Platform comparison
The real cost of every dropshipping platform
Five platforms, priced the way you will actually pay for them: plan fee plus card fees plus the penalties nobody puts on the pricing page. Shopify wins for most people, and the reasons matter more than the verdict.
TL;DR — Quick verdict
Updated August 202616 min readStart on Shopify Basic at $39/mo. The card fee (2.9% + 30¢) dominates your platform cost at every realistic volume, so the $10/mo difference between platforms is noise — the supplier app ecosystem is what actually decides your outcome, and Shopify's is 10x the size of the others. Pick WooCommerce only if you are technical, BigCommerce only for a large catalogue, Wix only to test cheaply, and Shopline only if you sell on TikTok Shop in Asia.
| Platform | Entry price | Card fee | 3rd-party gateway | Apps | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Shopify | $39/mo | 2.9% + 30¢ | 2% on Basic | 13,000+ | Almost every dropshipper. The default for a reason. |
| WooCommerce | $0 + hosting | 2.9% + 30¢ (Stripe) | None | 60,000+ WP plugins | Technical operators who want to own the stack. |
| BigCommerce | $39/mo | ≈2.59% + 49¢ | None | ~1,000 | Large catalogues and B2B, not one-product stores. |
| Wix eCommerce | $29/mo | 2.9% + 30¢ | None | ~500 relevant | Cheapest legitimate entry. Ceiling arrives fast. |
| Shopline | Quote-based | Varies by region | Varies | Small | TikTok Shop sellers in APAC. Niche choice. |
Entry-level pricing per platform, US rates, checked August 2026. Card fees are for domestic online card payments through the platform's own gateway.
What each platform really costs at 100 orders a month
Platform pricing pages compare the wrong number. The plan fee is the small part. Here is the same store on every platform: $5,000 of monthly revenue, 100 orders, $50 average order value, US domestic cards through the platform's own gateway.
Two follow-on questions this table raises:when the $105 Shopify plan pays for itself(roughly $33,000/mo), andwhat the store costs once refunds and apps are counted. Once the platform is chosen, connecting a supplier takes about ten minutes —step by step here. And if Shopify Payments does not support your country, the 2% penalty changes the whole comparison —the three options are here. Cheapest entry of the five isWix Core at $29/mo, with one catch worth knowing before you build, andBigCommerce charges 0% but caps annual sales at $50,000 on Standard. One thing you do not need to buy either way:a paid theme.
| Platform | Plan fee | % fee | Per-order fee | Monthly total | What the total hides |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Shopify Basic | $39.00 | $145.00 | $30.00 | $214.00 | Add $45–$90/mo once you install reviews, upsells and email. |
| WooCommerce | $30.00 | $145.00 | $30.00 | $205.00 | Plus $150–$400/year of extensions and your own maintenance time. |
| BigCommerce Standard | $39.00 | $129.50 | $49.00 | $217.50 | The $50k annual sales cap bites at roughly $4.2k/mo. |
| Wix Core | $29.00 | $145.00 | $30.00 | $204.00 | Cheapest on paper. App gaps cost you elsewhere. |
Monthly cost at $5,000 revenue / 100 orders. Gateway column is the percentage fee, fixed column is the per-order fee. Shopline is excluded because it does not publish comparable public pricing.
Shopify
Best overallThe default, and correctly so. $39/mo on Basic plus 2.9% + 30¢ buys you a checkout that converts on mobile without configuration and an app ecosystem where every supplier tool you will ever need already has a one-click install. You pay for it in monthly rent whether you sell or not, and in a 2% penalty if you cannot use Shopify Payments.
- Entry plan
- $39/mo ($29 annual)
- US card fee
- 2.9% + 30¢
- 3rd-party gateway
- +2% on Basic
- Apps
- 13,000+
Shopify's actual advantage is not features, it is that everything else in your stack was built for it first. DSers, CJdropshipping, Zendrop, AutoDS, Judge.me, Klaviyo and every UGC tool ship a Shopify app before they consider a WooCommerce plugin. When a supplier breaks at 2am, the fix exists and someone has written it down.
The checkout is the second reason. Shop Pay's one-tap flow measurably lifts conversion on returning traffic, and you cannot replicate it. On a store doing 2% conversion, a 0.3 point lift is a 15% revenue increase for zero work.
The cost you should plan for is not $39. It is $39 plus $45–$90 of apps once you add reviews ($15/mo Judge.me), upsells ($29.99/mo Vitals) and email (Klaviyo, free under 250 contacts). Every one of those is optional until your fiftieth order, and most people install them on day two, which is how a $39/mo store becomes a $170/mo store before it has revenue.
| Plan | Monthly | Annual | US card fee | 3rd-party fee | When it makes sense |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | $5 | $5 | 5% + 30¢ | 5% | Link-in-bio selling only. No real storefront. |
| Basic | $39 | $29 | 2.9% + 30¢ | 2% | Where every dropshipper starts and most should stay. |
| Grow | $105 | $79 | 2.7% + 30¢ | 1% | Worth it above roughly $30k/mo, purely on the card rate. |
| Advanced | $399 | $299 | 2.5% + 30¢ | 0.6% | Above $150k/mo, or when you need custom reports. |
| Plus | From $2,300 | — | Negotiated | 0.2% | Checkout scripts and B2B. Not a dropshipping problem. |
Shopify US plan pricing, checked August 2026. Annual column is the effective monthly rate when you prepay 12 months. Card fees are domestic online rates; UK and EU rates are lower and vary by country.
