Shopify Plus and Salesforce Commerce Cloud both sell to large retail brands, but they are priced and built in very different ways. Shopify charges a published monthly subscription. Salesforce publishes no prices at all for Commerce Cloud and says it takes a percentage of the gross merchandise value that runs through your storefront.
Every figure below was read on 1 November 2026. Shopify figures were taken from the US version of its Plus pricing page, the Help Center and the developer site shopify.dev. Salesforce’s come from its Commerce Cloud pricing pages and its developer documentation for B2C Commerce, the Commerce API and B2B Commerce. All amounts are US dollars.
Key takeaways
- Plus is billed monthly: $2,300 if you sign for three years, $2,500 if you sign for one. According to the Help Center, higher-volume businesses might also owe a variable platform fee tied to their revenue and business model; no rate is given.
- Salesforce shows “Contact for pricing” against every Commerce Cloud edition, in every currency. Its B2B pricing FAQ says the charge is a percentage of GMV, defined as revenue through your website minus tax and shipping.
- Salesforce B2C Commerce runs many sites from one back end: 5 on the Growth edition and 100 on Plus and Premium, and sites in the same realm can share a product catalog. Shopify Plus allows nine expansion stores in addition to the main store, all under the same brand, and nothing syncs between them.
- B2C Commerce and B2B Commerce are separate Salesforce products with separate developer guides. B2C uses Business Manager, realms and instances; B2B stores are built in Lightning Experience with Experience Builder templates.
- Shopify hosts everything as one service. A Salesforce B2C Commerce realm comes with three primary instances (staging, development, production) plus between 3 and 47 sandboxes, and code moves to production through replication from staging.
Shopify Plus vs Salesforce Commerce Cloud: comparison table (2026)
| Item | Shopify Plus | Salesforce Commerce Cloud |
|---|---|---|
| Published price | 3-year term: $2,300 monthly. 1-year term: $2,500 monthly | None; every edition is “Contact for pricing” |
| Fee linked to sales | A variable platform fee might apply at higher volume; no rate printed | Priced as a percentage of GMV; percentage not printed |
| B2C editions | One plan | Growth, Plus and Premium (Premium billed annually) |
| Sites or stores | Main store plus 9 expansion stores, same brand | 5 sites on Growth; 100 on Plus and Premium |
| Shared catalog | No; products and inventory stay separate per store | Sites in one realm can share a catalog |
| Price books | Not used; B2B prices are set through catalogs | 10 on Growth; 3,500 on Plus and Premium |
| Orders | Managed in the admin | Full Order Management on B2C Premium only; B2B Growth has Order Management Lite |
| B2B | Built in; Plus adds unlimited catalogs, deposits, partial payments | Separate B2B Commerce product: 6 storefronts on Growth, 10 on Advanced |
| Inventory locations | 200 | 20 on both B2B editions; Order Management Growth covers up to 50 |
| Storefront | Themes, or Hydrogen for headless (up to 25 headless storefronts) | Storefront Next on Managed Runtime; SFRA for existing builds |
| Admin API rate | GraphQL: 1,000 points per second | Varies by API family; SLAS at 24,000 requests a minute in production |
| Support | Priority 24/7 phone | Standard Success Plan in all licences; Premier and Signature by licence or contract |
How the two pricing models compare
Shopify’s price is fixed by term. Over a full year, Plus comes to $27,600 on the three-year term and $30,000 on the one-year term, before apps, payments and any variable platform fee.
Salesforce’s price grows with your storefront sales. Because it does not publish its percentage, the useful question is what percentage would make the two equal. Each tenth of a percentage point equals $1,000 a year for every $1 million of storefront GMV. The table divides Shopify’s annual subscription by a few levels of annual GMV to show that break-even rate.
| Annual storefront GMV | Rate equal to Plus at $2,500/month | Rate equal to Plus at $2,300/month |
|---|---|---|
| $5 million | 0.600% | 0.552% |
| $10 million | 0.300% | 0.276% |
| $25 million | 0.120% | 0.110% |
| $50 million | 0.060% | 0.055% |
Any Salesforce quote above the rate in that row costs more than the Plus subscription alone. Two things narrow the comparison. Shopify’s variable platform fee is unknown until you get a quote, and Salesforce works out GMV after removing tax and shipping, so the base it charges on is smaller than your gross order value. Get each vendor to put its fee at your forecast sales in writing.
