BigCommerce Reviews (2021) — All the Pros and Cons

We follow a hard-and-fast honesty policy. however, to fund our work, we use consort advertise links on this web log . In this BigCommerce review, I take an in-depth spirit at one of the best-known ecommerce solutions presently available. In the post, I ’ ll walk you through the key BigCommerce features. You ’ ll teach about all the BigCommerce pros and cons, and by the end of the article, you ’ ll have a much better estimate of whether this ecommerce solution is the right one for your occupation — or whether you ’ d be better off with an option. Let ’ s begin with a childlike question : what is BigCommerce?

What is BigCommerce?

BigCommerce is a paid-for, ‘ hosted ’ ecommerce solution that allows business owners to set up an on-line store and sell their products on the web. ‘ Hosted ’ means that BigCommerce runs on its own servers — so you don ’ t have to buy web host or install anything on your calculator to use it. arsenic long as you have access to a web browser and the internet, you can build and manage your memory from anywhere. BigCommerce is a ‘ software as a military service ’ ( SaaS ) intersection, which means that you don ’ thyroxine own the software — alternatively, you pay a monthly tip to use it. The product comes with a range of customizable templates to help you design your on-line store ; you can use it to sell either physical or digital goods ; and there are besides some tools provided to help you market your store .BigCommerce template The platform is chiefly aimed at people without much in the manner of web design skills — but it besides allows more tech-savvy users and developers to take things further by tweaking the HTML and CSS of BigCommerce stores. As with all hosted on-line storehouse and web site building services — Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, Jimdo etc. — if BigCommerce were to shut down or change its feature set radically, you might find yourself in a side where you needed to migrate your shop to another platform ( Magento Go users can tell you all about that ! ). But unless you are in a position to develop your own on-line store from scrape, you are in all likelihood going to end up using a host solution like BigCommerce anyhow to run your shop, and the good news is that it is one of the more build products of its kind out there. According to BigCommerce, the company has 60,000 customers ; 1,000+ employees, and a node roll that includes Ben and Jerry ’ sulfur, Skull Candy and Paypal .BigCommerce’s official statistics on platform usage

BigCommerce pricing

BigCommerce offers four monthly price plans, which are as follows :

• BigCommerce Standard: $29.95 per month
• BigCommerce Plus : $ 79.95 per calendar month
• BigCommerce Pro : $ 299.95 per calendar month
• BigCommerce Enterprise : price varies, depending on your clientele requirements

A 10 % dismiss is available for the ‘ Plus ’ and ‘ Pro ’ plans if you pay per annum for them ; and a 15-day free trial is besides available — you can avail of this offer via this link .BigCommerce pricing (2021). The ‘ standard ’, ‘ plus ’ and ‘ pro ’ plans are aimed at individuals and little businesses, and are separate of the company ’ randomness “ Essentials ” range of products. The Enterprise plan is geared more towards larger businesses and corporations ( users with very high gear bandwidth and advanced sell requirements ) .

Core selling features

As we ’ ll see below, the claim features you get with BigCommerce depend identical much on the plan you opt for, but important features common to all plans include :

• the choice of 12 free templates
• the ability to sell an unlimited number of physical or digital goods, in categories of your choose and using shipping rates of your choose
• a drag-and-drop page builder
• integrations with Paypal and a wide range of other requital gateways
• unlimited staff accounts
• blogging functionality
• search engine optimisation (SEO) features
• integration with various third-party apps
• discount coupons and endowment vouchers
• product review functionality
• the ability to tweak CSS and HTML
• professional reporting

( You ’ ll determine more about the quality of all of these as you progress through this BigCommerce review ). This comprehensive set of features is reasonably unique when it comes to online storehouse builders — a distribute of similar on-line store builders require you to upgrade to more expensive plans or install paid-for apps to access several of the above features. This means that BigCommerce arguably offers well more bang for the vaulting horse than many competing products at its submission degree monthly plan monetary value sharpen ( $ 29.95 per month ). That said, you can unlock extra functionality in BigCommerce by paying more. so lashkar-e-taiba ’ s drill down into the samara differences between each BigCommerce plan .

Differences between the BigCommerce plans

As you ’ five hundred expect, how much functionality you get from BigCommerce depends on how much you ’ rhenium prepared to pay for it. Each plan offers a distinct set of features, which I ’ ll go through now .

Bigcommerce Standard

BigCommerce ’ s cheapest offer, the ‘ standard ’ plan, costs $ 29.95, which is roughly the same price as Shopify, Volusion, Wix and Squarespace ’ s submission charge ecommerce plans. That said it is, in general, a much more comprehensive starter design than any of these, provide :

• a standalone online store
• the ability to sell an unlimited number of products
• unlimited bandwidth and storage
• unlimited staff accounts
• real-time shipping quotations
• gift cards and discount codes
• ratings and reviews functionality
• multi-currency selling
• point of sale (POS) functionality (this lets you use a BigCommerce store to sell in a physical location)
• professional reporting
• AMP (accelerated mobile pages) functionality

As discussed above, this represents a lot of ecommerce sleep together for your dollar — reasonably much all the key ingredients of an on-line store are provided on BigCommerce ’ s standard design ; this is not constantly the case with entry-level plans from other competing products. significantly, the BigCommerce Standard design facilitates selling in multiple currencies, with automatic conversion available — again, this is fairly singular. The chief criticism you could make regarding the submission level BigCommerce plan is that abandoned cart saving features are not included with it. An abandoned cart rescuer is an authoritative piece of functionality, because you can use it to identify people who have stopped their leverage mid-way through, and automatically send them a admonisher e-mail encouraging them to complete the buy. The similarly-priced Shopify ‘ Basic ’ plan includes this, and it ’ second besides available at a cheaper price degree from Squarespace, so BigCommerce falls down a bite by comparison here. There is an annual sales limit for BigCommerce Standard of $50,000 .