What it does well
- Every supplier app integrates natively — DSers, CJ, Zendrop, AutoDS, Spocket, all one click.
- Shop Pay checkout converts better than anything you will configure yourself.
- Free Dawn theme is fast and converts. A premium theme is a post-validation purchase, not a launch cost.
- Fraud analysis, abandoned checkout emails and basic analytics are included, not add-ons.
- 24/7 support that answers, which matters when payouts are held.
What it costs you
- $39/mo whether you sell nothing or $50k. Three dead months cost $117.
- 2% extra on every order if Shopify Payments is not available in your country. Check this first.
- App costs stack fast — $150–$250/mo is normal at scale, and none of it is optional once installed.
- URL structure is forced (/products/, /collections/) and the blog is weak, which caps content SEO.
- Checkout is locked unless you are on Plus at $2,300/mo.
Pick Shopify if you want to be selling this week
The $1/mo promo covers your first three months, which is exactly the window in which you will find out whether your product works.
$1/mo for 3 months, then $39/mo. We earn a commission if you stay.
WooCommerce
Best if you are technicalFree as a plugin, $30–$80/mo as a working store. You own the stack and pay for it with your time. No platform fee, no gateway penalty, complete control over URLs and content SEO — which is a genuine advantage for a content-heavy store. You are also the sysadmin, the security team and the person awake at 2am when a plugin update breaks checkout.
- Plugin
- $0
- Realistic hosting
- $25–$50/mo
- Stripe fee
- 2.9% + 30¢
- Setup time
- 10–20 hours
The honest comparison is not "free versus $39". It is "$30–$80/mo plus 3–5 hours a month of maintenance" versus "$39/mo plus zero". If your time is worth more than $10/hour, Shopify is cheaper. If you already run WordPress sites, none of this is work and WooCommerce wins.
Do not run a dropshipping store on $5/mo shared hosting. The first time an ad sends 400 concurrent visitors, the site returns 503 and you have paid for traffic that saw an error page. Managed WooCommerce hosting at $25–$50/mo exists for this reason.
Where WooCommerce genuinely beats Shopify: content SEO. You control the URL structure, you can put a real blog at the root, and Rank Math or Yoast give you schema control that Shopify apps approximate badly. For a store planning to rank on informational content, that is worth the maintenance.
What it does well
- No platform fee and no gateway penalty. At $50k/mo that is $1,260/year you keep.
- Full control of URLs, schema and content — the best option if organic content is your traffic plan.
- You own your data and can migrate hosts without asking permission.
- 60,000+ WordPress plugins, and the free ones are genuinely free.
What it costs you
- Supplier integrations are second-class. DSers supports it, but expect more manual work than on Shopify.
- You are responsible for updates, backups, security and speed. Budget 3–5 hours a month.
- Plugin conflicts break checkout silently. You will find out from a customer, not an alert.
- No support line. The answer exists on a forum from 2021 and may no longer be true.
- Cheap hosting collapses under ad traffic, which is the exact moment it matters.
BigCommerce
Watch the revenue cap0% transaction fees on every plan, which sounds decisive until you read the annual sales caps. Standard is limited to $50,000 of online sales per year — roughly $4,200/mo — so a store that is working gets pushed to Plus at $105/mo. The payment processing fee of about 2.59% + 49¢ is also a worse per-order fee than the 30¢ everyone else charges.
- Standard
- $39/mo
- Platform fee
- 0%
- Card fee
- ≈2.59% + 49¢
- Sales cap
- $50k/yr on Standard
BigCommerce is a good platform aimed at a different customer. Faceted search, multi-storefront and B2B pricing rules are built in rather than bolted on with apps, which matters when you sell 2,000 SKUs. A dropshipping store sells one to five.
The app ecosystem is the real constraint: roughly 1,000 apps against Shopify's 13,000, and the dropshipping-specific tools are thinner. You will find a way to connect AliExpress, but it will be the second-best integration written by a smaller team.
Run the cap math before you commit. At $8,000/mo you clear the $50k Standard cap in month seven, land on Plus at $105/mo, and your "0% transaction fee" platform now costs more per month than Shopify Grow, which charges a lower card rate.
What it does well
- Genuinely 0% platform transaction fees on every plan, including if you use your own gateway.
- Faceted search, product filtering and B2B features included at Pro instead of $50/mo of apps.
- Multi-storefront on one plan if you sell into several markets.
- No forced URL structure, better content SEO control than Shopify.
What it costs you
- Annual sales caps: $50k Standard, $180k Plus, $400k Pro. Growth forces an upgrade.
- The 49¢ per-order fee costs you $19/mo more than a 30¢ fee at 100 orders.
