Last verified: September 2026
An enterprise ecommerce platform comparison is an evaluation of commerce platforms across architecture, total cost of ownership, and native capability that helps growth-stage and enterprise brands choose a system they can afford to staff as well as license.
Shopify Plus, Salesforce Commerce Cloud (recently renamed Agentforce Commerce), Adobe Commerce (formerly Magento Commerce), and BigCommerce charge annual license fees anywhere from roughly $18,000 to $500,000 or more, depending on GMV.
That range is just the license fee. Shopify Plus starts at $2,300 a month on a 3-year term or $2,500 on a 1-year term, $27,600 to $30,000 a year. The median US software developer earned $135,980 in May 2025, so the developer who runs that store costs 4.5 to 4.9 times the license in salary alone, before benefits and payroll taxes.
The first half compares the four on architecture, cost, features and scale. The second half turns that into a team: the stack each platform forces you to hire, what those people cost, the in-house versus agency break-even, and the order to hire in.
An enterprise ecommerce platform is a commerce system built for high order volume, multi-storefront operations, complex catalogs, and deep integration with ERP, PIM, and OMS systems. It's licensed on a mix of published starting prices and revenue-linked or negotiated enterprise terms.
That scope is what separates it from a WordPress site running WooCommerce or a starter Shopify store. In enterprise ecommerce, your team or a partner's team owns those integrations.
No. Shopify Plus is the enterprise tier of the same platform, with unlimited staff accounts, checkout extensibility, multiple expansion stores, lower card processing rates, and a lower third-party gateway surcharge, on a negotiated multi-year contract and not a published monthly plan.
Shopify's pricing pages put numbers on the gap. Staff accounts are unlimited on Plus and capped at 15 on Advanced. Plus pays 0.20% on third-party gateways where Advanced pays 0.6%. One Plus contract covers the main store and 9 expansion stores. B2B no longer separates the two: since April 2, 2026, company profiles, payment terms and up to three custom catalogs ship on every paid plan, and Plus adds unlimited catalogs, deposits and B2B checkout customization.
That contract is a 1-year or 3-year commitment on a platform where developer-built extensions run the checkout logic. The developer relationship starts on the day you sign.
This comparison covers four enterprise ecommerce platforms for brands between $10M and $250M GMV. Composable-only vendors sit in a different evaluation, so the next section names them without comparing them.
The table sets the four side by side on seven dimensions. Three of them (hosting model, upgrade management, and infrastructure staffing) decide whether you hire engineers just to keep the platform running.
Sourced from Shopify, Salesforce and BigCommerce pricing pages, as of September 2026. Adobe's SaaS versus PaaS comparison, lifecycle policy and deadlines cover hosting, upgrades and Cloud dates; Vendr, license bands. Salesforce's B2C Commerce, POD FAQ and Salesforce Ben cover stacks and pods; B2B Commerce and customer portal pages cover native B2B quoting and account hierarchies; B2C release process, upgrade automation and Preview-stage compatibility testing. Fit profiles and talent pool breadth (skill overlap with standard web engineering) are Constant Hire analysis. BigCommerce renamed Enterprise to Performance on June 1, 2026.
The best enterprise ecommerce platform depends on three inputs at once: commercial model, GMV and the engineering capacity you can hire.
A DTC brand adding wholesale, a mid-market distributor, and a global enterprise already on Salesforce land in different columns, and each column sets the team you have to build. If you cannot staff the row called infrastructure staffing, that row makes the choice for you. The talent pool row measures skill overlap with standard web engineering, and a broader overlap gives you more candidates when you post the first role.
Composable-only vendors such as commercetools and Elastic Path are out of scope. So is VTEX, which now sells a full native commerce core under its "Composable and Complete" positioning. SAP Commerce Cloud, formerly Hybris, is out too, because its infrastructure and licensing model sit in a heavier category than these four.
This article helps you decide what team to build, so evaluate the composable vendors after that team exists. Headless commerce separates the storefront from the commerce back end, and composable commerce goes further by letting you assemble the remaining services yourself through microservices and an API-first architecture that vendors call MACH. Both are hiring commitments before they are technology choices, and both trade one vendor relationship for several smaller ones.