BigCommerce Plus

Next we have the ‘ BigCommerce Plus ’ plan. In addition to the core functionality as you ’ ll find on the criterion plan, it provides

• an abandoned cart saver tool
• a ‘persistent cart’ (this saves products to a customer’s cart irrespective of device used)
• stored credit cards (this allows your regular customers to save their card details on your store)
• customer grouping / segmentation.

With gaze to the end have mentioned above, customer group, this lets you divide customers into different segments, so that you can reward different customers based on action and particular purchases. You could, for case, use this functionality to create a loyalty program. The annual sales limit for BigCommerce Plus is $180,000 .

BigCommerce Pro

The adjacent plan up in the shuffle is ‘ BigCommerce Pro ’. With this plan, you don ’ t get a huge come of extra functionality over BigCommerce Plus — but you do get a importantly increase sales restrict. This permits up to $400,000 in on-line sales, with an extra fee of $ 150 per month per $ 200k in sales. One excess feature which is worth drawing attention to on this plan is Google Customer Reviews — a program that lets you collect and display feedback from users who ’ ve made a purchase from your on-line store. If you ’ ve enabled Google Customer Reviews, once a customer buys a product from your BigCommerce store, they will be asked if they ’ d like to review it on Google ( after it ’ randomness been delivered ) .When you have Google Customer Reviews enabled in Bigcommerce, your customers are sent this email after marking a purchase. If the customer indicates that they want to do this, Google will email them a survey after their ordering has arrived. The collect ratings are then displayed on your locate ( via an optional Google Customer Reviews badge ), on Search Ads, and in Google Shopping. The early independent features that you gain on this plan are advanced product filtering and custom SSL via a third party .

BigCommerce Enterprise

last, there ’ s BigCommerce ’ s “ Enterprise ” plan to consider. As this plan mention suggests, it is geared towards corporate users that have very high volumes of sales ( typically, over $ 1,000,000 ), and, consequently, advanced sell requirements. Features that are included on ‘ Enterprise ’ but not on the cheaper plans include :

• price lists ( this allows you to create price rules based on customer groups — so different groups of customers see different intersection prices based on how you ’ ve segmented them )
• unlimited API calls ( BigCommerce ’ s API — ‘ Application Programming Interface ’ — allows developers to share data between your storehouse and early apps, and the Enterprise design doesn ’ thymine place any limits on how many times these ‘ data sharing ’ connections can be made. This makes it better suited to businesses that are expecting a high volume of traffic / API connections to their store )
• priority support (including API support)
• BigCommerce consulting / bill management.

If you ’ rhenium interested in the Enterprise plan you will need to discuss your requirements with BigCommerce to establish price — the costs will reflect your business needs, but BigCommerce claims that they are cheaper than those for Shopify ’ s enterprise grade plan ( this is called ‘ Shopify Plus ’ and typically comes in at around $ 2,000 per month ). You can generally expect a lot more defend from BigCommerce if you purchase an Enterprise plan — in-depth support with data migration, setup, account management can all be facilitated. The annuals sales limit for BigCommerce Enterprise is negotiable. immediately, let ’ s drill down into sales limits in a morsel more depth .

Transaction fees and sales limits

A interview which many potential BigCommerce users ask is : “ how much of a cut of my sales are they going to take ? ” well, the good newsworthiness is that there are no transaction fees on any BigCommerce plan. This is in punctuate contrast to its key competitors. however, you do have to pay credit card processing fees to the company you select to process payments. These will depend on the payment gateway you use ( more on that in a moment ). The bad news, and as mentioned above, is that BigCommerce places a limits on your annual on-line sales. These limits are as follows :

• BigCommerce Standard : $ 50,000
• BigCommerce Plus : $ 180,000
• BigCommerce Pro : $ 400,000
• BigCommerce Enterprise : assignable.

( If you ’ re on the ‘ BigCommerce Pro ’ plan, you can increase the sales limit by paying $ 150 per month for every extra $ 200k in sales ). I contacted BigCommerce to see what happens if you breach these limits and the response was :

“ There is an extra 1,000-2,000 regulate limit per plan that users are able to go over before being forced to upgrade. During this fourth dimension users will receive notifications about upgrading their plan as they are over the limit. But we will not prevent extra orders from coming through until they exceed the extra 1,000-2,000 overage order provided. ”BigCommerce

I expect the limits write out won ’ t be a show-stopper for most merchants — if your storehouse is bringing in $ 400,000 a class you probably won ’ thyroxine be moaning excessively much about having to pay an extra $ 150 per calendar month for breaching the limit…but for some merchants they will be a bit of an aggravator. I have however to come across these sorts of limits on competing products like Shopify or Squarespace, so it ’ s a moment of a ‘ could do better ’ here for BigCommerce .

