Ecommerce platforms compared (2026): the best webshop software

Choosing an ecommerce platform is a five-year decision that most brands make in five weeks. The Netherlands has more choice than most markets. WooCommerce still runs the most Dutch webshops, Shopify grows fastest, Lightspeed and Magento have deep roots here, and enterprise brands weigh Salesforce, SAP and Centra. Each of them is the best webshop software for someone. None is the best for everyone.

This guide compares twelve platforms for Dutch brands that sell seriously online: growing shops, scale-ups and enterprise retailers, often with B2B, physical stores or several countries. Per platform: who it suits, verified prices, strengths and limits. Then hosting, B2B, international selling, hard limits, a decision matrix and a three-year cost example for a Dutch shop with €2 million in revenue.

We are a Shopify Platinum Partner, so we are not neutral. We say so where it matters, and we say where another platform fits better. One honest line for starters: with a few products and no developer, Shopify Basic, Wix or Squarespace is enough for now. Most of this guide becomes relevant once you pass a few hundred orders a month, or plan B2B, stores or a second country.

Prices and figures: status October 2026, from the vendors' own pricing pages, Store Leads (updated 16 October 2026), the HTTP Archive Web Almanac 2025 and Patchstack. Prices exclude VAT unless stated otherwise. Check current prices before you decide.

Key takeaways

• Market: 98,489 Dutch webshops run on WooCommerce and 67,941 on Shopify, 2,895 of them on Shopify Plus. In one year WooCommerce lost 10% of its Dutch stores and Magento 26%, while Shopify grew 13% (Store Leads).

• Cost: the subscription is rarely the big number. For a €2 million shop, payment costs run to €13,000–€18,000 a year on any platform. Keeping an external payment provider on Shopify Grow adds €20,000 a year.

• Ownership: open source (WooCommerce, Magento, Shopware, PrestaShop) means you own code, hosting, updates and security. SaaS (Shopify, BigCommerce, Lightspeed, Wix, Squarespace) means the vendor does.

• Speed: 76% of Shopify sites pass all Core Web Vitals on mobile, against 35% of WooCommerce and Magento sites (Web Almanac 2025).

• Limits decide: Shopify allows 3 options and 2,048 variants per product; the Lightspeed C-Series one domain and 7 languages; Shopware Community requires a paid plan above €1 million GMV.

• Enterprise: Salesforce Commerce Cloud, SAP Commerce and Centra publish no prices. Expect a licence tied to revenue and a long project.

• Timing: to sell on a new platform on Black Friday 2027 (26 November), decide in February 2027.

Which ecommerce platforms Dutch webshops use

Store Leads tracks live webshops per platform. These are its counts for the Netherlands, updated 16 October 2026:

Read these numbers with three things in mind. Store Leads counts stores, not revenue: one enterprise store on SAP can sell more than a thousand small WooCommerce shops together. Headless shops are hard to detect, so Centra and other API-first platforms are undercounted; six stores says more about detection than about Centra's reach. And a falling count includes shops that closed as well as shops that moved.

The direction is still clear: the open source platforms that need the most maintenance lose Dutch stores, and Shopify and the hosted enterprise platforms gain them.

Webshop software prices at a glance

Some platforms charge a subscription, some a share of revenue, some nothing while you pay for hosting and developers. The published prices side by side:

The starting price says little about the bill. For a shop with €2 million in revenue, payment costs run to €13,000 to €18,000 a year, whatever the platform. The example further down shows what moves it. For every cost line on the Shopify side, read what Shopify really costs.

The platforms one by one

Per platform: who it suits, what it costs, what it does well, and where it stops.

Shopify (Basic, Grow, Advanced)

For whom: shops from the first sale to tens of millions in revenue that want to sell, not run servers. Price: Basic €21, Grow €59 and Advanced €289 per month on yearly billing. With Shopify Payments you pay 1.9%, 1.8% or 1.6% plus €0.25 per EEA card, and €0.29 per iDEAL payment. Strong: hosting, security, checkout and updates are Shopify's job. Markets handles countries, currencies and up to 20 languages in one store, B2B works with up to three catalogues, Shopify POS runs your stores.

Limits: 3 options and 2,048 variants per product, fixed URL paths such as /products/ and /collections/, 10 inventory locations below Plus, and a fee of 2% to 0.6% if you keep an external payment provider such as Mollie. You do not change the core: custom logic goes into apps or Shopify Functions. Advanced only pays off when the lower card rate covers the higher subscription; in our example below it does not.