The hosting model decides who carries infrastructure, upgrades, and security patching, and that decides what you hire.
Shopify Plus is multi-tenant software as a service (SaaS). Shopify handles hosting, security patches and upgrades, and says its stores are Level 1 PCI DSS compliant. Custom backend logic runs in Shopify Functions, inside Shopify's infrastructure.
The trade is governance. Storefront queries run through a GraphQL-only API, checkout changes go through Checkout Extensibility, and custom data extends Shopify's own models through metafields, so the schema stays Shopify's. You never hire for infrastructure, and no hire can move the platform boundary.
Salesforce Commerce Cloud, renamed Agentforce Commerce at Dreamforce in October 2025, is two products with two technology stacks. B2C Commerce, originally Demandware, runs on its own stack, separate from the core Salesforce platform. Storefronts use the Storefront Reference Architecture (SFRA) with JavaScript controllers, or a React front end on PWA Kit or Storefront Next, and server-side scripts run on the Mozilla Rhino engine.
B2B Commerce, originally CloudCraze, runs natively on the core Salesforce CRM platform with Apex and Lightning Web Components. If you run both, you hire into two unrelated developer markets and maintain two build pipelines.
Adobe Commerce deploys in three ways. Two of them, on-premises and Adobe Commerce on Cloud (a single-tenant package on AWS or Azure), run PHP 8.x on Magento's open-source core, with Symfony components and data in MySQL or MariaDB on an EAV schema. The third option, Adobe Commerce as a Cloud Service, is SaaS, where Adobe handles hosting, upgrades, and scaling. The package you buy sets the infrastructure hire.
Adobe's feature comparison lists in-process PHP customization and manual patching for the on-premises and Cloud packages, so almost anything is possible in the code, and patch work falls on your team. From June 1, 2027, Adobe will stop maintaining Cloud environments on unsupported versions and may suspend their traffic, so a fixed date now drives your upgrade calendar. App Builder and API Mesh exist to move new work outside the core. On both packages, you staff infrastructure and treat upgrades as a permanent line item.
BigCommerce Enterprise is now called Performance and runs on what BigCommerce calls Open SaaS, a vendor-maintained hosted core. Its Checkout SDK can replace the checkout interface entirely, with more room than Shopify Plus's extension model, so checkout changes become frontend work you can staff.
Native storefronts use Stencil, a Handlebars-based theme engine; headless builds use Catalyst on Next.js and draw on React skills you can hire on the open market. BigCommerce says its APIs expose over 90% of platform functionality.
BigCommerce webhooks push events over HTTPS to an endpoint you host, so backend extensions run in a cloud account your team owns, on a stack your team already knows. That is a quiet cost advantage: the backend hire is a general web engineer, not a platform specialist.
Six components make up enterprise ecommerce platform cost: license, implementation, payment and transaction fees, apps and extensions, infrastructure and environments, and the fully loaded cost of the people who run it. Vendor pricing pages omit that last line, and the introduction's wage comparison shows it can be the largest.
None of the four publishes a full enterprise rate card. Shopify and BigCommerce publish starting prices; Salesforce and Adobe publish none. Every other figure below is an estimate reported by agencies or publishers, not a price list.
Shopify Plus pricing is $2,300 a month on a 3-year term and $2,500 on a 1-year term. Higher-volume merchants move to a variable platform fee that Shopify ties to revenue and business model but does not publish. Fuel Made, a Shopify agency, reports 0.25% of monthly GMV on the 3-year term and 0.40% on the 1-year term once monthly sales pass roughly $1M, while Contra Collective, an agency, puts the threshold at $800k a month. Third-party gateways add 0.20% on top. A brand approaching $1M a month should model the variable fee before it signs a term.
BigCommerce Performance, formerly Enterprise, starts at $1,499 a month billed annually, or $17,988 a year. BigCommerce says its Open Payment Provider Fee does not apply to Performance under contracted terms. For a high-AOV business, that makes its bill more predictable than Shopify Plus or Salesforce, where fees move with GMV.