Which BigCommerce plan represents the ‘sweet spot’?

For me, the best value BigCommerce design is the $ 79 per calendar month ‘ Plus ’ plan, because it gives you access to features that in most context will help you to sell well more products — an abandon cart saver ( essential ! ), haunting handcart, and accredit card storing. so long as you have a sanely beneficial flow of traffic to your web site, these features will well pay for themselves. And, although I ’ d prefer not to see sales limits on any of the BigCommerce plans, the sales limit for this one is sanely high : $ 180k. For a restrict period, BigCommerce are offering 1 calendar month ’ s free overhaul on this plan ( in accession to the 15-day free trial ). You can avail of this release trial and try out the ‘ Plus ’ plan here .Learn more >

Payment gateways

There are two ways to accept credit circuit board payments in BigCommerce. The simplest thing to do is to use the default requital option for BigCommerce, Paypal powered by Braintree. Doing sol makes for an easy requital gateway frame-up and gives you discriminatory Paypal rates for credit card transactions ( which decrease as you go up BigCommerce ’ s pricing ladder ). The US rates are presently as follows :

• BigCommerce Standard : 2.59 % + 49c
• BigCommerce Plus : 2.35 % + 49c
• BigCommerce Pro : 2.05 % + 30c
• BigCommerce Enterprise : 2.05 % + 30c

PayPal Powered by Braintree rates (for USA) These fees can be lower in other countries — for example, in the UK, you ’ re looking at rates of 1.55 % to 1.85 %, depending on plan. There ’ s besides the choice of using a third-party requital processor for your on-line storehouse : these are called ‘ payment gateways, ’ and around 45 are available for BigCommerce, depending on your nation of operation. This number compares sanely well with competing products. Squarespace only provides an integration with 2 payment gateways ( Stripe and Paypal ) ; Shopify, however, offers over 100. Depending on the requital gateway provider you choose, you can expect to pay a monthly fee, a transaction tip, or both. It ’ s authoritative to note that these fees are not applied by BigCommerce but by the requital gateway provider in question. ( This contrasts positively with Shopify, which charges you transaction fees to use a third-party payment gateway ). Integrating a payment gateway with a hosted ecommerce solution like BigCommerce can occasionally be bit of a drawn-out work, which involves setting up ‘ merchant accounts ’ with your chosen gateway provider and configuring them so that they work with your store. It is still worth looking at the diverse fees involved with other payment gateway providers though — depending on what you sell and how much of it, using a different requital gateway may still be the best route for you to go down, even if it involves a bit more shape time .

BigCommerce templates

BigCommerce offers a reasonably beneficial choice of responsive templates that you can use for the design of your on-line store. There are 12 free BigCommerce themes and around 165 paid themes ; each composition contains a number of unlike variants, thus there quite is a bunch to choose from .Example of a free BigCommerce theme, ‘Cornerstone.’

Free themes

The rid themes on offer are contemporary, professional in appearance and provide a effective begin distributor point for building an on-line store. however, a few of them are very alike to each other, with the chief differences plainly involving color scheme. This is a finical exit with the release themes — although there are technically 12 available, it feels more like there are actually merely five themes to choose from .Some of the free BigCommerce themes are very similar to each other. This means that in the composition department, BigCommerce arguably doesn ’ t provide quite so much slam for buck as other solutions, like Shopify ( which provides 10 identical distinct exempt themes, with 2-3 variants of each ) or Squarespace ( which provides around 140 bundled themes ) .

Paid-for themes

To extend your options here, you can consider purchasing one of the paid-for BigCommerce themes. These are fairly sanely priced, starting out at $150 and going up to $300 ( occasionally you can pick one up at a dismiss rate — I ’ ve seen agio themes available for $ 99 when on sale ) .Example of a paid-for BigCommerce them, ‘Geneva’ again, you ’ ll find that some of these are a piece excessively similar to each early to merit being classified as different themes, however. overall, you will be able to create a professional blueprint for your BigCommerce storehouse using either the dislodge or bounty themes — it ’ d just be dear to see the range of themes extended a snatch .

Using the themes

One sphere where there could be an improvement made to the themes involves typefaces : the bundle baptismal font excerpt in most of the free themes is small by comparison to those offered by competitors like Shopify and Squarespace ( in some cases limiting you to good 3 or 4 fonts ). Although adding another baptismal font is perfectly accomplishable, it involves adding some code to your template file, which won ’ deoxythymidine monophosphate invoke to all users. It ’ mho besides a moment unvoiced to hide certain locate elements in BigCommerce templates — for model, when testing the ‘ Vault ’ theme for this BigCommerce review, I couldn ’ metric ton find an obvious way to remove the search legal profession ; in the ‘ Fortune ’ subject, I couldn ’ t hide the sidebar without resorting to adding some CSS. On the plus english, all the free themes are in full reactive, meaning they ’ ll automatically display correctly on any device ( mobile, tablet, desktop etc. ) ; and significantly, they are AMP-enabled excessively ( I discuss AMP — Accelerated Mobile Pages format — later on in this review ) .

