Magento vs Shopify Plus / Mayvenn / BellaMi tech, what fits hair extension DTC + B2B?

Honest cut for hair-ecom:

Shopify wins if: pure DTC consumer brand, shade range under 6 with no highlights/balayage variants, no B2B salon trade channel, no medical-wig FSA/HSA channel, catalog under 500 SKUs, ops team is 1-2 people. Mayvenn historically built on Shopify Plus and scaled to $100M+ on it, their differentiation was the textured-hair (4A, 4C) curation, not the platform.

Magento wins if: 10+ shades with highlight / balayage / ombre / root smudge variants, B2B salon trade is 15%+ of revenue, medical-wig FSA/HSA channel matters, subscription auto-ship for tape-ins / clip-ins, multi-region inventory (US + EU + UK customs differ for human hair). BellaMi, Indique Hair, Donna Bella all run on heavy-customised stacks, Magento or proprietary, because Shopify can’t carry their B2B salon trade portal at native quality.

Specific Shopify ceilings for hair-ecom: 100 variants per product (Plus: 2,000) breaks at the “10 shades × highlight × balayage × length × method” cross-product. Native customer-group price visibility for B2B salon trade is gappy, you end up duct-taping it with apps that don’t handle license verification well. Medical-wig FSA/HSA payment routing through TrueMed / Flex requires custom checkout logic that Shopify Plus discounts but doesn’t make easy.

Pattern I default to: Magento + Hyvä for any hair brand at $1M+ doing B2B salon or medical wig. Pure DTC clip-in / tape-in consumer brand under $1M GMV can stay on Shopify happily.