Magento vs Babylist Storefront vs Shopify Plus vs Amazon Baby Registry, which is right for a DTC baby brand?

Honest cut, baby-DTC-specific:

• Babylist Storefront, it’s a marketplace, not a platform. You list SKUs, Babylist owns the customer relationship, you pay ~20% take-rate. Fine for discovery, terrible as your sole channel because you have no retention lever and no first-party data.
• Shopify (Basic / Plus), works fine under $2M GMV if you can live with the subscription apps (Recharge / Skio / Smartrr) at app-store-grade integration depth. Variant ceilings (100 per product, 2,000 on Plus) become a pain when you cross size + color + stage axes. Native registry integration is shallow.
• Amazon Baby Registry, same as Babylist: a channel, not your home. ~15% of premium baby DTC discovery happens here, so you need a feed in. Not your platform.
• Magento (Open Source / Adobe Commerce), the right answer when you want stage-based catalog architecture (newborn → toddler attribute model), recall workflow you control end-to-end, registry deep-integration (Babylist + Amazon + Target sync via API, not iframe), and subscription deep enough to graduate sizes by birthdate.

Pattern I see at $1M, $10M baby DTC: Magento is the home base, Babylist + Amazon Baby + Target are channels that feed traffic back via deep links. Above $10M GMV the math tilts harder toward Magento because $25k/yr in Shopify app fees buys you a Magento + Hyvä build outright.