staff, you already run WordPress content, or you need a model — memberships, bookings, complex subscriptions — hosted platforms don't cover.

3. Squarespace — the best-looking site in the category, at 0% from $29

If you sell a handful of beautiful things and book appointments alongside them, Squarespace gives you the best-looking site in the category with a 0% transaction fee from $29 a month (Core, billed annually). That's a genuinely good deal and a real reason to stay put — Acuity scheduling, courses, memberships, invoices and in-person POS come on the same bill.

Two things to check on your own account. Three plan families are live at once while the new lineup rolls out in waves, and the commerce fee differs across all three — the one that catches people is 3% if you're still on the older Business plan, per their own fee table updated 26 June 2026. And their full feature comparison lists ecommerce analytics and conversion insights, but no A/B testing, no session replay, no heatmaps.

Pick Squarespace if design is the product, your SKU count is low, and you sell time as well as things.

4. Wix — live this afternoon, with no experiment to run on it

Nothing gets a non-technical founder to a published, hosted, domain-connected store faster. $29/mo yearly-prepaid buys real ecommerce; $159 buys the advanced tier. Physical goods, digital goods, dropshipping, print-on-demand, subscriptions, bookings and a 2.6% in-person POS rate sit on one plan. Mtrix has nothing to say to a brand at $17 a month and shouldn't pretend to.

Two caveats. Wix's processing fees stack — "These fees are charged in addition to each other," in their own words — so a cross-border card sale in another currency costs 5.4% + $0.30, and a refund doesn't return the original processing fee. That structure isn't unique to Wix; see the note under the table. Wix just documents it most plainly.

The second caveat is the one that separates Wix. What it calls testing is Test Sites: their docs describe choosing what percentage of traffic sees one alternative version of the site, then publishing or discarding it. That's a staged rollout for feedback — no second variant, no conversion metric, no winner. Wix has analytics; what its own documentation doesn't describe is running two versions against each other and being told which one won.

Pick Wix if speed to a live store matters more than anything you'd do to it afterwards.

5. Headless — the highest ceiling and the longest runway

Medusa (MIT), Saleor (BSD-3), commercetools and Shopify's own Hydrogen + Oxygen decouple the storefront from the commerce engine. Medusa and Saleor can be forked and self-hosted indefinitely — a real answer to a real lock-in fear. On Shopify it's cheap to try: Hydrogen is MIT and Oxygen is available at no extra charge on paid Shopify plans, though every plan below Plus is capped at one headless storefront (25 on Plus).

The cost isn't the licence. Shopify's own enterprise blog, selling headless, says it plainly: "The pricing for an enterprise headless project could cost anywhere from hundreds of thousands to millions upfront, plus annual maintenance costs, depending on the functionality, supporting tools, and level of customization." And in the same piece: "If your business is prospering with a traditional architecture, it may not be worth the financial and time resources to invest in headless."

Price the second cost too, because it never appears in a licence comparison: marketing loses the edit button. No theme customiser, no visual editor unless someone builds or buys one — every seasonal banner becomes a sprint. Saleor sells "Forward Deployed Engineering" at $12,000 as a published line item, which tells you what implementation looks like.

Pick headless if you have front-end engineers and the theme system is genuinely the constraint. Mtrix runs on top of a headless storefront via npm, so a team already committed to Hydrogen or Medusa can add the measurement layer without unwinding the architecture.

6. Mtrix — the one that replaces the stack, not just the storefront

Every other option swaps one storefront for another. Mtrix changes what the platform includes: the builder, the experiments, the session replay, the heatmaps, the error tracking, the real-user Core Web Vitals and the order data, in one product, on one script, against one definition of a session and one definition of revenue. Head to head against the platform you're leaving: Mtrix vs Shopify.

