Can you dropship on BigCommerce?

Yes, and the headline number is misleading

BigCommerce takes 0% on every plan, which sounds decisive next to Shopify’s 2% penalty on third-party gateways. Two things undercut it.

The processor fee is worse. Roughly 2.59% + 49¢ on Standard. Compare 100 orders on $5,000 of revenue:

• BigCommerce: 2.59% = $129.50, plus 100 x 49¢ = $49 → $178.50
• Shopify Payments: 2.9% = $145, plus 100 x 30¢ = $30 → $175

Add the identical $39 plan and BigCommerce comes to about $217.50 against Shopify’s $214. The 0% platform fee saves you nothing, because the fixed fee per order gives it all back.

The picture changes only if Shopify Payments is unavailable in your country, where the 2% penalty is $100 a month — the three options there are worth reading before you dismiss BigCommerce entirely.

The cap is the real constraint

Annual online sales limits: $50,000 on Standard, $180,000 on Plus, $400,000 on Pro.

$50,000 a year is $4,166 a month. That is not a large store — it is roughly 84 orders at a $50 average order value, or under three a day. A store that is merely working already exceeds Standard over twelve months, and you are pushed to Plus at $105/mo.

At which point your 0%-transaction-fee platform costs more per month than Shopify Grow, which charges a lower card rate. That is the trap: the plan that looked cheapest becomes the most expensive at exactly the volume where you notice.

The supplier ecosystem decides it

For dropshipping specifically, this matters more than any fee.

DSers, CJdropshipping, Zendrop and AutoDS all build for Shopify first. On BigCommerce you get fewer integrations, later, with thinner documentation — and when something breaks mid-campaign, the fix either does not exist or nobody has written it down.

That is the same argument that decides Wix, and it has nothing to do with which platform is better software. It is about which one your supply chain was built for. Connecting DSers to Shopify takes about ten minutes; everywhere else it is a project.

Where BigCommerce genuinely wins

• Large catalogues. Variant handling and faceted search are better out of the box than Shopify’s.
• B2B features — customer groups, price lists, quotes — included rather than bolted on.
• No third-party gateway penalty, which matters in markets Shopify Payments does not serve.
• Built-in features that would be paid apps on Shopify, so the app bill is genuinely lower.

None of those are dropshipping problems. They are established-catalogue-retailer problems, and BigCommerce is a reasonable answer to them.

What happens when you outgrow it

Both directions cost you something, so decide now rather than at $4,200 a month.

Staying means Plus at $105/mo, which is more per month than Shopify Grow while charging a worse per-order fixed fee.

Leaving means a migration: products and variants re-imported, every URL redirected or turned into a 404, reviews that may not export cleanly, and pixel history starting again. That arrives at the moment the store is working and you least want to touch it.

The cap is not a technical limit — crossing it upgrades you rather than switching the store off. It is a pricing decision made for you, at the point where you are least certain the revenue will hold.

The decision

Choose BigCommerce if you have a large catalogue, need B2B functionality, or Shopify Payments is unavailable and you would rather not pay the 2% — and you are comfortable with a thinner supplier ecosystem.

Choose Shopify if you are testing one product with DSers and AliExpress, which is what most people reading this are doing. The plan arithmetic is in Shopify Basic vs Grow.

Either way, run the numbers on your own revenue rather than the pricing page. The full five-platform comparison at 100 orders a month is on the platform comparison.