Shopify alternatives, and the case for keeping the checkout.

Why do merchants look for Shopify alternatives?

You usually start looking because your monthly bill no longer matches what your store does for you. Plan price is one trigger. So is an app stack that keeps growing, especially when each small monthly charge quietly becomes part of the store's fixed cost. Your theme can push you too, if content pages feel harder than they should. A third-party comparison puts typical mid-market Shopify app spend at $500 to $2,000 a month. So you may find the apps cost more than the platform.

Your theme is the other trigger. If you publish guides and lookbooks, or if landing pages carry much of your pitch, Liquid templates and app scripts can start to feel like the drag. And you can see part of this in your own markup. Script weight shows up there, and so do heading order and structured data, all of them public. The assessment reads those signals on your homepage and up to eight sampled pages, so you can tell whether the problem sits in your theme, your apps or neither. It does not read your analytics, so it cannot tell you what a slow page costs in sales.

Which costs grow with your store on Shopify?

Your costs grow in four places. The plan is one. Fees on each order are another, and apps and staff seats can keep adding weight after the base price looks settled. On the EUR page you pay €27 monthly for Basic, €74 for Grow and €384 for Advanced, or €19, €56 and €289 if you pay yearly. Plus starts at €2,100 a month. The base price is rarely the whole bill.

Your order fees move with the plan too. If you use a third-party payment provider, you pay 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow and 0.6% on Advanced. Selling abroad can add more. You may add a 1.5% or 2% currency conversion fee on Shopify Payments, whose online rates run from 2.5% to 2.9% plus 30¢. As your team grows, seats matter. Grow includes up to 5 staff accounts and Advanced up to 15. A third-party claim says a $29 plan can reach $2,000 a month once you add apps and themes. But your invoices show what you really pay, so check them before you trust that figure.

Which Shopify alternatives fit which store size?

Your store size and your team decide the fit. One third-party matrix says stores under $1M in GMV should start on Shopify Basic or Advanced. It calls BigCommerce credible if you want zero transaction fees on a non-Shopify processor or need B2B features. It also says to avoid WooCommerce unless you already run WordPress. (That last warning is about running a second system, not about the software itself.)

If you have a developer or an agency partner and annual sales between $200k and $20M, WooCommerce can fit. You still handle hosting, security, updates and backups, with managed hosting budgeted at $50 to $500 a month. If your catalog and team are larger, you can look at Medusa, an open-source headless backend you host and build around, or commercetools. Each one trades your monthly bill for operations work that you or your team must own. You pay less in fees and more in hours. So the real question is what you can afford to own. The roles list below ranks them for you.

When should you keep Shopify checkout and change the storefront?

You should keep Shopify checkout when your orders work. Payments and customer accounts need to work too, and if they do, your pain may sit in your pages rather than in the commerce system. Checkout and the order system are where you carry the most risk, so moving them needs a reason your store can name. Shopify says its checkout converts 15% better on average than other platforms, but it calls that a platform-wide figure, not the lift you should expect from upgrading.

Change the storefront when your content pages are the problem. You can put a separate marketing site on Astro in front of your guides and landing pages while you keep your products and checkout on Shopify. I move legacy and WordPress estates to these stacks, and when your checkout works I tell you to leave it alone. If your costs sit in apps, you may only need to prune them. On Advanced you can brand checkout. You need Plus for apps on the information, shipping and payment pages.

What is a headless Shopify storefront, and when is it worth it?

A headless Shopify storefront is a front end you build and host. It reads your products and carts from Shopify through the Storefront API, available only in GraphQL. Shopify describes two channels. With the Headless channel you can host on any stack, including Hydrogen storefronts deployed elsewhere such as Vercel. With the Hydrogen channel you build with Hydrogen, which runs on React Router, and you deploy to Oxygen, Shopify's hosting. (One channel gives you freedom, the other gives you a default.)

It is worth it when you have an application, personalization or many editors on your team. In that case, you should look at Next.js with Sanity or Contentful. You gain control of your rendering and script weight, and Vercel documents ISR as stale-while-revalidate caching that persists for 31 days or until revalidated. You give up a hosted admin. You also give up plugins and your editors' visual canvas, and you take on the code. If your pages are mostly content, you may do better with Astro. Your headers and markup show you what a rebuild has to beat.

How do you check your own store's pages before deciding?

You check your own store by running the free assessment on your homepage, then reading the evidence behind each of the eight pillars. It reads your homepage and up to eight sampled pages. The read covers response headers, markup, structured data, headings, script and image weight, and robots and canonical signals. You get one score out of 100 in four bands: 80 to 100 good standing; 60 to 79 constrained; 40 to 59 at risk; 0 to 39 legacy condition. The evidence matters more than the number.

It takes you about two minutes. You give a work email so you get the report link once, and you can run three checks per hour per connection. It does not log in. Your analytics stay outside the read, field performance stays outside it, and your team does too. Your pages will not tell you what your customers think. If your site is down, you see the Wayback Machine read instead of a score. And before you move any URL, you should map old URLs to new ones and use permanent redirects, as Google advises.

Every alternative, in one list.

Questions, answered.

Your next read.

1. 01Magento to ShopifyCatalog, customers, orders, extensions and URL rewrites.
2. 02Core Web Vitals testLCP, INP and CLS from what the page ships.
3. 03Next.js SEO auditRendering mode, metadata, hydration cost.