Two deployment models, and the difference matters. On the store you already have, Mtrix runs as an npm package or CDN script and gives you experiments, session replay, analytics, error tracking and real-user performance monitoring — 100% of sessions captured, not a sample. That is the whole offer on that path: you keep Shopify's checkout, prices and theme — the builder and the native checkout come with the platform, not with the script. Built on Mtrix, you get the rest: drag-and-drop building with no developer, edit live and undo in one click, native products, variants and inventory, its own checkout, multi-currency, multi-language, tax, custom domain and SSL, staging, and user-editable meta, canonical, redirect, structured-data and sitemap controls. The builder edits pages Mtrix hosts — not a Shopify theme in place.

• Testing has no cap. A/B, multivariate, split URL, mask URL, bandit allocation, mutually exclusive overlapping tests. Assignment is made server-side against your visitor ID, not in a browser cookie. No limit on concurrent or monthly experiments on any plan; first test live in about five minutes.
• On a store built on Mtrix, checkout is a decision you can test. Use the native checkout — Stripe, Braintree/PayPal, Shopify Payments, iyzico, Mollie, Klarna — or keep the one you have, and A/B test one against the other. Across Mtrix's own clients' checkout tests, the Mtrix checkout converted 14% better than Shopify's.* On a store that stays on Shopify, this one isn't on the table: you keep Shopify's checkout.
• Migration is a shipped feature. Automated import from your GitHub repo (preferred), your live site URL, or Figma, then Mtrix finishes the setup with you. The most complex stores are fully live within one week — the outside case, not the average.
• You can leave with your site. Code export is supported, contracts are monthly or annual, and the certifications are SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001, with GDPR, CCPA/CPRA and HIPAA/HITECH compliance programmes.

Pick Mtrix if you're replacing a platform and four measurement subscriptions at once, page changes wait on a developer today, and a point of conversion rate is worth more than the subscription line.

Who should not switch off Shopify — and where Mtrix loses

• You depend on niche apps. Subscriptions, loyalty, your 3PL, a bundle builder, a review widget. Open your billing page and count them before you read another word of this — every one is a workflow somebody rebuilds by hand on any platform below, and that list is the single best predictor of whether a migration goes well.
• You sell in person. Shopify POS is real and Mtrix has none. Squarespace and Wix have POS; BigCommerce and headless mean building or buying one.
• Your reason is the subscription line. A migration costs more than the delta between $299 and $79, and it costs it in your team's weeks. If price is the whole complaint, the honest destinations here are Wix and Squarespace — not Mtrix.
• You run one theme test a quarter. Rollouts does that natively on Grow and above at no extra cost — on the metrics Shopify picks. A theme experiment reports four (conversion rate, bounce rate, reached-checkout rate, added-to-cart rate); a checkout experiment reports one, checkout conversion rate; "you can't customize the available metrics for your rollout"; and none of its four Rollouts help pages mentions significance, confidence or a winner. For one test a quarter that is enough. Don't buy experimentation infrastructure for a cadence Shopify already covers.
• You don't have the traffic yet. A store doing a few orders a week can't resolve an experiment at any sample size, on any platform. Install Microsoft Clarity — free forever, no traffic ceiling, no card — watch sessions for a quarter, and come back when the volume is there.
• It's peak season. Nobody has ever been glad they replatformed in Q4.

And where Mtrix loses, plainly. No app marketplace. No POS. Web only — no native iOS or Android SDK, so app traffic is out of scope. Session replay and error data are kept one month (events and purchases three years). No free tier — one month free, no credit card, then paid. And the documented import paths are Shopify, Webflow and custom builds: there is no documented WooCommerce migration. What an import carries is answered, not assumed: order and customer history both transfer, and the jobs your apps do — subscription logic, custom checkout code — are supported natively, with each store's specific stack mapped on the migration call rather than promised from a page.

There are no customer stories on this page, because none are published yet. No logos, no case-study numbers. Ask for a reference call instead.

FAQ

Build it, test it, and see the revenue in one place

If the storefront is the problem, one of the five platforms above fixes it. If the reason you can't move the number is that the platform, the tests, the sessions and the orders live in five places — that's what Mtrix replaces.

* Measured across 350,000+ sessions, tested side by side against Shopify's checkout in the same period, over two years of tests. Mtrix's own client results, not a guarantee of what a new store will see.