Compare E-commerce Platforms in Australia

How we compare e-commerce platforms

We list 11 e-commerce platforms sold into Australia, and every one publishes a rate card. Every figure comes from the vendor's own pricing page. Where a vendor publishes in US dollars we convert it and keep the original figure, so a currency move is visible rather than hidden.

The calculator takes your monthly online revenue, your average order value and your product count. It costs each platform's published plans at that product count, then uses the revenue and order value to add card processing: the platform's own published rate where it has one, otherwise an estimate from the average of the published rates, marked as such. Hosting is added for the self-hosted platforms. App subscriptions are not included, because they depend on your setup. Commission does not change the order.

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 often the smallest of the three. The plan is the first. Card processing is the second: a percentage of every sale, charged by whoever moves the money. Where a platform runs its own checkout the rate is published; where it does not, the row names the processor and your rate comes from there.

Read the label inside each figure as carefully as the number: some entry figures are the monthly equivalent of an annual commitment, which is a different product with the same digits. On a store with real turnover, a percentage point of processing outweighs most of the entry plans above, so do the comparison on all three bills at once.

Gateway fees: what an e-commerce platform charges when you do not use its own checkout

Some platforms charge an extra percentage of every sale when you take payment through any gateway other than their own, on top of what that gateway already charges. You pay for the same transaction twice, and nothing on a pricing page announces it.

Two things follow. Where the fee is attached to the entry plan and drops to zero above it, the dearer plan can be the cheaper total: the upgrade pays for itself in the month that percentage of your sales exceeds the gap between the two plan prices, so compare the Mid plan figure against your own turnover. And a short gateway list is the other half of the story: a platform can publish a zero third-party fee because it never gives you a third party to use, which is not the same as being open.

For an Australian merchant there is a deadline attached. From 1 October 2026 you cannot surcharge eftpos, Visa or Mastercard, debit or credit, so the processing percentage becomes a deduction from your margin on every order. If you have been surcharging online, model your platform choice as though you cannot.

Hosted or self-hosted: the split that decides what an e-commerce platform really costs

This table is two different purchases: platforms an owner can run without help, where the server, updates and uptime are the vendor's problem, and software you install and run yourself, where the licence is free and the running of it is not.

Then there is the part no row can price: somebody has to apply security patches, keep tested backups, and be reachable when the checkout breaks on a Saturday. Community support is real and often good, and it is not a number you can ring on a Friday afternoon in Australian time. If nobody in your business maintains a website today and you are not budgeting for a developer, the self-hosted rows of this table will likely cost you more than the hosted ones once someone is paid to run them, whatever the licence costs. Self-hosting earns its keep when you need control over the checkout or the data model; the Custom checkout row shows where that exists.

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 arrives with its own monthly charge. The size of the ecosystem and the typical spend loosely track each other, though not on every row.

Read that as a trade, not 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. A paid theme is a one-off purchase rather than a monthly bill, and the Free themes row shows how far you get without buying one. Check the Built-in blog and SEO features rows before you commit, because filling those gaps with an app is what quietly builds the bill.

Where an e-commerce platform caps you: staff accounts, products and channels

Entry plans here are capped on the things that change when the business grows. Staff accounts is an easy cap to overlook, and it moves the day you hire. Catalogue size is rarely the constraint, since most rows list unlimited products.

If a bookkeeper, a warehouse hand and a casual all need logins, the first column can decide the plan before the price does. Three more rows are worth a look: Multi-channel selling if eBay or Amazon is in next year's plan, Multi-currency if you sell overseas, and Abandoned cart recovery, which is sold as standard and gated by plan on some rows.

No platform here requires a contract, so the commitment is the migration. Moving a live store takes weeks of work and often costs some search ranking, whether or not there was ever a contract to break.