How we compare e-commerce platforms
We list 11 e-commerce platforms sold into Australia, and a published rate card exists for 11 providers, which is every platform in the table. Nothing here is a quote we have guessed at.
Ranking is arithmetic on the published plan price at the inputs you enter. Commission never moves a platform up or down, we do not sell prominence, and the cheapest row is whatever the sums say it is. Where a vendor publishes a price in US dollars we convert it and keep the original figure and rate, so a currency move is visible rather than baked in.
One limit worth stating plainly: the estimate on this page is the software subscription. It is not your total cost of selling online, because card processing and app subscriptions are separate bills that depend on your turnover and your setup. The next three sections are about those bills, and they are the reason a table sorted on monthly price alone will mislead you.
What the monthly price of an e-commerce platform leaves out
An Australian store pays for its online sales in three places each month, and on a trading store the subscription is frequently the smallest of the three.
The plan. Entry plans in this table start well below what most owners expect: Squarespace publishes $17/mo (Basic), Ecwid by Lightspeed $7/mo (Starter, 10 products), GoDaddy Online Store $26.95/mo (Ecommerce, true monthly), Webflow $41/mo (Standard, annual), Shopify $42/mo (annual), Wix $42/mo (Core) and BigCommerce $55/mo (Core). Read the label inside each figure as carefully as the number: several are the monthly equivalent of an annual commitment, while GoDaddy's entry figure is marked as true monthly. An annual-billed headline and a true monthly price are different products with the same digits.
Card processing. A percentage of every sale, charged by whoever moves the money. Where a platform runs its own checkout the rate is published: Shopify's native rate is 1.75% + $0.30 (Basic), Wix 1.9% + $0.30 (Wix Payments), WooCommerce 1.75% + $0.30 (WooPayments) and Square 2.2% (Free/Plus), 1.9% (Premium). Where it does not, the row names the processor instead: Squarespace reads Via Squarespace Payments, Webflow Via Stripe, PrestaShop Via Stripe and Adobe Commerce Via Braintree, and your rate then comes from that processor's own pricing rather than from the platform.
Apps. The recurring subscriptions that fill the gaps in the core product. Typical spend runs $50 to $200/mo on Shopify and $0 on Square, and that spread is not noise.
At $10,000 a month in sales, a percentage point of processing is a larger number than most of the entry plans above. So do the comparison on all three bills at once. Sorting on the plan price alone answers a question you were not really asking.
Gateway fees: what an e-commerce platform charges when you do not use its own checkout
This is the trap that defines the category, and it is worth stating explicitly because nothing on a vendor's pricing page announces it.
Some platforms charge you an extra percentage of every sale when you take payment through any gateway other than their own. It is charged on top of what that gateway already charges you, so you pay for the same transaction twice: once to the processor, and again to the software.
The rows that carry it: Shopify lists 2% (Basic), Squarespace 3% (Basic), 0% (Core+) and Webflow 2% (Standard), 0% (Plus+). The rows that do not: BigCommerce 0%, Wix 0%, WooCommerce 0%, Ecwid 0%, Square 0% and GoDaddy Online Store 0%. On the open-source side the answer is No to a contract and Varies for the fee, because there is no vendor in the middle of the payment to charge one.
Two things follow from this, and both change which platform is cheapest for you.
The penalty usually falls away higher up the same ladder. Read the Squarespace and Webflow fee rows above and you will see the percentage attached to the entry plan and zero above it, which means the more expensive plan can be the cheaper total. The arithmetic is simple enough to do on the back of an envelope: take the fee percentage that applies to your entry plan, and the upgrade pays for itself in the month that percentage of your sales exceeds the gap between the two plan prices. Compare Squarespace's $28/mo (Core) and Webflow's $104/mo (Plus) against your own turnover, not against the entry figures.
A short gateway list is the other half of the same story. Shopify supports 100+ gateways, Wix 70+, Ecwid 70+ and BigCommerce 65+. At the other end, Squarespace lists Stripe, PayPal, Webflow Stripe, PayPal, Apple Pay and Square Square only. A platform can honestly publish a zero third-party fee simply because it never gives you a third party to use, which is not the same thing as being open.
For an Australian merchant there is a deadline attached to all of this. From 1 October 2026 you cannot surcharge eftpos, Visa or Mastercard, debit or credit, so the processing percentage stops being something you can hand to the customer and becomes a straight deduction from your margin on every order. If you have been surcharging online, model your platform choice now as though you cannot.
Hosted or self-hosted: the split that decides what an e-commerce platform really costs
This table looks like a price ladder and is actually two different purchases, and the technical skill row is where the line sits.
On one side, platforms an owner can run without help. Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, Square, Ecwid and GoDaddy Online Store all list technical skill as None, BigCommerce as Basic and Webflow as Basic (design skill). Hosting on all of these reads Included, which is the whole point of paying a subscription: the server, the updates, the certificate and the uptime are the vendor's problem.