Salesforce adds charges outside the editions. Orders taken on channels other than the Commerce Cloud storefront that use Salesforce Order Management are billed separately once they pass the limits each edition includes, and orders from other channels or third-party systems need standalone Order Management. Salesforce Payments is listed with digital wallets, fraud protection and the option to bring your own Adyen account, also without a price.
Sites, brands and catalogs
This is where Salesforce has the clearest structural lead. In B2C Commerce, a realm holds all of your sites, a site can serve several storefronts with their own URLs for different brands, locales or channels, and sites in the same realm can share one product catalog. The Plus and Premium editions allow 100 sites and 3,500 price books. Salesforce suggests separate realms where teams have their own processes, policies or back-end integrations.
Shopify’s expansion stores are narrower by design. A Plus contract covers up to ten stores at no extra subscription cost, but each must be an extension of the main brand, share its name and branding, and sell the same kinds of goods. Settings, products, collections and inventory do not sync between them, apps are billed per store, and each store needs its own theme licence. Stores for a different brand therefore fall outside the expansion allowance.
Selling to other businesses
On Shopify, B2B runs in the same admin and store as direct-to-consumer sales. Plus adds unlimited B2B catalogs, catalogs assigned straight to a company, deposit requirements, partial payments and a payment request for each fulfillment, and the Help Center says one store can run separate checkout flows for B2B and D2C buyers.
Salesforce sells B2B Commerce as its own product. The Growth edition includes 6 storefronts, Order Management Lite, 250,000 Data Cloud credits, a Merchant Agent and 20 inventory locations; Advanced raises that to 10 storefronts, full Order Management and 500,000 credits. Its developer guide describes building these stores with Lightning Experience, the Commerce Experience Builder template and Lightning Web Components. Salesforce also offers commerce features inside its CRM at no cost, called Foundations, for Sales and Service Enterprise Edition or higher.
How each platform is built and deployed
Shopify Plus is a hosted service with nothing to provision. You build a theme or a Hydrogen storefront, connect apps, and Shopify runs the infrastructure.
B2C Commerce gives you environments to manage. The primary instance group holds staging, development and production. Developers write code in sandboxes, upload it to staging, and replicate it from staging to production or development; replication only runs one way and can be rolled back to the previous version. Merchandisers work in Business Manager on staging, and the development instance is kept for configuration, data imports and QA testing.
Salesforce now lists Storefront Next as its recommended B2C storefront. It is built on React Router 7, React 19, Tailwind CSS, shadcn/ui and Vite, and runs on Salesforce’s Managed Runtime. The older Storefront Reference Architecture uses server-side HTML and JavaScript with the Script API, and the docs describe a hybrid route for moving from SFRA to Storefront Next in stages. Shopify’s equivalent for custom front ends is Hydrogen, with up to 25 headless storefronts on Plus.
Checkout and APIs
On Shopify, checkout changes go through extensions rather than template edits. Only Plus stores can place checkout UI extensions on the information, shipping and payment steps. Custom apps that use Shopify Functions for discount, delivery and payment logic are also limited to Plus. On Salesforce, checkout is part of the storefront code itself, in Storefront Next or SFRA, so changing it means changing your own build.