Shopify Plus

For whom: brands with B2B next to B2C, several markets, physical stores or high volume. Price: from €2,100 per month on a three-year term, €2,250 on one year, or a variable platform fee tied to revenue. Ask in writing which one you get. With Shopify Payments iDEAL costs €0.15 and EEA cards 1.4% plus €0.25; an external provider costs 0.2%. Strong: unlimited B2B catalogues, a main store plus nine expansion stores, 30 languages, 200 inventory locations, POS Pro for up to 20 locations and checkout customisation.

Limits: one brand per contract, so a second brand means a second contract, and every store beyond ten costs €250 a month. With an external payment provider, Plus pays for itself on fees alone from about €5.4 million in revenue. Below that, Plus is a decision about capabilities, not cost. More on Shopify Plus.

WooCommerce

For whom: content-led brands with a WordPress team and modest volumes. Price: the plugin is free. Managed e-commerce hosting at Hypernode costs €129 to €388 per month (Falcon XS to L). Paid extensions are annual licences, such as WooCommerce Subscriptions at €249 a year; when a licence lapses, updates stop. Strong: full control over code and URLs, and WordPress as the best content tool in this comparison.

Limits: you own every update and every vulnerability. Patchstack counted 11,334 new vulnerabilities in the WordPress ecosystem in 2025, 91% of them in plugins, and 46% had no patch when they were disclosed. Only 35% of WooCommerce sites pass all Core Web Vitals on mobile. Security support for PHP 8.2 ends on 31 December 2026. The alternatives and the numbers behind them are in our guide to WooCommerce alternatives.

Moving from WooCommerce? See how we approach a WooCommerce to Shopify migration.

Magento Open Source and Adobe Commerce

For whom: complex catalogues and B2B, with an in-house or agency development team. Price: Magento Open Source is free. Adobe Commerce is a licence, priced on request by GMV and average order value tiers. Hosting at Hypernode costs €181 to €703 per month (Falcon S to XL). Strong: a rich data model, B2B features in Adobe Commerce, and full control over the code.

Limits: every 2.4.x release has a hard end date. Standard support for 2.4.6 ended on 11 August 2026; for 2.4.7 it ends on 31 May 2027. From 1 June 2027 Adobe can suspend traffic on Commerce Cloud environments that run an unsupported version, and Magento Open Source gets no extended support at all. Adobe Commerce as a Cloud Service, live since June 2025, is the SaaS route within Adobe. In the Netherlands Magento lost 26% of its live stores in a year. See Magento alternatives for the routes from here.

Moving from Magento? See how we approach a Magento to Shopify migration.

Shopware 6

For whom: brands that want open source built for commerce, often B2B-heavy or focused on Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Price: Community Edition free; Rise from €600 and Evolve from €2,400 per month excl. VAT; Beyond on request. Shops above €1 million GMV over the past 365 days must move to a paid plan to keep access to their Shopware account. Strong: a flexible data model; self-hosted, PaaS or SaaS; B2B components such as quotes and purchase approvals from Evolve, and customer-specific prices in Beyond.

Limits: self-hosted, you still pay for hosting, updates and developers. The Dutch partner and app ecosystem is small: Store Leads counts 902 Dutch stores. Compare the two directly in Shopware vs Shopify.

Moving from Shopware? See how we approach a Shopware to Shopify migration.

Lightspeed eCom (C-Series and E-Series)

For whom: Dutch and Belgian retailers that already run Lightspeed Retail in their stores. Price: the C-Series, formerly SEOshop, costs €68 (Essential) to €259 (Professional) per month; Enterprise is on request. Lightspeed charges no extra fee when you use your own payment provider. The E-Series is a different product, built on Ecwid and priced by number of products. Strong: webshop and till from one vendor, with Dutch roots and support.

Limits: the C-Series gives one domain per shop, up to 7 languages and 6 currencies, 15,000 variants on Professional, 100 variants per product, and an API cap of 12,000 requests a day. In February 2025 Lightspeed chose retail in North America and hospitality in Europe as its focus markets; European retail is not one of them. More in Lightspeed alternatives.

Moving from Lightspeed? See how we approach a Lightspeed to Shopify migration.

BigCommerce

For whom: teams that want SaaS with an open API and several storefronts from one back office. Price, in US dollars: Core $39, Growth $105 and Scale $399 per month ($29, $79 and $299 on yearly billing); Performance from $1,499. Plans have caps on trailing twelve-month GMV: $30,000 for Core, $100,000 for Growth and $33,333 a month for Scale, with 0.9% on sales above that. With a payment provider outside BigCommerce's embedded providers, it charges 2%, 1% or 0.6%.