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Product options, variants and categories

A particularly strong feature of BigCommerce is the way it handles product options and variants. Unlike its rival Shopify, which only allows you to present users with three merchandise options without resorting to coding or paying for third-party apps, BigCommerce lets you create a big number of product options ( up to 250 per merchandise ). BigCommerce ’ s product variant limit is generous besides — you can present a product in up to 600 variants. ( product variants are the number of product option combinations you can offer — for exemplar a little, aristocratic jersey would count as one discrepancy ; a big, crimson one would count as another, and thus on ). again for perspective, Shopify and Squarespace ’ s equivalent limits are 100 and 250 respectively. so if you are selling products that come in a lot of unlike formats, BigCommerce may be a particularly good option. See the below video for more detail on how it all works. Although BigCommerce is great when it comes to product options, it ’ second less impressive when it comes to product categories — whilst creating and editing them is aboveboard enough, you have to assign them to individual products in quite a manual fashion .Assigning product categories in BigCommerce It would be better — as is the case with some other leading on-line shop builders, notably Shopify — if you could automatically categorize products based on merchandise name or tags. To be fair, you can use a ‘ bulk edit ’ cock to speed up the summons a snatch, but I prefer Shopify ‘ s ‘ smart ’ approach to product classification .

BigCommerce’s abandoned cart saver feature

A BigCommerce have worth singling out for praise is its abandoned cart feature – it ’ s arguably one of the best out there. The creature allows you to create up to three automated emails to locate visitors who go part of the direction through the sales process entirely to leave your store without buying anything. This has the electric potential to dramatically increase your gross with little attempt – other than the ‘ one-off ’ prison term investment in setting up the automated messages – being involved .Setting up abandoned cart emails in Bigcommerce. It ’ s important to note however that the abandoned cart saver functionality only comes with BigCommerce ’ second ‘ Plus ’, ‘ Pro ’ and ‘ Enterprise ’ plans. This makes obtaining this functionality a morsel more expensive than from competing products. That said, the BigCommerce abandoned handcart rescuer is more flexible than the equivalent offerings from its key competitors — most of them limit the number of automatize emails to one, whereas BigCommerce lets you send three follow-ups. So there may be some justification for the higher price. In my know, abandoned cart rescuer functionality normally pays for itself, and if you are confident of receiving a large total of visits to your site, purchasing a BigCommerce plan featuring the abandoned cart rescuer makes a draw of sense .

Selling in multiple currencies

You normally get more sales if you sell in the currency used by your site visitors. so, if you ’ re sell in multiple countries, it ’ s a good idea to let your electric potential customers choose their own currency ( or, better inactive, award products in your site visitors ’ currency mechanically ). The very good news is that with BigCommerce ’ s free themes, you get a very thoroughly multi-currency solution out of the box — one that facilitates automatic currentness conversion based on IP address. If you ’ re using a paid-for template, you may need to use a third-party app to facilitate multi-currency — Bold Multi-Currency is a good option. But overall, BigCommerce scores highly when it comes to multi-currency sell — some competing solutions don ’ thymine offer this functionality at all ( i.e., Squarespace ) and others don ’ thymine provide fully automatic currency conversion unless you use an app or on an expensive enterprise-level plan ( Shopify being a key case ). For me, this multi-currency functionality is one of the strongest arguments for choosing BigCommerce over a competing ecommerce solution .

A multi-channel approach to selling

As with other leading ecommerce platforms, BigCommerce doesn ’ thymine restrict you to selling on your own on-line store — you can sell your products on respective sales channels. ‘ Out of the box ’ options on this front man include Facebook, Amazon, Instagram and Ebay, with more available via third-party apps ( available from the BigCommerce app store ) .

Selling in multiple languages with BigCommerce

BigCommerce doesn ’ metric ton have any built-in multilingual capabilites ; however, you can still sell in multiple languages using the chopine, thanks to an consolidation with the translation app Weglot. The BigCommerce + Weglot approach brings both advantages and disadvantages. On the asset side, you can offer your site in up to 100+ languages ; and the translations are automatic rifle ( with the choice to manually edit them ) .The Weglot translation app On the down side, you will need to pay extra for the Weglot app on peak of your BigCommerce fees — between $ 11 and $ 230 depdning on needs. And, machine translations, whilst improving all the time, are not normally good as those provided by an feel human translator .

Dropshipping with BigCommerce

many potential BigCommerce merchants will be concerned to learn how it handles dropshipping. Dropshipping is a sell mannequin where you don ’ thymine keep what you ’ rhenium sell in stock. rather, you take an decree, send its details to a supplier, and they send the goods to your customer. The advantage of this model is that you don ’ t need much start-up das kapital, as there ’ s no need to purchase any malcolm stock before you start selling. ( The disadvantage is that the low start-up costs mean that there a distribute of people doing it, and it ends up being quite a competitive business area. ) You can use BigCommerce to dropship, but in order to do sol, you ’ ll need to install a third-party app from BigCommerce ’ s app storehouse ( of which more in a consequence ) to facilitate it. There are quite a few apps available to help you dropship with BigCommerce, with key ones including :

• Ali-Express Dropshipping
• Spocket
• Wholesale B2B
• Inventory Source
• Printful

These apps vary in price to use, with barren trials being available for some of them .Dropshipping apps in the BigCommerce app store.