Shopify’s published GraphQL Admin API allowance is 1,000 points per second for Plus stores, compared with 200 for Advanced and 100 for standard plans. Shopify also says buyer traffic on its Storefront API is not rate-limited. Salesforce’s Commerce API uses load shedding, returning a 503 when the system hits its load threshold after scaling to maximum capacity, and leaves checkout endpoints such as Shopper Baskets and Shopper Orders outside it so shoppers can finish a purchase. Some API families have fixed rate limits, such as 24,000 requests a minute per tenant in production for its shopper login service, and Salesforce says limits can be adjusted through your account team.
When Shopify Plus fits better
- You want a published price you can budget for before talking to sales.
- You sell one brand and want regional or wholesale stores without extra subscription fees.
- You want B2B and D2C in the same admin, with B2B extras that come with the plan.
- Your team does not want to manage sandboxes, staging and replication.
- Your stock sits in up to 200 locations.
When Salesforce Commerce Cloud fits better
- You run many brands or country sites that should share one catalog from one back end.
- You need thousands of price books across sites.
- Your sales, service and marketing data already lives in Salesforce, and you want commerce in the same platform.
- Your orders arrive from several channels and you plan to run them all through Salesforce Order Management.
A note on vendor comparisons
Shopify publishes a comparison page against Salesforce Commerce Cloud, and its figures on conversion, cost and launch speed come from research Shopify commissioned, including a report published by EY in October 2025. Salesforce prints no prices to test them against, so we left those figures out and kept to what each company documents.
If you decide to move
If you are also weighing Shopify’s other enterprise rivals, our Shopify Plus vs BigCommerce Enterprise comparison covers a platform with published overage fees. Reading Shopify Plus vs Shopify Advanced helps decide whether Plus is needed in the first place, and for the build budget, our Shopify Plus development cost guide sets out what a project includes. Our Shopify Plus development team handles builds and replatforms, including expansion stores, B2B setup, checkout extensions and Functions.
FAQ
How much does Salesforce Commerce Cloud cost compared with Shopify Plus?
On 1 November 2026, Salesforce published no Commerce Cloud prices; every edition said “Contact for pricing”, and its FAQ said the charge is a percentage of GMV. Shopify’s Help Center gave $2,300 monthly for a three-year Plus term and $2,500 monthly for a one-year term, and said higher-volume businesses might pay a variable platform fee.
How does Salesforce calculate GMV for Commerce Cloud pricing?
Salesforce defines GMV as the total revenue through your website minus tax and shipping. For the Growth and Advanced editions it charges only on revenue that goes through the commerce storefront. Orders from other channels handled in Salesforce Order Management are charged separately beyond each edition’s included limits.
Can Shopify Plus run several brands like Salesforce Commerce Cloud?
Not as expansion stores. Shopify Plus covers up to ten stores, but each expansion store must carry the main brand’s name and branding and sell the same kinds of goods, and products and inventory do not sync between stores. Salesforce B2C Commerce Plus and Premium allow 100 sites, and sites in one realm can share a catalog.
Is Salesforce B2B Commerce the same product as B2C Commerce?
No. They are separate products with separate editions and developer guides. B2C Commerce uses Business Manager, realms and instances, while B2B Commerce stores are built in Lightning Experience with Experience Builder templates and Lightning Web Components. B2B Growth includes 6 storefronts and B2B Advanced includes 10.
What is Salesforce Storefront Next?
Storefront Next is the storefront type Salesforce recommends for B2C Commerce. It uses React Router 7, React 19, Tailwind CSS, shadcn/ui and Vite, runs on Managed Runtime, and calls the B2C Commerce API. Existing sites on the Storefront Reference Architecture can move to it in stages through a hybrid setup.
Sources: Shopify’s US Plus pricing page; Help Center articles on the Plus plan and on expansion stores; shopify.dev pages on GraphQL rate limits, API limits, checkout UI extensions and Functions; Salesforce’s Commerce Cloud pricing, B2C Commerce pricing and B2B Commerce pricing pages, and its developer documentation on B2C Commerce architecture, storefront types, load shedding and rate limits and B2B Commerce, all read on 1 November 2026. Both vendors negotiate at this level, so get every figure in writing before you sign.