Salesforce lists both B2B Commerce editions as Contact for Pricing and takes a percentage of GMV without naming it. Uncap, a Shopify agency, reports about 1% of GMV for Growth and 2% for Advanced, which at $25M in GMV is $250,000 a year in license fees alone. A Premier Success Plan adds 30% of net license fees on top, and for B2C Commerce, Contra Collective reports licenses of $150k to $500k+ a year, scaling with GMV.
Vendr, a software procurement platform, says Adobe Commerce pricing is custom and based on GMV, order volume, and deployment model. ITQlick, a software review platform, reports that Adobe Commerce starts at $22,000 a year.
That floor has no published ceiling, and the rest sits in the infrastructure and engineering work covered in the architecture section.
Sourced from the Shopify Help Center and pricing pages, the Shopify Plus pricing page, the Salesforce B2B Commerce pricing page, BigCommerce pricing, the MuleSoft pricing page, Vendr's Salesforce and Adobe pages, and ITQlick. Cells labeled Uncap est., Contra est., Vendr est., or ITQlick est. are estimates as reported by Uncap, Contra Collective, Vendr, and ITQlick. Uncap and Contra Collective are agencies and not independent benchmarks. Salesforce and Adobe publish no rate card, and Shopify and BigCommerce publish starting prices only.
Every figure in this table comes from a company that sells the platform, builds on it or brokers the contract. None of them publishes what it costs to staff the platform you pick, which is why the second half of this article prices the team.
Third-party apps add recurring fees on top of the license, and some bill on volume. Recharge, a subscription app, lists its top published plan at $499 a month plus 1.34% per transaction. That is how a cheap platform becomes an expensive one. Price the app stack before you call Plus the cheaper option.
Salesforce carries a higher first-year systems integration commitment than Shopify Plus. Contra Collective reports $500k to $1.5M for mid-market SFCC builds, and $2M+ for complex ones, against $300k to $900k for Shopify Plus, usually before MuleSoft's middleware licensing on top, from $2,000 a month with a $50k minimum on its pre-commit model.
The platforms differ most in five areas, and each one ends on a seat you have to fill or a backlog you have to own.
Adobe Commerce is the benchmark. Adobe's B2B documentation lists company accounts and hierarchies, shared catalogs, requisition lists, negotiable quotes, and purchase order approval rules. BigCommerce's B2B Edition covers comparable ground natively. It offers buyer roles including Admin, Senior Buyer, and Junior Buyer, and a Buyer Portal supporting quotes, invoices, and multiple company users.
Shopify Plus has companies, catalogs, locations, and payment terms but no native RFQ cycle, and order-review rules, quotes, and custom role permissions still come through apps. On B2B, Shopify Plus vs Adobe Commerce turns on who supplies the quote and approval workflow.
On Shopify Plus, every missing B2B workflow lands on a developer's backlog.
All four support headless, through BigCommerce's GraphQL Storefront API, Adobe's GraphQL schemas and Edge Delivery Services storefront, Salesforce's PWA Kit on Managed Runtime, and Shopify's Hydrogen, which Shopify rebuilt in 2026 to run on any React stack, including Next.js. What it costs you differs. Shopify's themes use an integrated CMS, so decoupling there adds a headless CMS, another vendor, and another skill set to staff.
Headless on any of the four means hiring React, Next.js, and TypeScript skills on top of platform skills.
Adobe Commerce vs Shopify Plus on multi-store depends on what your stores share. Adobe's scope hierarchy runs global, website, store, and store view, and BigCommerce's Multi-Storefront runs multiple websites from a single catalog, so one team runs catalog management for the whole footprint on either. Salesforce manages all sites and locales from Business Manager with catalogs shared between sites. Shopify runs multiple markets from one store and points brands with independent local teams toward separate expansion stores, 9 of which come with Plus.
Fragmentation is an operations headcount cost, because someone has to handle inventory management, reporting, and promotion calendars by hand across every store.