Strong: open API, no hosting, multi-storefront. Limits: a €2 million brand lands on Performance or pays overage on Scale, and the Benelux ecosystem is small: 120 Dutch stores.

Wix and Squarespace

For whom: starters, creatives and service businesses that sell a small range next to a website. Price: Squarespace costs €12, €18, €32 or €69 per month on yearly billing, with a 2% transaction fee on Basic and none from Core. Wix prices vary by country; check the plan page for yours. Strong: quick to set up, good-looking templates and decent speed: 69% of Squarespace sites and 66% of Wix sites pass all Core Web Vitals on mobile. Limits: not built for large catalogues, B2B, ERP integrations or several markets. If those are on your plan, start on a commerce platform.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud

For whom: large B2C brands that already run Salesforce for service, marketing or CRM. Price: on request; the licence is tied to revenue (GMV). Salesforce lists its B2C edition with up to 100 sites and 3,500 price books. Strong: many sites and brands on one platform, and deep integration with the rest of the Salesforce stack. Limits: no public prices, a large implementation project and specialised developers. It fits when Salesforce is a deliberate choice for the whole organisation. Store Leads counts 162 Dutch stores, 31% more than a year ago.

Moving from Salesforce Commerce Cloud? See how we approach a Salesforce Commerce Cloud to Shopify migration.

SAP Commerce Cloud

For whom: enterprises with SAP as their ERP and complex B2B or B2B2C processes. Price: on request. Strong: close integration with SAP ERP and a strong B2B data model. Limits: the on-premise release 2205 has been in customer-specific maintenance since 31 July 2026, and the Accelerator storefront is deprecated, so many installations face a new front end either way. Projects are long and need SAP specialists. Store Leads counts 47 Dutch stores, 31% fewer than a year ago.

Moving from SAP Commerce? See how we approach a SAP Commerce to Shopify migration.

Centra

For whom: fashion and lifestyle brands that sell direct to consumers and wholesale. Centra calls itself a DTC and wholesale platform, and says 70% of its brands use both. Price: on request; there is no public price list. Strong: wholesale and DTC in one system, local prices, payments and warehouses for 120+ countries, and headless by design. Limits: you build and maintain your own front end with a CMS: two codebases, and a development team or agency for both. Store Leads detects only six Dutch stores.

Moving from Centra? See how we approach a Centra to Shopify migration.

PrestaShop

For whom: shops with their own developer that want free, self-hosted open source; the platform is strongest in France and Southern Europe. Price: the software is free; hosting and paid modules from the Addons marketplace come on top. Strong: free, many modules, full control. Limits: PrestaShop 1.6 has had no maintenance since June 2019, and moving a heavily customised shop to version 9.0 (June 2025) is a project. Only 50% of PrestaShop sites pass all Core Web Vitals on mobile. In the Netherlands the count fell 20% in a year, to 2,106 stores.

Moving from PrestaShop? See how we approach a PrestaShop to Shopify migration.

Hosting, maintenance and security

The biggest difference between platforms is not a feature. It is who does the work when something needs an update, a patch or more capacity.

Speed: Core Web Vitals per platform

The Web Almanac 2025 measured Core Web Vitals, the speed and stability metrics Google uses, on real visits to e-commerce sites:

These are averages. A lean shop on good hosting can pass on any platform; on hosted platforms the baseline starts higher, though heavy themes and apps can pull it down.

B2B and international selling

The native options per platform:

Two rules from our projects. Same brand in another country means one store with a market per country, not a second store: Stoov merged four stores into one Plus store with Markets and saw conversion rise 13% and site speed 50%. And on Shopify, B2B prices come from your ERP; if it cannot deliver a price per customer per line, do not start. See Shopify B2B for how that works.

Hard limits that decide the choice

Limits decide more often than features. These are the published limits that come up most when Dutch brands compare Shopify and Lightspeed, the two most common hosted routes:

Open source platforms set no fixed limits here: the limit is the hosting you pay for and the code you maintain. If your catalogue relies on more than three options per product or a configurator, settle that first: on Shopify that means a configurator on the Storefront API.

The best webshop platform per type of brand

Our decision matrix: a starting point for your shortlist, not a verdict.

And by revenue, as a working rule from our own projects:

How to choose: three questions and a three-year cost example

The Breakup Talk

Most brands already run a platform, so test that one first. We ask every merchant three questions, with twelve months of invoices on the table:

No red answers: stay, and invest in conversion, margin and marketing. One red answer: fix that one thing, such as the version, the plan or the theme. Do not move a whole shop for one issue. Two or more: move, because two red answers reinforce each other and do not fix themselves. Let the merchandiser and the marketer answer the ceiling question, not the developer: they hit the ceiling every week. Choosing for the first time? Ask the ceiling question of every candidate instead: which of the three things your plan needs would require a rebuild on this platform?