On the other side, software you install and run yourself. PrestaShop and Adobe Commerce both list Developer, and WooCommerce lists Basic to Developer. The licence is genuinely free, at $0 (free plugin) for WooCommerce, $0 (open source) for PrestaShop and $0 (Open Source) for Adobe Commerce. The running of it is not. Hosting reads $4 to $45/mo for WooCommerce, $5 to $30/mo for PrestaShop and $50 to $200+/mo (self-hosted) for Adobe Commerce, and managed WordPress hosting sits around $15 to $45/mo (managed hosting) once you want it looked after properly.
Then there is the part no row can price. Somebody has to apply security patches, keep backups you have actually tested, and be reachable when the checkout breaks on a Saturday. Support on PrestaShop reads Community + paid and on WooCommerce Community + paid, where Shopify lists 24/7 chat, email, phone, BigCommerce 24/7 chat, phone, email and Wix 24/7 online. Community support is real and often good, and it is also not a number you can ring at 4pm on a Friday in Australian time.
The honest guidance is unglamorous. If nobody in your business maintains a website today, and you are not budgeting for a developer, the self-hosted half of this table is more expensive than the hosted half no matter what the licence costs. Self-hosting earns its keep when you need control over the checkout or the data model that a hosted platform will not give you, and custom checkout is exactly where that shows: WooCommerce lists Yes (fully customisable), Adobe Commerce Yes, while Shopify lists Limited (Plus only for full) and Squarespace No.
Apps, themes and the running cost of an e-commerce platform
A large app marketplace is sold as an advantage and behaves like a cost, because the features it fills in are the ones the core product left out, and each one arrives with its own monthly charge.
The size of the ecosystem and the typical spend track each other closely. Shopify lists 10,000+ apps against typical app costs of $50 to $200/mo. Adobe Commerce lists 4,000+ extensions at $100 to $500/mo, and PrestaShop 5,000+ modules at $10 to $100/mo. Further down, BigCommerce is 1,000+ apps at $20 to $100/mo, Wix 500+ apps at $0 to $50/mo, Ecwid 100+ at $0 to $30/mo, Squarespace 40+ extensions at $0 to $30/mo and GoDaddy Online Store Limited at $0 to $20/mo.
Read that as a trade rather than a ranking. A deep marketplace means almost anything you need later already exists and you will rent it monthly. A shallow one means a lower running cost and a hard stop when you need something the vendor did not build.
Themes work the other way round, because a theme is bought once. Free theme counts are 900+ on Wix, 100+ on Squarespace, ~13 free on Shopify, ~14 free on BigCommerce and ~3 on Square. A paid theme is a one-off few hundred dollars and then it is done, which makes it the cheapest line in this whole section.
Two capabilities are worth checking before you commit, because filling them with an app is what quietly builds the monthly bill. A blog is the cheapest organic traffic an Australian store has: it is built in on Shopify at Yes, and reads No on Ecwid and No on Square. SEO control is the same shape: Square lists Basic and GoDaddy Online Store Basic, against Yes on BigCommerce.
Where an e-commerce platform caps you: products, staff accounts and selling channels
Entry plans in this category are rarely stripped of features. They are capped, and the caps are on the things that change when the business grows.
Staff accounts. The cap almost nobody checks and the one that bites first, because it moves the day you hire. Ecwid allows 1, Squarespace 1 to 2, Shopify 2 (Basic) and Webflow 3 (Standard) to 15 (Advanced), while BigCommerce, Wix and WooCommerce all list Unlimited. If a bookkeeper, a warehouse hand and a casual all need logins, that row can decide the plan before the price does.
Catalogue size. Less often a constraint than owners assume. Products allowed reads Unlimited on Shopify, BigCommerce and Squarespace, Unlimited (Business+) on Wix, 10 (Starter) to Unlimited on Ecwid and 500 (Standard) to 15,000 (Advanced) on Webflow. Only the last two really price on catalogue size, so if you sell a handful of lines this is not the axis to shop on.
Selling somewhere other than your own site. Multi-channel reads Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Instagram, Google, TikTok, Pinterest on Shopify, Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Instagram, Google, Walmart on BigCommerce and Facebook, Instagram, Google, Amazon, eBay, TikTok on Ecwid, against No native on Webflow and Limited (social sharing) on Squarespace. If eBay or Amazon AU is in your plan for next year, check this row this year.
Selling to buyers overseas. Multi-currency is No on Square and Squarespace, Limited on Wix and Yes (Plus+) on Webflow, where BigCommerce lists Yes and Ecwid Yes (Unlimited).
Recovering an abandoned checkout. Sold as standard and frequently gated. Shopify lists Yes (all plans), where BigCommerce reads Yes (Growth+), Squarespace Yes (Core+) and Ecwid Yes (Business+). On a store with real traffic this is one of the highest-return features on the page, so a plan that excludes it is not the plan you are actually buying.
There is a free end to this table and it is honest about what it is. Square's free tier reads Yes, WooCommerce's Yes (open source), and Wix's reads Yes (no e-com), which is the distinction worth catching: a free website plan is not a free store. Contracts are not the risk here, because contract requirements across this table read No. What you are committing to is the migration, and moving a live store between platforms costs a fortnight and some ranking whether or not there was ever a contract to break.