For BigCommerce vs Shopify Plus on payments, the difference is one surcharge. BigCommerce lists more than 65 pre-integrated payment solutions, charges no payment fees across 20+ embedded providers, and exempts Performance plans under contracted terms from its Open Payment Provider Fee. Shopify Plus cuts the third-party gateway surcharge to 0.20% but keeps it. At that rate, $10M in annual GMV through a third-party gateway carries a $20k surcharge and $50M carries $100k, before your processor's own fees.
Salesforce's cost is the GMV percentage in its license, and Adobe's sits in the license band and the infrastructure. The surcharge is a finance line, but changing gateways is developer work.
The useful question is which capability the platform supplies and which one a person has to supply.
Each platform ships merchandising tools an operator runs daily: discount codes and automatic discounts on Shopify, automatic and coupon promotions on BigCommerce, cart price rules on Adobe, and Einstein product recommendations and customer group segmentation on Salesforce B2C. Shopify and BigCommerce also generate sitemaps, robots.txt and canonical tags, 301 redirects, and rich-snippet microdata without code.
Past those defaults, the SEO work is code. Shopify needs a robots.txt.liquid template in theme code, and BigCommerce markup sits in Stencil or Catalyst. Technical SEO is developer work on all four, and the marketing tools need an operator every day, so budget both seats before launch. If Amazon or Walmart is in your channel plan, marketplace manager recruitment is a separate search.
Sourced from vendor documentation linked in the section text, plus the checkout pages of Shopify, Salesforce, Adobe and BigCommerce. Also Hydrogen and Oxygen, Salesforce Ben's B2C versus B2B comparison, the Adobe Commerce Storefront page, and Adobe's SaaS versus PaaS comparison. BigCommerce Enterprise is now called Performance.
Scale has two ceilings, the platform's and your team's, so the real constraint is whether you can staff the platform at the pace your GMV grows.
Shopify's own case study says BRUNT Workwear scaled to over $300M in annual revenue, with most sales flowing through Shopify. Salesforce's customer stories page says Siemens uses Commerce Cloud to process up to $10B in annual GMV on the B2B side.
For Adobe Commerce and BigCommerce, ask the vendor for a reference customer at your GMV, then ask that customer how many engineers run the platform.
Shopify Plus stops being the right answer when you need database-level customization, formal RFQ and approval workflows, legal entities and catalogs that must be fully separate rather than shared, or checkout logic that Functions cannot express. In a Shopify Plus vs Magento decision, those four triggers tip the choice toward Adobe Commerce, and toward hiring an architect. Until one of them shows up, stay on Plus.
Adobe Commerce earns its place when your business logic cannot fit inside a SaaS boundary and you can fund a permanent internal engineering team, one that also owns the upgrade calendar Adobe now enforces on Cloud. Adobe is worth it when you can staff it. A brand that buys it without an in-house architect is buying a permanent agency dependency that no license quote prices.
Choosing a commerce platform is a hiring decision disguised as a procurement decision, because the platform sets your tech stack and the labor market you will be recruiting from for the next three to five years.
Sourced from vendor documentation and certification pages as of September 2026. The architecture section's sources also apply. BigCommerce Enterprise is now called Performance.
Shopify Plus and BigCommerce draw from standard web engineering, meaning JavaScript, React, Next.js, and TypeScript plus one platform layer, Liquid or Handlebars. A competent frontend engineer already holds most of that stack, so the platform layer is the main thing left to learn.
In Stack Overflow's 2025 Developer Survey, 66% of respondents used JavaScript, 18.9% used PHP and 4% used Symfony, the framework layer Adobe Commerce builds on. The survey is self-selected, so treat it as the shape of the general pool rather than a count of candidates.
Salesforce Commerce Cloud (SFCC) and Adobe Commerce draw from narrower pools. Engineers learn SFRA, ISML and server-side JavaScript on Rhino (B2C) or Apex (B2B) on the job, and the same goes for Adobe's Magento-specific framework. PHP is not the constraint. Magento experience is. Start the search in integrator teams and their alumni before the open market.
Salesforce Ben's reporting on the 2025 10K Talent Ecosystem Report found technical architect demand grew 27%, solution architect demand rose 21%, and developer demand fell 12% year over year across Salesforce as a whole, which points to the architect as the scarce seat.