Five checks before you sign

1. List the processes that must keep working: B2B, stores, countries, and the integrations with ERP, PIM and WMS.

2. Compare total cost over three years, not the build alone. Include payment costs and maintenance hours.

3. Decide who runs the platform after launch: your own team, an agency, or the vendor.

4. Check the local ecosystem. iDEAL | Wero is used for 73% of Dutch online purchases (Betaalvereniging, first half of 2026). Reviews from Kiyoh and the Thuiswinkel Waarborg mark must work on the new platform.

5. Test your hardest requirement first, in a demo or a short proof of concept.

For the growth side of this choice, read choosing a platform when you scale.

A three-year cost example for a Dutch webshop

Abstract comparisons do not help much, so here is a fictional but realistic Dutch shop. The assumptions:

• €2 million online revenue a year, average order €80: 25,000 orders.

• 70% paid with iDEAL | Wero (17,500 payments), 30% with EEA consumer cards (7,500 orders, €600,000).

• Shopify on yearly billing with Shopify Payments, at Shopify's Dutch rates. For the open source platforms, Mollie: iDEAL €0.32, EEA consumer cards 1.80% + €0.25, no monthly fee.

• WooCommerce and Shopware on managed hosting at the price of Hypernode Falcon M (€237 per month). WooCommerce with Subscriptions, Product Bundles and Dynamic Pricing (€436 a year together). Shopware on Rise (from €600 per month), which a shop above €1 million GMV needs.

• Not included: design, build, migration, development and maintenance hours, apps, themes and VAT. We do not estimate hours: they depend entirely on your shop. Fill them in yourself.

Four things stand out. First, payment costs are the largest line in almost every row, so compare payment rates before platforms. Second, the payment provider decides the Shopify bill: keeping Mollie on Grow adds the 1% platform fee, €20,000 a year. Third, Plus is not a cost decision at this size; it pays off when you need what only Plus offers. If you need Shopware's B2B components, Evolve costs €86,400 over three years instead of €21,600.

Fourth, and most important: the honest comparison sits in the line we left open. On WooCommerce and Shopware, hosting, updates, PHP upgrades and security are your hours. On Shopify, apps take their place. Ask your developer how many hours went into updates and fixes in the last twelve months, and add them. BigCommerce is not in the table because a €2 million shop exceeds the Scale cap: either 0.9% overage or Performance from $1,499 a month. Our method for a full calculation is in the TCO comparison of ecommerce platforms.

Plan backwards from Black Friday 2027

Black Friday 2026 is too close to move for; the next one is 26 November 2027. Our working rule for a mid-market catalogue with two integrations: six weeks to choose, four weeks of scope, about twenty weeks of build and testing, and six weeks of hypercare. That means starting by 26 February 2027, going live by about 24 September and freezing code from 5 November. How we run the move itself is on Shopify migration.

What we have seen in practice

Malelions and NØORDCODE. moved from Lightspeed to Shopify Plus; for Malelions we migrated more than 180,000 customers. OGÉR and Mason Garments moved from Magento to Shopify Plus; according to OGÉR's CCO, revenue rose 45% after go-live. Jansen Holland and High Clean left WooCommerce for Shopify, and High Clean now sells in eleven languages. Stoov merged four stores into one Plus store, and John Beerens runs B2C and B2B for more than 20,000 SKUs in one store. Jansen Holland's review sums up what a move should feel like: "Our migration from WooCommerce to Shopify was handled smoothly and professionally, with excellent support throughout the process."

Our view

There is no best ecommerce platform, only the best fit for the next three to five years. For most growing Dutch brands that want to sell rather than run software, that is Shopify, and the Store Leads data points the same way. The deciding numbers are rarely the subscription: they are payment costs, maintenance hours and limits.

As a Shopify Platinum Partner we are not neutral, so here is where we would choose differently. A content-led shop with a strong WordPress team can stay on WooCommerce. A team that wants to own its code and hosting, or sells mainly in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, is often better off with Shopware. A product configurator at the core fits Shopware or Adobe Commerce better. A fashion brand where wholesale is half the business should put Centra on the shortlist. An enterprise that has standardised on Salesforce or SAP should weigh their commerce products first. And if the Breakup Talk comes back without a red answer, stay where you are and invest in conversion and margin.