- App ecosystem is roughly 1/13th the size of Shopify, and dropshipping tools are the gap.
- Theme costs $150–$300 and the free ones look dated next to Shopify Dawn.
Free trial, then $39/mo Standard with a $50k annual sales cap.
Wix eCommerce
Cheapest real entry$29/mo on Core with 0% commission and a 2.9% + 30¢ card fee, which makes it the cheapest legitimate way to have a real store. The ceiling arrives faster than people expect: supplier integrations are limited to Modalyst and Spocket, and the template is locked once you publish, so a redesign means rebuilding the site.
- Core plan
- $29/mo
- Wix commission
- 0%
- Card fee
- 2.9% + 30¢
- Supplier apps
- Limited
Wix is fine. That is the whole review. The editor is the easiest of the five, the templates look current, and $29/mo with no commission is honest pricing. If you want to test one product for the smallest possible monthly commitment, this works.
What you give up is the AliExpress supply chain. Modalyst is Wix-owned and its catalogue is narrower than AliExpress by an order of magnitude; Spocket costs $39.99/mo on top and its products carry higher wholesale prices. If your plan is DSers plus AliExpress — which is the plan for most beginners — Wix is fighting you.
The template lock is the other thing to know before you build. Changing template on Wix means rebuilding pages, not swapping a theme. On Shopify a theme change is an afternoon.
What it does well
- Cheapest real store at $29/mo with 0% platform commission.
- The easiest editor of the five. Non-technical users get a decent-looking store in a day.
- Bookings, blog and email are bundled rather than being separate app subscriptions.
What it costs you
- Supplier ecosystem is the weak point — no first-class DSers/AliExpress path.
- Template locked after publishing. A redesign is a rebuild.
- Checkout customisation is shallow, and one-page checkout apps do not exist here.
- Scaling past a few hundred orders a month means migrating anyway.
Core plan $29/mo billed annually; monthly billing costs more.
Shopline
APAC / TikTok Shop onlyStrong in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Southeast Asia, with the tightest TikTok Shop and social-commerce integration of the five. It does not publish one transparent global price list — what you pay depends on your region and usually a sales call, which is itself the reason to be cautious: you cannot model your unit economics before you commit.
- Pricing
- Quote-based, region-dependent
- Strength
- TikTok Shop + social commerce
- Core markets
- HK, TW, SG, MY, VN
- App ecosystem
- Small
We are not going to invent a price for Shopline the way most comparison sites do. Its published pricing varies by market and several plans route through a sales conversation. For a beginner that is a real disadvantage, because your first job is knowing your cost per order before you spend on ads.
Where it earns a look: if your traffic plan is TikTok Shop in an APAC market, Shopline's native integration and local payment support beat what you will assemble on Shopify from outside the region. Livestream selling tooling is also further along than the Western platforms.
For a US or EU dropshipper with a DSers-and-Meta plan, there is no case for it. You would be choosing a smaller app ecosystem, thinner English documentation and opaque pricing in exchange for features you will not use.
What it does well
- Best-in-class TikTok Shop and livestream commerce integration.
- Local payment methods and logistics partners across APAC that Western platforms handle badly.
- Omnichannel and POS features included rather than bolted on.
What it costs you
- No single transparent price list. Expect a sales call before you know your cost.
- Small app ecosystem and few dropshipping-specific integrations.
- English documentation and community are thin compared with Shopify.
- Migrating away later is harder than migrating away from Shopify or Woo.
Pricing is quote-based and varies by region.
Best for beginners vs best for scaling
These are different questions and the answers are different platforms. Most guides collapse them into one recommendation, which is why people migrate at month six.
Best for beginners: Shopify Basic
You do not know which product will work yet, so your priority is speed to launch and the widest supplier support. $39/mo (or $1/mo for three months) buys both. Use the free Dawn theme, install DSers and nothing else, and spend the saved time on creative.
- Live store in under a day with no code
- DSers, CJ and Zendrop all one-click
- Free theme that converts on mobile
- Cancel any month if the product fails
Best for scaling: Shopify Grow, or WooCommerce if content is your traffic
Above roughly $30k/mo, the 2.7% card rate on Grow pays for the higher plan fee and then some. If your traffic plan is organic content rather than paid ads, WooCommerce's SEO control becomes worth the maintenance burden it costs you.
- Grow saves ~$95/mo at $50k revenue vs Basic
- Advanced only pays off past ~$150k/mo
- BigCommerce caps force upgrades as you grow
- Migrate before you scale, never during
When to migrate, and when not to
Migrating costs two weeks of attention and always breaks something: URLs, reviews, email flows, pixel data. Do it between products, never during a campaign that is working.
The only good reasons to move are structural: your card rate is materially worse than the alternative at your volume, Shopify Payments is unavailable in your country so you are paying the 2% penalty, or you have hit a platform cap. "The other one looks nicer" is not a reason.
If you do migrate, keep the old store live for 30 days, set 301 redirects for every product and collection URL, and re-verify your pixel before you resume spending. Re-learning costs you 3–7 days of ad performance either way.