A narrow pool should mean a longer search, a higher offer, and a harder replacement when someone leaves. On Adobe and Salesforce, single-person dependency comes built into the platform choice, and no management practice fully removes it.
Screen for current credential names. Shopify's Verified Skills badges cover apps, Liquid storefronts and checkout but not headless, and its partner directory has Plus, Premier and Platinum tiers. BigCommerce offers BigDev Certification Courses. Ask each candidate for the badge and the work behind it.
For Adobe Commerce, developers hold AD0-E724 Developer Professional at 6 to 12 months of experience or AD0-E725 Developer Expert at 1 to 3 years, and technical leads hold AD0-E722 Architect Master.
Adobe certifications must be renewed every two years, so check the renewal date, and treat a resume citing only an older code such as AD0-E711 or AD0-E709 as a prompt to ask which version the candidate has shipped on.
Salesforce candidates hold B2C Commerce Developer for B2C, Platform Developer and Platform Developer II plus the Accredited B2B Commerce Developer Professional for B2B, and MuleSoft Developer for integration engineers.
Salesforce has closed new exams for the B2C Commerce Architect and B2B Solution Architect credentials. Its 2027 retirements FAQ sets August 31, 2026, as the last exam date and February 1, 2027, as the retirement date, and confirms a retired certification stays valid. No new candidate can earn either, so screen architects on shipped architecture work.
A certification proves platform literacy. It says nothing about commercial judgment, and on the SaaS platforms, shipped work tells you more.
The platform you choose changes what your first hire costs. Shopify Plus starts with an Ecommerce Operations Manager, while Adobe Commerce and Salesforce start with an architect. BLS has no architect occupation, so the closest proxy is the 75th to 90th percentile for software developers, $171,980 to $214,670. Constant Hire's candidate data puts the operations manager at a $140,000 median expected base, a gap of $31,980 to $74,670 a year.
Across three years, that gap is $95,940 to $224,010 for one seat. Salesforce Ben separately puts the SFCC Solution Architect median at $192,500, a gap of $52,500 a year against the operations manager, or $157,500 over three years.
On the license side, Contra Collective, an agency, reports Commerce Cloud licenses at $150k a year. Against Shopify Plus at $27,600, that is a gap of $122,400 a year, or $367,200 over three years. The pay delta and the license delta are the same order of magnitude.
BLS and Salesforce Ben publish no US pay by commerce platform, so the table below anchors most seats with occupation-level and Salesforce-wide figures. The Shopify rows are the exception: they come from Constant Hire's own candidate interviews.
Sourced from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics OEWS, May 2025 (software developers, general and operations managers; all industries, occupation level, not platform specific), Salesforce Ben's 2025 to 2026 salary surveys (developers, architects; Salesforce-wide) and Constant Hire's own candidate salary data, 2025 to 2026. None of these sources publish US pay by commerce platform.
Constant Hire publishes Shopify developer salary benchmarks from its own candidate data, the basis for the Shopify Plus row above.
Benefits and payroll taxes add 25% to 30% on top of base pay, so a $150k base runs $187,500 to $195,000 before tooling.
The clearest signal in the data is a supply constraint. Salesforce Ben's reporting on 10K's research puts technical architects at 1% of global Salesforce talent supply, with supply up 4% in 2025, against the 27% demand growth for technical architects. Budget the architect seat first.
Build each job description from the scopes below. Our guide to ecommerce team structure maps the whole team at each revenue stage.
The Commerce Technical Architect owns data schemas, integration architecture with ERP, PIM, and OMS systems, performance budgets, and technical governance. On Adobe and Salesforce, this is the first hire, not a later one, because every later engineer inherits the architect's decisions.
The Lead Platform Developer writes the platform-specific backend, meaning custom APIs, core application logic, and the release branches. If your platform commands a premium, it lands in this seat, because developers learn those backend skills inside the platform.
