Magento vs Amazon vs Shopify vs Tabletop Tycoon for toy + game DTC?

Honest cut, toy-and-hobby specific:

• Amazon, you cannot beat them on price, search ranking, or Prime shipping. Don’t try. Use Amazon as a sales channel via Magento + Channel Advisor / Codisto for the brands where Amazon Buy Box is already a settled question. Keep DTC for higher-margin SKUs, exclusives, pre-orders, and bundles Amazon can’t replicate.
• Shopify, great under $1M GMV, decent app marketplace for toys (Recharge for subscriptions, Klaviyo, Loop Returns). Pain points: 100-variant ceiling (2,000 on Plus) hurts if you carry Funko Pop in 14 variants per character or Lego in size/age multi-axes. Pre-order apps work but are clunky. Q4 surge handling is fine until you hit ~$5M GMV.
• Tabletop Tycoon / Crystal Commerce, purpose-built for hobby + LCS (local card shops) + TCG singles. Excellent for that niche, weaker for general toy retail. Most LCS owners I talk to either love it or have migrated off it for catalog limitations.
• Magento, wins when you carry both mass-market toys AND collectibles, when pre-order + waitlist is a daily workflow (Pokemon TCG set launches, Magic pre-release, Lego anniversary), when compliance attributes (CPSC / EN-71 / AS-NZS) need to render per-region, when secondary market with condition grading is in scope, or when you’re multi-region (US + EU + UK + AU). Typical migration trigger: $2M-$5M GMV where the app stack on Shopify starts costing $800-$2,500/mo and the variant ceiling hurts.