Review of BigCommerce

If you are looking for applications to build your online business, you have a lot of options. Shopify and WooCommerce are the most popular, but there are many other options available, all with different capabilities and prices. In my review of BigCommerce, I will be looking at another option for you.

BigCommerce is second in popularity and size to Shopify when it comes to paid shopping cart builders. BigCommerce is still a giant.

Who Uses BigCommerce?

Although quite a few notable brands use BigCommerce, it’s impressive. What about small businesses? Is it right for them?

BigCommerce is a popular option, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s the best for ALL businesses.

BigCommerce Review – Uptime

It and its competitors offer an all-in-one solution. This means that it provides more than just the software to help you build your shop. It also offers security and resources.

BigCommerce is, in other words, your host and security suite. This means that it can guarantee outstanding performance.

BigCommerce is not a hosting company. Instead, it uses an “industrial-sized” host to ensure excellent performance.

It is a good thing that the company’s base of customers consists entirely of small businesses with e-commerce needs. This gives them a strong incentive to invest and improve performance. BigCommerce’s performance and uptime have been excellent so far.

This holds true regardless of how much you pay for the plan. However, you may get performance increases as you increase your plans. But it is not necessary.

Easy to Use

BigCommerce is all about making it easy to set up an online shop. While it is simple to use in regular hosting, it’s also a building tool and your site’s host.

Even if you know nothing about coding, you can still do a lot of things. Although it is less targeted at beginners, you can still learn site builders quickly. BigCommerce is user-friendly, but not as much as Shopify. Designing a website is the most exciting part.

Site and Store Management

After your website is designed and ready to go, you will be able to edit key details quickly. These are the details that determine the nature and purpose of your shop. What are you selling? What is your sales volume? How does your traffic look? And so on.

Easy site management tools make it much easier to add changes to your website. These are the two major aspects of BigCommerce that are done perfectly.

A third important thing is your ability to edit and delete your account. You will never have problems saving or navigating the changes you make.

This is how it works:

It is suitable for almost everyone, even beginners. It’s also user-friendly for developers.

BigCommerce Pricing & Features

You definitely pay a fair price for what you receive in exchange.

Below are the prices for a year. Also, you can pay monthly if you don’t have the funds upfront. Or you can save up to 10 percent when you upgrade to the yearly plans and this offer is only available for Pro and Plus packages.

• You make a payment of $29.95/month (billed yearly) for the Standard plan.
• You pay $71.95/month (billed yearly) for the Plus plan.
• $269.96/month (billed yearly) for the Pro plan.

The Enterprise plan also offers custom pricing based on your business’s size and requirements.

BigCommerce’s largest competitors offer the same three-tiered structure and similar figures.

BigCommerce Features

• First, there are no transaction fees. Does that make a difference? Perhaps not! It is an unnecessary expense when you already pay for a site. BigCommerce’s largest competitor, Shopify, is guilty of charging transaction fees to its customers. This is a huge win.
• There are no limits on how much bandwidth you can use or how many products or staff accounts you may create. That’s great. All plans can achieve this.
• All plans can access the most popular sales channels. This is a basic feature but still a good one.

These are features that you would reasonably expect from other platforms and they are available for all BigCommerce plans.

BigCommerce has an advantage over other platforms in that it offers these services at entry-level. Coupons or gift cards, for example, are sometimes reserved for higher-tiers.

BigCommerce Tiered

This is the best distribution of features. You get everything you need to create a strong shopping cart at entry-level. The higher tiers get some very useful tools.

Abandoned cart saver, for example, is an automated tool to market customers who have left your site via the checkout page. It has a good chance of bringing back customers.

Store credit cards can be a strong feature, adding credibility and loyalty to your website. The persistent cart is great for keeping sales with recurring customers.

You also get better contact management tools, such as customer segments and customer groups. This can be very useful if your creativity is strong.

It’s up to you to decide if it is worth the higher costs. BigCommerce has great features.

Shipping

Let’s talk about shipping in e-commerce.

Shopify is fiercely challenging BigCommerce. It is a popular e-commerce platform that uses shipping (e.g., doesn’t sell digital products).

Shopify’s success is due to its ease of integration with shipping services and great shipping discounts. This is the challenge BigCommerce must face. How does BigCommerce succeed?

This is a quick overview:

There are many details to consider, and that all depends on the plan you choose. However, BigCommerce is great for shipping. Its shipping capabilities compare to Shopify’s and are almost equal.

It’s easy to save shipping costs and get customers to buy.

BigCommerce Sales Limits

Apart from features, the main difference between tiers is the sales limits. If you make close to $150k per year in online sales, then paying $72 per month might be acceptable. However, these limits may not be the same for all platforms.

If you already have to invest a lot in your business to make a profit, it may be a pain to need to increase your BigCommerce expenses just because you sold more than a threshold. This is the downside.