The Frontend or Headless Engineer builds the customer-facing interfaces, the design system, Core Web Vitals, and any React, Next.js, or Hydrogen application, and is the most portable of the five roles across platforms. BLS puts the median wage for web developers, the closest occupation it measures, at $92,650 in May 2025.
The Systems Integration Engineer builds and monitors the middleware pipelines that sync inventory, orders, customer master, and accounting data between the storefront and the ERP. On Salesforce, this seat is often a MuleSoft-certified specialist, and MuleSoft's license, priced in the cost section, is a separate line item.
The Ecommerce Operations and Merchandising Manager runs the platform consoles daily, covering promotions, catalog tagging, localized landing pages, and app coordination. It is the most underrated hire on the list and the correct first hire on Shopify Plus. It sits alongside the broader Ecommerce Manager role, which owns revenue, site performance and profitability.
No single hire covers UX, backend module architecture, checkout security, and database indexing. A brand that tries to buy all four in one person is exposed on whichever one that person covers least, so put that skill on a second hire or a partner before the build starts.
The break-even between an in-house hire and an agency retainer sits between roughly 45 and 90 hours a month of steady development work, and the agency's rate decides where. A mid-level Shopify developer costs $130,000 to $165,000 a year fully loaded, or $10,800 to $13,750 a month. Agencies bill $150 to $250 an hour on retainer, so that monthly cost buys between 43 and 92 agency hours.
Below about 45 hours a month, the agency is cheaper at any rate in that range. Above about 90, the in-house hire is cheaper at any rate. Between the two, compare your agency's actual rate against the salary. For brands with continuous development work, Constant Hire's data shows the in-house model usually pays for itself within 12 to 18 months of the hire.
Sourced from Constant Hire's Shopify developer vs. Shopify agency analysis, 2026, which draws on ZipRecruiter, Shero Commerce, Elsner, Qikify and Constant Hire DTC placement data. Break-even range is Constant Hire analysis.
In-house buys institutional memory, ERP edge-case knowledge, and fit with commercial priorities. The costs are single-person dependency and the loading covered in the salary section.
An agency buys multi-disciplinary coverage and surge capacity. The costs are account management overhead and context decay when its staff rotates.
For most brands at $20M to $100M in GMV, the answer is a hybrid. One internal architect or lead owns direction and standards, and external specialists execute. The failure mode is what Constant Hire calls the Agency Handoff Tax: an in-house hire spending more than 20% of their time decoding undocumented agency code. The lead's first job is the documentation standard that prevents it. That lead is a hire too, and a specialist ecommerce recruitment partner is one way to run that search.
These four profiles show the order of hires for each platform. On three of the four, the first hire comes before implementation starts.
Sourced from Constant Hire analysis and Constant Hire's Shopify developer salary benchmarks, 2025 to 2026.
On Shopify Plus, the first hire, at or before launch, is an in-house Ecommerce Operations Manager running merchandising, promotions, service, and native B2B company profiles. BRUNT Workwear followed this path, launching wholesale on Shopify B2B in February 2024 and growing from 110 stores to about 2,000 in two years.
Development starts outsourced to a Shopify partner covering custom Liquid, checkout extensions, and ERP integration through a pre-built iPaaS connector. Constant Hire's benchmarks put a Plus partner retainer at $5,000 to $15,000 a month for $5M to $20M brands and $10,000 to $20,000+ above $20M. Once the backlog passes about 90 hours a month, hire a senior full-stack Shopify developer and keep the agency for redesigns and headless work.
Set the 90-hour trigger now, before the first request for an in-house developer arrives.
This profile runs on BigCommerce Performance with B2B Edition, and the first hire comes before implementation starts. A Technical Product Manager or Commerce Lead defines requirements, maps the ERP integration, and owns the deliverables while a certified BigCommerce integrator builds and orchestrates the middleware. After launch, a frontend and API integration developer maintains the customer portal and handles daily technical requests.
For Adobe Commerce, on Cloud or self-hosted, the Enterprise Solutions Architect comes in before you sign the implementation contract, validating the integrator's data model instead of inheriting it and keeping custom work out of the core software through App Builder and API Mesh. Adobe's Architect Master exam recommends 3 to 5 years' experience leading Commerce projects, which tells you how senior this seat is.
