7 Shopify Alternatives With No Transaction Fees (2026)

BigCommerce is the closest like-for-like replacement for Shopify if you want to keep things simple and hosted but stop paying transaction fees. It charges 0% on every plan — Standard ($29/mo), Plus ($79/mo), Pro ($299/mo), and Enterprise — regardless of which payment gateway you choose. That alone makes it a no-brainer for stores using PayPal, Authorize.net, Braintree, or any local processor.

What makes BigCommerce particularly compelling for Shopify refugees is feature parity: a polished admin, a robust app marketplace, native multi-channel selling (Amazon, eBay, Meta, Google), and built-in B2B features on higher plans without needing apps. You also get more functionality out of the box than Shopify — abandoned cart recovery, product reviews, faceted search, and persistent carts are all standard rather than apps.

The one quirk to know: BigCommerce has revenue thresholds per plan ($50K/yr on Standard, $180K on Plus, $400K on Pro). Cross the threshold and you're auto-bumped to the next tier. For most merchants, the savings from killing Shopify's transaction fee more than pay for the higher base plan.

WooCommerce is the obvious choice if you already run a WordPress site or want full control without going fully headless. The core plugin is completely free, charges zero transaction fees, and works with every major payment gateway via free or paid extensions. You keep 100% of your revenue minus whatever your processor charges.

WooCommerce powers roughly 28% of all online stores, which means the ecosystem is enormous: thousands of themes, tens of thousands of plugins, and a developer community larger than any other e-commerce platform. For content-heavy stores — anything where blog posts, guides, or SEO content drives traffic — running e-commerce on the same WordPress install where your content already lives is hard to beat.

The trade-off is that WooCommerce is a plugin, not a platform. You're responsible for hosting, security updates, plugin compatibility, and performance tuning. Realistic total cost for a serious WooCommerce store runs $30-150/month (managed WP hosting + a few premium extensions), which still crushes Shopify's transaction fee on any meaningful sales volume.

Medusa is the leading modern open-source headless commerce platform — think "Shopify backend, but you own it." It's free to self-host, charges zero platform fees of any kind, and gives developers a TypeScript/Node.js commerce engine they can extend in any direction. Storefronts are built with whatever framework you prefer (Next.js, Remix, Astro, mobile apps, IoT — anything that can call an API).

For teams switching from Shopify because they hit Liquid template limits or got stuck on backend customization, Medusa is the cleanest escape hatch. The architecture is genuinely modular: pricing, products, inventory, fulfillment, and payments are independent modules you can extend or replace. There's a strong plugin ecosystem and pre-built integrations for Stripe, PayPal, Klarna, and Adyen.

Medusa Cloud (the optional managed offering) starts at $29/mo for the Hobby tier, but the meaningful pricing gap with Shopify only opens up when you self-host on infrastructure you already control. Expect $20-100/month in hosting plus engineering time. For developer-led teams processing $50K+/month, the math is overwhelmingly in Medusa's favor.

Saleor is the most enterprise-ready of the open-source headless options. Built in Python with a comprehensive GraphQL-first API, it's used by brands that need complex product catalogs, B2B workflows, and multi-channel selling — and it does all of it without charging any platform or transaction fees.

What sets Saleor apart from Medusa or Vendure is its polish: the admin dashboard is genuinely production-grade, the GraphQL schema is well-thought-out, and it ships with sophisticated features like draft orders, channel-specific pricing, and gift cards out of the box. It's a strong fit for established Shopify Plus merchants who've outgrown Liquid and want headless control without losing the merchant tooling.

Saleor offers both self-hosted (free, MIT-licensed) and Saleor Cloud (managed, priced by monthly orders) options. The cloud pricing is order-based rather than revenue-based, which often works out cheaper than Shopify Plus for high-AOV stores. For self-hosted, expect a Python infrastructure stack (Postgres, Redis, Celery) — slightly heavier than the Node.js options.

Vendure is the developer's headless commerce platform. Like Medusa, it's TypeScript and Node.js, fully open-source, and charges zero transaction fees. Where Vendure stands out is architectural cleanliness — it uses NestJS conventions, has first-class TypeScript types throughout, and a plugin system that's notably easier to extend than most alternatives.

The sweet spot for Vendure is mid-size B2C and B2B merchants whose teams write a lot of TypeScript and want a backend they can confidently extend in-house. Native features include multi-vendor marketplaces, tax zones, channel-specific pricing, custom fields on every entity, and a GraphQL API that the team treats as a first-class citizen alongside REST.

The trade-off versus Medusa is community size — Medusa has more plugins, more integrations, and more community content. Versus Saleor, Vendure has less out-of-the-box B2B but a more consistent codebase. For teams that prioritize code quality and long-term maintainability, Vendure is often the cleanest pick.

PrestaShop is the European stalwart of open-source e-commerce. It powers 300,000+ active stores worldwide, charges no transaction fees, and is particularly strong if you sell in multiple European languages and need GDPR-native defaults. The Classic edition is fully free and self-hosted; the hosted edition starts at $24/month.

Where PrestaShop shines for Shopify migrants is multi-language and multi-currency handling — these are core features rather than paid add-ons, which matters enormously if you sell across the EU. The module marketplace is mature, with strong VAT handling, country-specific shipping integrations, and accounting connectors that are non-trivial to find on Shopify or even WooCommerce.

The downside is that PrestaShop's UX feels more 2010s than 2020s — the admin is functional but not as polished as BigCommerce or Shopify. Some popular modules are paid (€50-300 each), and the developer ecosystem skews toward European agencies. For US-only stores, WooCommerce or BigCommerce are usually a better fit.

Ecwid is the simplest answer if you don't want to migrate platforms at all — you just want to add e-commerce to an existing website (WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, a static site, anything). It's a hosted store widget that drops in via a script tag, has a generous free tier (up to 5 products), and charges zero transaction fees on every plan including the free one.

For very small stores, side projects, content creators selling digital products, or local businesses adding online ordering to an existing brochure site, Ecwid is dramatically simpler than standing up a full Shopify replacement. Paid plans start at $25/month and add things like abandoned cart recovery, discount coupons, and multi-currency.

The limitations match the simplicity: you're not building a sophisticated catalog with thousands of SKUs, complex variant logic, or B2B workflows here. But for the exact use case it's built for — embedding a store inside an existing website with minimal effort — it's the best option in this list and beats Shopify Lite on price and transaction-fee structure.