Point of sale functionality in BigCommerce

A courteous feature of BigCommerce is that it doesn ’ t just let you run an on-line memory — it can facilitate deal at ‘point of sale’ (POS) excessively. Thanks to some integrations with diverse POS providers — including Square, Clover, Hike and Vend — you can take payment and synchronize armory when sell from a physical placement ( such as a shop, market stall, event etc. ) .BigCommerce point-of-sale functionality lets you sell using hardware from leading POS providers like Square. You ’ ll need to research each of the available providers cautiously to ensure you find the right one for your needs, but it ’ second full that BigCommerce offers a few options on this presence. other competing ecommerce solutions either don ’ triiodothyronine offer POS at all — or are more restrictive in terms of what countries they can be used in, or the hardware and software options that are available .

File uploads and custom fields

Merchants who need to capture text to complete an order — for exemplar jewellers who need personalised text for an scratch, or printers who need their customers to supply a JPG of a logo for a jersey — will find BigCommerce ’ s approach to custom fields and file uploads peculiarly commodity. Creating custom fields and capturing data using them is very aboveboard in BigCommerce — you merely find the relevant product, create your custom field, name it and then your site users will be able to enter information into it at the bespeak of leverage. similarly, it ’ randomness in truth easy to allow your users to upload a file — again, it ’ s fair a case of editing your product so that it contains an ‘ upload file. ’ Your customers will then be able to upload a file — up to a generous 500MB in size — when they purchase that merchandise .BigCommerce’s ‘upload file’ functionality allows your site visitors to upload custom images that can be used on your products. This functionality is implemented well better on BigCommerce than some competing products. For exemplar, while Shopify allows you to create custom fields and give users the choice to upload files, it ’ s a fiddly process involving adding ‘ agate line item properties ’ to your code.

Squarespace allows you to create a custom plain easily adequate, but doesn ’ deoxythymidine monophosphate facilitate file uploads. so all in all, a thumbs-up for BigCommerce in this area .

Tax rules and VAT MOSS

US and Canada

One of the challenges of creating an on-line store is that you can end up selling goods in jurisdictions with differing tax rates — something that needs to be reflected in the price of your products. This is a particular concern for merchants based in the USA and Canada, where unlike states / provinces apply different tax rules. thankfully, BigCommerce allows you to apply tax rates mechanically for these two countries, which is a huge meter rescuer. You will however need to research and install a third-party app to facilitate this — Avalara, Vertex or Taxjar — so you can expect some extra costs. ( That said, Avalara can be used for free up until 2022, so hanker as you don ’ t exceed 5,000 tax calcluations ) .

European Union

If you intend to sell digital products to European Union consumers with BigCommerce, and expect to raise over €10,000 a year in tax income from doing then, you ’ ll need to familiarise yourself with something called VAT MOSS ( this is curtly for ‘ VAT Mini One Stop Shop ’ ). VAT MOSS requires you to apply country-specific rates of VAT to digital products — even if you are running a business that is based outside of the EU. Unlike key rival Shopify, BigCommerce doesn ’ deoxythymidine monophosphate seem to provide an automatic manner to do this — you will have to set up tax rates manually in order to facilitate it .

Shipping options

BigCommerce allows you to set up a variety of shipping rules / methods :

• Free embark rates
• Flat rates
• Price-based rates
• Weight-based rates
• In-store pickup
• Real time shipping rates from third-party carriers

BigCommerce has an edge over other ecommerce platforms when it comes to third-party real time shipping rates — you can access this functionality on any of its plans, whereas with leave competitors you ’ ll normally need to be on one of the most expensive ones. however, some competing products — notably Shopify and Etsy — allow you to avail of discount ship rates if you are based in certain countries and are felicitous to use their favored providers. These sort of discounts are not however available with BigCommerce .

Enhancing your BigCommerce store’s functionality via the app store

If the standard set of features provided by BigCommerce international relations and security network ’ metric ton sufficient for your needs, then you might want to consider purchasing some apps from its app storehouse — or to call it by its proper name, the ‘ Ecommerce Apps Marketplace. ’ A fairly across-the-board range of integrations is available in the app shop, which let you add many extra features to your BigCommerce store .The BigCommerce app store. You can add apps that deal with lots of different aspects of of running an on-line business — categories include :

• accounting
• CRM
• marketing
• shipping

and so on. Integrations are available for many long-familiar other business SaaS apps — for exemplar, you ’ ll find apps for Mailchimp, Zendesk, Xero and Salesforce. There is frequently a monetary value associated with these apps, but on the asset slope they do open up a earth of advanced features for your on-line store. In total, there are around 1,000 apps available for BigCommerce. This international relations and security network ’ thymine ampere many as rival Shopify provides ( it offers over 6,000 ), but a key app which IS provided by BigCommerce but not by Shopify is an official integration for Mailchimp. ( Due to a quarrel between Shopify and Mailchimp over data protection issues, an official integration between these two platforms is no longer available and you will need to use a workaround to make two platforms talk to each other. )