Within three to six months of launch, add a senior Adobe developer for patching and module work, plus a DevOps or cloud engineer for infrastructure, OpenSearch, Valkey, and CI/CD. On the SaaS package, skip that last hire, because Adobe manages hosting, upgrades, and scaling.
This profile runs on Salesforce Commerce Cloud, chosen for Customer 360 data architecture spanning Sales Cloud, Service Cloud and Marketing Cloud, instead of commerce functionality alone. Hire an in-house Principal Salesforce Commerce Architect before implementation to govern standards across clouds. During the build, add a MuleSoft-certified integration engineer for ERP, warehouse, and finance data flows. After launch, a senior SFCC developer covers cartridges and Lightning components, supported by an administrator and merchandiser running Business Manager and Einstein.
Across all four, hire the person who defines and checks the work before the party that carries it out, and add the people who execute when a measured trigger says the work exists. A license is a purchase you can revisit, but a data model an integrator sets without your architect sits under everything built after it.
The wrong order costs money in both directions. Hire the architect after the contract, and the search runs while the integrator builds. Hire the developer before the work exists and, at 30 hours of monthly demand, a $130,000 to $165,000 fully loaded developer costs $3,300 to $9,250 a month more than buying those 30 hours from an agency at $150 to $250 an hour, roughly $40,000 to $110,000 a year in idle capacity.
Here is how to choose an ecommerce platform when the team matters as much as the license. Run these six steps against any of the four.
Step 4 needs a baseline. SHRM's 2026 benchmark puts the median time to fill a nonexecutive role at 39 calendar days, and Constant Hire's searches for nonexecutive ecommerce roles average 34 days. A narrow platform pool runs longer than either, so a search that starts at signing lands the hire a month or more into the project.
Brands that regret replatforming rarely regret the platform. They regret discovering after launch that they cannot hire the people to run it at a price they will pay, and by then the switching cost is a second data migration and a second replatform.
With the platform settled, the team is your next decision. A generalist recruiter can read a resume but cannot tell a Liquid developer who ships checkout extensions from one who only edits themes, or judge an Apex, SFRA cartridge, EAV schema or Shopify Functions answer, so the search fills with candidates nobody can rank.
Constant Hire is a specialist ecommerce and DTC recruiter that delivers first interviews within five days and fills nonexecutive ecommerce roles in 34 days on average. To hire a Shopify developer for a Shopify Plus build, or to sequence the first hire once you have chosen a platform, book a strategy call.
No single platform ranks first for every brand. Shopify Plus suits DTC speed, BigCommerce native B2B on a predictable fee, Adobe Commerce deep custom logic when you can staff an architect, and Salesforce brands already standardized on Salesforce. Match the platform to the team you can hire.
Shopify Plus starts at $27,600 to $30,000 a year, BigCommerce Performance at $17,988, and Adobe Commerce reportedly at $22,000. Agencies put Salesforce B2B at 1% to 2% of GMV and B2C Commerce at $150k to $500k+ a year. None publishes a full rate card, and implementation and staffing can exceed the license.
No. Plus is Shopify's enterprise tier, with checkout extensibility, expansion stores, unlimited staff accounts, lower card and gateway fees (the third-party gateway fee is 0.20%), and a negotiated multi-year contract. Core B2B tools now ship on every paid plan, so choose Plus when checkout logic, more than three B2B catalogs, or several storefronts outgrow the standard plans.
BigCommerce and Shopify Plus, because both sit closest to standard web engineering. Adobe Commerce and Salesforce Commerce Cloud draw from narrower, certification-gated pools, which means longer searches and harder replacements, and on Salesforce, higher offers. Name three credible candidates for the lead role before you commit to the platform.
Monthly hours decide it. A mid-level Shopify developer costs $130,000 to $165,000 a year fully loaded, which buys 43 to 92 agency hours a month at $150 to $250 an hour. Below about 45 hours, use the agency. Above about 90, hire. Most brands at $20M to $100M in GMV fit one internal lead plus bounded agency projects.
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