But BigCommerce is very well-featured. It is as well-featured as its competitors and has more features for the first level than its counterparts. It’s not only strong in features, but it’s also a good deal.

Apps and Themes

The themes are beautiful-looking, and if you spend some time finding the right one and tweak it properly, you can make your site look amazing.

You might have to spend more time choosing a site theme that’s not already in use, as many sites look the same. However, overall, I believe the themes are acceptable.

The App Store

The app store is pretty standard. This is an app store that’s quite large, to be very honest. I’m talking about more than 600 apps.

Keep this in mind:

BigCommerce won’t be able to offer the same number of integrations as WordPress or any other CMS. The tradeoff is worthwhile as you can almost be certain of quality and security.

You can be assured that all major apps (like MailChimp and ShipStation) are accessible due to their size.

Customer Support

Even if every other thing is great, quality customer support is essential if you want to be successful in e-commerce.

When everything is perfect in your shop and it’s making money, if something goes wrong, you need to have it fixed quickly and without disruption.

No matter the tool, great customer support is vital. You don’t want just any customer support. You want, BigCommerce industry-leading support

BigCommerce’s customer service is great, in my opinion. This is mainly due to the quality of communications with representatives. BigCommerce, for example, is proud of its phone support. The support is quick and of high quality.

Apart from Live chat and email support, 24/7 phone support is also available. They’re both pretty good. Live chat works as fast as you would expect.

Email support is very fast. Although it is not meant to be instant, customers receive replies fairly quickly.

Then there is the on-site information. This is a great thing about BigCommerce.

BigCommerce Help Center

BigCommerce’s help center is well-organized. Many sites, including Shopify, have many resources that are spread all over the site. But BigCommerce has everything in one place. Knowledge base is essential.

BigCommerce Knowledge Base

Its knowledge base is also very well-organized. It consists of high-quality articles, and there’s absolutely nothing to complain about.

BigCommerce Community

There are many forums here and you can also access other socially-oriented support tools.

This is a great resource, not only because it allows you to get answers to strange questions that aren’t covered in standard help articles. But it’s also great because you get EXTRA tips, advice, and information.

Popular BigCommerce Groups

These community pages are actually underrated and not used as much as they should be.

BigCommerce has other features that can be considered part of its high-quality customer service. These features, in addition to what I have already shown you, will almost always be paid for.

BigCommerce Design Expert

For personalized assistance, you can pay a little more to have a designer.

Despite the paid extra support layers, which are still excellent, I don’t think they are as important as the existing free support.

Although I am not certain which company I would give the number one spot in customer service to, BigCommerce is certainly one of my favorites.

This leaves us with one final area that every person involved in e-commerce must consider when making a decision.

Security

Online business is a risky venture so it shouldn’t be a surprise that BigCommerce needs to be secure.

Here are some examples:

BigCommerce PCI

While an e-commerce solution, that is compliant with level 1 PCI compliance, must be in place, it’s good to know the gold standard has been achieved.

This is what everyone believes, even those who aren’t involved in e-commerce.

It uses Google’s cloud. This is an assurance of security and performance. Google’s cloud platform was designed to offer industrial-strength hosting as well as enterprise-sized hosting.

You’re basically getting a piece of high-quality hosting that is normally reserved for large businesses and not small business owners.

Every company claims they have DDoS protection. BigCommerce also claims it.

BigCommerce DDoS

This applies to all things. It is evident in the high uptime and quick response times.

However, the fact is that BigCommerce is safe. This positive note is what I love.

Some of the pros and cons of BigCommerce.

Pros:

• BigCommerce is a great platform, with high uptime and quick response times.
• It makes use of Google’s cloud hosting platform for the enterprise. It is extremely secure and safe for e-commerce.
• BigCommerce is easy to use for all.
• The overall features are excellent and reasonable for the price. The best part is that the entry-level has access to some tools and features that are only available on higher-tier platforms.
• Overall, customer support is excellent.

Cons:

Let’s be a bit negative here for a moment. But the good news is that none of these are serious flaws.

• BigCommerce does a good job with shipping…but it is not as good as Shopify.
• The three pricing plans have online sales limitations. These limits are generally reasonable but could in some cases unnecessarily raise its cost.
• You can find some themes that look the same. They can also look fantastic.

People who feel more confident setting up e-commerce tools can afford to use BigCommerce. This is primarily because they can use a free/open-source CMS and as many plugins as they need.

Conclusion

Do I recommend BigCommerce? Overall, I will say yes. Here’s why.

BigCommerce does it all. It is easy to use, offers great customer service, great performance, security, and is very secure. Its generous feature allowances are what make it stand out from its competitors.

Many features are available on the first or second plan, but some are reserved for BigCommerce’s higher tiers.

There are downsides, some sales thresholds that will force you to raise your plan price if you exceed them. Which if your sales are skyrocketing you won’t mind about!

If this has helped you in your research, I would love you to leave a comment, or a like and share.

Thanks for visiting.

LILY