Interface and ease-of-use

BigCommerce ’ s interface is in general square and drug user friendly ; it ’ s relatively like in choice and appearance to Shopify ’ s and Squarepace ’ south. It ’ s not entirely dissimilar to a WordPress splashboard either, and anyone companion with a contemporary content management system ( CMS ) should find it pretty easy to use. A vertical menu on the left hand side of the screen gives you easy access to the key features — and the labels ( ‘ orders ’, ‘ shopfront design ’, ‘ analytics ’ etc. ) make it obvious where you ’ ll find all the key features. once you ’ ve selected an option from the menu on the leftover, the consort message or data is displayed on the right — you can then edit or view accordingly. An interest holocene addition to the BigCommerce feature sic is a drag-and-drop page builder ; this lets you select content blocks ( text, column, images etc. ) and drop them into status on your pages as appropriate. Whilst not however adenine twist as Squarespace ’ s layout engine, or the raw WordPress Gutenberg editor program, it involves a exchangeable concept .Bigcommerce’s new page builder. so in general, I ’ ve found BigCommerce slowly to use and get started with — surely when it comes to managing products and catalogues, it decidedly stands up well in terms of serviceability by comparison to Shopify and Squarespace, and it beats Volusion hands down. however, when it comes to managing message and layout, there is board for improvement. This is chiefly because despite the welcome addition of the foliate builder, it ’ mho not as easy to change the layout of a BigCommerce page as possibly it should be — some elements are hard to remove or hide, and as mentioned above, changing fonts is not deoxyadenosine monophosphate easily as it should be ( the default range provided with the free templates is reasonably limited ). additionally, whilst the page builder is a potentially utilitarian modern development, there is scope to implement it slenderly better. You can merely access the foliate builder if you go to the theme customizer — if you navigate to the web page you want to edit in the BigCommerce back goal, you arrive at a rather antique WYSIWYG ( what-you-see-is-what-you-get ) editor. This is a bite confusing. The downstairs video recording gives you a quick overview of the BigCommerce interface .

BigCommerce SEO features

A winder refer of prospective BigCommerce will be how good the search engine optimization ( SEO ) features in the platform are. The short answer is that they ’ ra very strong. All the basics are covered nicely — it is slowly to edit BigCommerce foliate titles, meta descriptions and headers. You can besides create and change product-specific URLs without trouble, and, unlike some competing products ( notably Shopify and Squaresapce ), you can create curtly URLs ( i.e., yourdomain.com/product-name rather of yourdomain.com/products/product-name ), which is by and large considered better for an SEO target of view. additionally, BigCommerce is no slouch when it comes to how a web site performs on mobile. ( This is all-important now that Google has introduced a ‘ mobile first ‘ approach to indexing contentedness ). not only are BigCommerce ’ second templates all responsive ( meaning they are designed to adjust to suit the device they ’ re being viewed on – fluid, tablet, desktop etc. ) but many besides work vitamin a ‘ Accelerated Mobile Pages ’ ( AMP ), which can have some positive SEO implications. Let ’ s drill down into AMP for a moment, as it ’ s an area that BigCommerce arguably leads the on-line store builder field in .

Using Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) in BigCommerce

Accelerated mobile Pages ( AMP ) is a Google-backed project which aims to deliver your locate content extremely promptly to mobile users, chiefly by creating streamlined pages that strip out certain types of code ( scripts ) and features ( for example, web log comments ). The main advantage of using AMP on your web site is that it drastically reduces the number of mobile users who leave your web site as a result of your content loading excessively slowly. This means you ’ ll get a higher share of engage visitors, and potentially sales. AMP format can besides provide some SEO benefits excessively — many SEO experts believe that pages with a humble cliff rate that people ‘ populate on ’ for some clock time ( two things that AMP can deliver ) are rewarded by Google ’ s algorithms in search results .Enabling AMP in BigCommerce just involves ticking a checkbox At the moment, AMP format is typically used for web log posts and news articles — but it can besides be used for early foliate types, including merchandise pages on ecommerce sites. ( The fact that eBay is one of the early adopters of AMP format in the ecommerce world highlights that there are decidedly some obvious benefits to using it in an on-line store context ! ) BigCommerce ’ s AMP oblation is excellent — its free templates facilitate AMP, and many of the premium themes do excessively .

Image optimisation

Images that are sized correctly for the device they ’ re on and which load promptly can improve foliate rush significantly ( with faster-loading pages being given discriminatory treatment by Google in search results ). BigCommerce provides effigy optimization via Akamai Image Manger. This optimises all your images automatically, and according to BigCommerce, merchants using Akamai Image Manager as contribution of a closed beta for several months saw american samoa much as 70 % improvement in site load times. Again, and in keeping with BigCommerce ’ s general ‘ all-in-one ’ approach to its platform features, this is included in all plans. A big thumb up for this, because competing platforms either don ’ thyroxine provide this functionality, or require you to install a paid-for app to attain it. All in all, I ’ megabyte very impress with BigCommerce ’ s SEO capabilities. In order to ensure your memory ranks highly in search results, you will of course still need to engage in keyword inquiry and radio link build up — but the out-of-the-box technical SEO features provided by BigCommerce are excellent. associate content : witness see our Semrush review, our Ahrefs v Semrush comparison and our post on Semrush price for more data on the extra tools you will normally need to help your on-line shop rank in search results .

