BigCommerce vs Sellfy: one plan upgrades itself when you sell more

What the record says

Most pricing pages ask you to pick a plan. BigCommerce's picks for you, and it says so on the card. Core is described as being for 'New businesses with up to $30K in annual sales', and directly beneath the $29 price sits the line 'Up to $30K TTM GMV; plan auto-upgrades to Growth.' Growth carries the same construction: 'Up to $100K TTM GMV; plan auto-upgrades to Scale.' TTM is trailing twelve months, so this is not a projection — it is a rolling measurement of what you have already sold.

Follow that through and the cost curve is steep. A shop doing $29,000 a year pays $29 a month, or $348. Cross into $31,000 and it pays $79 a month, $948 — an extra $600 a year triggered by $2,000 of extra sales. Cross $100,000 and it becomes $299 a month, $3,588 a year. None of those steps require you to click anything, and none of them are hidden: BigCommerce prints all three thresholds on the plan cards. But they are the sort of thing that gets left out of a comparison table, and they matter more than the headline price.

Sellfy's page has no equivalent mechanism anywhere on it. Starter is $22 a month billed yearly, Business $59, Premium $119, and nothing on the page ties any of them to how much you sell. Every tier is published as 'Starting from', so the figures are floors that can rise with usage — we are not claiming the bill is immovable — but the specific structure where revenue triggers a plan change does not exist here.

The annual discounts are almost identical and both are honest. Sellfy's switch says 'Yearly (save 25%)' and delivers 24.1%, 25.3% and 25.2% across its three tiers. BigCommerce's badge says 'Save 25%' and, on the one tier where it publishes both figures, delivers 25.06% — Scale at $399 monthly against $299 annually. After a long run of vendors whose discount claims did not survive checking, both of these do.

There is a second BigCommerce meter worth knowing about before you reach it. Scale carries a $33,333 per month GMV cap with '0.9% on GMV above cap'. That works out to $400,000 a year, above which every extra dollar of sales carries a 0.9% charge. It is worth being precise about what that is not: BigCommerce separately advertises 'Zero fees with Embedded Payment Providers' on every tier, so the 0.9% is a platform charge on volume rather than a payment-processing fee. At $600,000 of annual sales it adds about $1,800 a year on top of the $3,588 plan price.

Neither page tells the whole story, and the gaps are in different places. We could not actuate BigCommerce's Pay Monthly control, so the monthly-billed rates for Core and Growth are not quoted above — the only monthly figure we publish for BigCommerce is Scale's $399, which the page states in its own text. Sellfy's 'Starting from' labelling means its published prices are floors without a stated ceiling. In both cases we have quoted what the page says and left the rest blank rather than filling it in from a discount badge.

The two products are also aimed at different people, which the prices reflect more honestly than most comparisons admit. Sellfy tops out at $119 a month and badges its entry tier 'Creators favorite'. BigCommerce's ladder runs to a Performance tier at 'starting at $1,499 per month, billed annually' and describes its plans in terms of businesses heading toward and past $1M in annual sales. A creator selling digital downloads and a retailer running a catalogue are not choosing between the same two things.

So the verdict depends on a question the pricing pages answer better than any feature list: do you want the bill to follow your revenue or not? If you are small and want to stay predictable, Sellfy is cheaper at the entry point and stays put. If you are heading for six figures, BigCommerce's automatic ladder is at least printed on the card, and the tier you will end up on is the one built for that volume.