Somewhere in the request-a-demo pipeline, a human being is scheduling a call to be told a number a spreadsheet could have handed over for free. Enterprise software has always run this ritual with the solemnity of a hostage negotiation, dressed up as due diligence rather than what it actually is, which is a vendor sizing up your budget before it names its own. E-commerce tooling inherited the ritual wholesale. Nobody calls it what it is. It's a toll booth with no posted price.
The catalog is bigger than any single sales call admits
2,619
The catalog runs to 2,619 e-commerce tools, which is less a market than a small country complete with its own customs office, dialects, and, evidently, a native tongue for dodging the price question. Most of that inventory never reaches your shortlist because it isn't trying to. It waits to be found.
SaaS Choice catalog, 2026
Buyers keep assuming a category this size has settled into something like transparency, the way older industries eventually agree on units of measurement and stop making customers guess. E-commerce software pricing has had no such reckoning. A large slice of the catalog still routes every prospective buyer through a form, a callback, and a stranger reading your headcount off a screen before naming a number. Call it Procurement Theater. Everyone knows their lines.
27%
27% of the catalog prices itself through quote requests, meaning more than one in four vendors have decided the honest price is whatever they land on after learning your company size, your industry, and how urgently you sound. Call it the Appraisal Model. It prices the buyer, not the product.
SaaS Choice catalog, 2026
The other three quarters aren't automatically better
It would be tidy to report that everyone left over simply prints a price and moves on, and plenty do exactly that. But how the remaining catalog splits says just as much about the category's nerves as the quote-request crowd does. Comfort with a published number, it turns out, is not evenly distributed.
23% paid, 16% free trial
23% of the catalog runs on straightforward paid pricing you can read without handing over an email address, and another 16% offers a free trial before any card gets charged. Add the two together and well under half the category will let you actually use the thing before negotiating for it. The rest still wants the meeting first.
SaaS Choice catalog, 2026
Sorting the sales-call tools from the sticker-price tools by hand, across a catalog this size, is its own unpaid research project, and most buyers do it exactly once before giving up and booking the first demo offered. That sorting is what [browsing the full e-commerce catalog](https://www.saaschoice.co/e-commerce) is for, not to crown a favourite, just to see which pricing model you're actually about to walk into.
What the median really costs once you multiply it
$29/mo
Across the 402 tools with a comparable monthly plan, the median starting price is $29/mo, with most sitting somewhere between $5 and $247 a month. That number looks like a rounding error against a marketing budget right up until it's quoted per seat, at which point a small team is quietly paying for a stack of seats and calling the decision made. The sticker price was never the negotiation. The seat count was.
SaaS Choice catalog, 2026
A median is one tidy number standing in for thousands of separate negotiations, each shaped by seat count, transaction volume, and whichever add-on got quietly bundled in as "included" that quarter. None of that appears on the pricing page. It appears on the invoice.
457 tools (17%)
457 tools, 17% of the catalog, offer some version of a free or freemium plan, which sounds generous right up until you remember freemium is usually a trial wearing better branding, with no expiry date printed anywhere obvious. It isn't charity. It's a funnel with patience.
SaaS Choice catalog, 2026
Reading the invoice before you sign it
None of this makes e-commerce software a scam. None of it makes the category unusual either. It simply makes it a market that still expects buyers to run the pricing research it declined to publish itself. The honest approach treats every listed figure as an opening bid, and every "contact sales" button as a number nobody has settled on yet. Someone still has to work through 2,619 listings and work out which pricing model they are actually agreeing to. That someone doesn't have to be you.
SaaS Choice sorts by pricing model, not preference, across the full e-commerce catalog, so you can see what you're walking into before anyone asks for your email.
Compare e-commerce tools