Blogging in BigCommerce

You might think that a blog is not an all-important sport of an on-line store — but you ’ five hundred be wrong ! Blogging is a key part of any successful inbound market crusade ; when done well it can improve a site ’ second SEO and, by annex, traffic to it ( with both improvements obviously leading to increased sales ! ). helpfully there is a built-in web log in BigCommerce. Whilst it ’ s not going to compete with a WordPress web log in terms of functionality, it will however allow you to create the classify of posts that can attract visitors to your site .Adding a blog post in BigCommerce. There is one rather strange omission from BigCommerce ’ s blogging functionality however : an RSS fertilize. RSS feeds are useful because they allow your web log contentedness to ‘ travel ’ — site visitors can use them to subscribe to raw posts via RSS readers or embed your posts on other websites ; and site owners can use them to mechanically populate the newsletters sent by e-mail market tools like GetResponse, Campaign Monitor, AWeber or Mailchimp. If you feel the BigCommerce blogging functionality is not up to scratch, or if RSS is a deal-breaker for you, you can always integrate another blogging tool ( such as WordPress ) with your BigCommerce memory. It ’ randomness important to set this up correctly however — using a subdomain — as doing this incorrectly means that you may not benefit from the SEO / inbound marketing advantages that good blogging can bring .

Email marketing — a missing feature?

Something that ’ s provided by leading competitors — but is presently missing from BigCommerce ’ sulfur feature set — is electronic mail market. Unlike Wix, Shopify and Squarespace, BigCommerce doesn ’ thyroxine so far provide you with a means to host a mailing list and send e-newsletters out of the box. however, integrations are available for BigCommerce with most of the leading electronic mail marketing solutions ( AWeber and GetResponse etc. ) — and these tend to provide a LOT more functionality than the built-in electronic mail commercialize tools provided by on-line store builders .

BigCommerce analytics reports

BigCommerce provides users with respective reports as criterion, including :

• customer reports ( where your customers come from, the share of fresh five returning customers, their overall spend and when they last made an order )
• marketing reports ( how you acquired your customers )
• search data reports ( the give voice customers used when searching for products in your on-line store )
• finance reports ( sales, tax reports etc. )
• abandoned cart reports ( assuming your plan supports this feature ).

For an extra fee you can besides gain access to an ‘ Ecommerce Insights ’ report, which provides you with more detail data on your customers, products and abandoned carts. This fee varies according to the plan you are on — ‘ Standard ’ and ‘ Plus ’ customers can avail of ‘ Insights ’ for an extra $ 49 per month ; for ‘ Pro ’ customers it ’ second $ 99 per calendar month ; and for ‘ Enterprise ’ customers it ’ mho $ 249 per month .BigCommerce analytics. In short, the BigCommerce analytics offer is reasonably strong — and the best thing about it is that the majority of the report functionality comes a standard on all plans. This is not the lawsuit with its key rival Shopify, which requires you to be on its more expensive $ 79 design before you get access to its more in-depth sales and customer reports. Of naturally in addition to using the built-in BigCommerce report tools, you could besides supplement your analytics arsenal by integrating Google Analytics into your web site and using goals to measure conversions .

iOS and Android apps for BigCommerce

After several years without a mobile app available, the dear news is that BigCommerce has reintroduced one. available for both Android and io, the new app allows you to manage your store on the go. It allows you to :

• access all your stores with one login
• check your store’s revenue, orders, visitors, and conversion rate by week or by month
• view and search your store’s orders, access person holy order details, and update order status
• view and search all your store’s customers, access individual customer details ( including order history )
• contact customers via in-app earphone and electronic mail links.

The review for this app were initially quite poor, but BigCommerce seems to have fixed some key bugs and it ’ s receiving quite a incontrovertible reaction from users nowadays. The io adaptation seems to be generating higher ratings than the Android one, however ( 4.6 out of 5 versus 3.5 out of 5, respectively ) .The Bigcommerce mobile app (iOS).

GDPR compliance in BigCommerce

With the introduction of GDPR ( General Data Protection Regulation ), there are several legal steps that web site owners now need to take to ensure that they are adequately protecting their europium visitors ’ privacy. There are serious fiscal penalties for not doing so ; and even if your clientele is not based in the EU, you still need to comply with the regulations where any site visits from the EU are concerned. now, please note that I ’ thousand not a lawyer and you shouldn ’ thyroxine treat anything here as legal advice ; but that said, I ’ thousand going to spell out how I see GDPR issues affecting likely BigCommerce shop owners. Based on my understand of the GDPR rules, the key things that BigCommerce storehouse owners have to do are :

• provide adequate privacy and cookie notices
• process and store data securely
• get clear consent from people signing up to mailing lists that it is approve to send them e-newsletters
• provide a means to opt in or revoke consent to use of non-essential cookies on a web site before they are run ( and to log that accept ).

