Magento vs Zappos / Foot Locker / Shopify Plus, what fits footwear DTC?

Different lanes:

• Zappos / Amazon is a marketplace, not a platform. Great for incremental volume, terrible for brand control + customer data + margin (15-25% in fees + you don’t own the customer). List there as a channel, not as your house.
• Foot Locker / Famous Footwear are retailers, not platforms. You sell to them via wholesale. Joor + EDI feeds; they decide your shelf space. Important channel, not your DTC store.
• Shopify Plus is a credible DTC platform for footwear under 2,000 SKUs and single-brand. Hits a wall at the 100-variant-per-product ceiling (Plus: 2,000) when size × width × color × arch multiplies. Decent app ecosystem (Loop, Vyking via SDK, Klaviyo). Per-tx fees on third-party gateways (2.4-2.9%) eat ~$120k/yr at $5M GMV.
• Magento + Hyvä is the DTC choice for multi-brand footwear retailers, sneaker specialty, orthopedic, or any brand above ~$5M GMV with B2B share >15% (Faire, Joor) or brand-portal dealer agreements (Nike SNKRS, Hoka, Red Wing).

Honest cut: under $2M GMV, single-brand, no drops, Shopify is fine. Above that, or multi-brand, or you want the size matrix done right, or you have brand-portal contracts, Magento wins. The lines move every 12 months but that’s the 2026 read.