It ’ second by and large easy on most platforms to meet the first three requirements, although you will need to spend a bite of time ( and possibly money on lawyers or legal templates ! ) creating the relevant notices and tweaking data capture forms in order to make them GDPR compliant. The cookie accept prerequisite is harder to meet — but the well news is that unlike many competing platforms, BigCommerce actually does pretty well in terms of helping you do then. To ensure GDPR submission in this area, you are required to display a cookie banner to your web site users which

• allows them to choose which cookies they want to run BEFORE those cookies are run ( i.e., to give ‘ prior accept ’ )
• logs their consent to run cookies
• allows them to revoke consent at a late stage.

so for example, if you use a Facebook Ads or Google Analytics cookie on your BigCommerce store, you will be breaking GDPR laws unless you have a solution in locate which does all of the above. helpfully, BigCommerce provides a in truth straightforward way to add third-party scripts and ensure they are only run when consent is granted. ( It ’ south not clear however how to log user consent / facilitate revoke of it down the line — so there ’ s telescope for improvement here ). GDPR cookie consent functionality, in my scene, should constantly be considered a ‘ core feature ’ and not something that users should have to look to an app to provide — so it ’ randomness great to see that this feature of speech, or at least the key parts of it, are provided out of the box by BigCommerce .

BigCommerce customer support

When you start a BigCommerce free trial, you are provided with assorted support emails and resources aimed at helping you with the ‘ onboarding ’ work. There ’ s a fair amount of hand-holding available if you want it, which should make it easy adequate to get your shop up and running. For those who have purchased a BigCommerce design, the company provides 24-hour ‘ populate agent ’ customer subscribe ( via call, electronic mail or chat ). Before you get access to relevant contact details however, you are encouraged to try to resolve the issue by searching for an answer to your question via the BigCommerce serve pages first base ( see screengrab below ) .The BigCommerce ‘contact support’ page This will annoy some users a bit, although you do get presented with fairly easy-to-digest contact details once you ’ ve completed your search and ignored the assistant articles ! You can besides use ‘ cut this step ’ button to bypass this — this immediately brings up the earphone numbers, live old world chat options etc. And of class the good news is that earphone support is available for a wide range of countries — and if you don ’ t see your nation listed, there ’ s a helpful ‘ all other countries ’ number you can call. For those who are more incline towards trying to sort support issues out themselves, there is a large range of video and textbook resources available from BigCommerce, and a residential district forum. And last a notice on the languages that customer support is available in : you can presently access it in English, French, Dutch and Italian .

BigCommerce review: conclusion

ultimately, BigCommerce is one of the most feature-packed host on-line store builders I ’ ve tested — in especial, its entry-level design provides significantly more ‘ hit for the vaulting horse ’ than many competing products. It ’ s impregnable on the SEO front man, with AMP functionality and automatic image optimization features being provided out of the box. Its multi-currency selling functionality is very full besides — and one the strongest arguments for using this product over a competing one. The chief thing that needs improvement in BigCommerce would probably be its template excerpt — I think the free options provided could be more varied, they ’ re not quite american samoa editable as they should be, and it would be better if they give you access to a wide-eyed range of web fonts. I hope this BigCommerce inspection has helped give you a smell of this product and whether it ’ s suitable for your needs — but as common, it ’ randomness always best to try before you buy, and you can avail of a free BigCommerce test here. finally, below you will find my drumhead of the key pros and cons of BigCommerce. Our overall rating : 4.4/5

Key pros and cons of BigCommerce

Pros of BigCommerce

• The overall feature set on entry-level BigCommerce plans is very comprehensive. many advance features that other platforms charge a premium for are available at a much lower cost with BigCommerce .
• It makes selling in multiple currencies very aboveboard .
• Third party real time shipping calculations are available on any design — this distinguishes BigCommerce from samara competitors like Squarespace and Shopify, which require you to be on a bounty plan or buy an accessory to avail of this functionality .
• There are no transaction fees applied by BigCommerce, even if you use a third-party requital gateway .
• You get a dependable adjust of report tools on all plans — again, this is not the case with all competing products .
• It ’ south in truth easy to create custom-made fields .
• Allowing your customers to upload files during their leverage is very slowly .
• It comes with built-in intersection review functionality .
• It comes with drag-and-drop page builder functionality .
• Its SEO features are capital — you can create short URLs, AMP format is available on all its templates, and automatic rifle image optimization is included on all plans .
• The ‘ abandoned cart saver ’ creature is more comprehensive than the alike offer from competitors .
• You get an outright number of staff accounts on any plan .
• It comes with a built-in blog .
• You can avail of cheaper-than-usual Paypal poster transaction fees with BigCommerce, thanks to its discriminatory arrangement with Braintree .
• It ’ s a very flexible solution for vendors with a lot of different product variants.
• The built-in cookie accept feature of speech helps you meet GDPR requirements in ways that other alike platforms don ’ triiodothyronine .
• You can try the merchandise spare for 15 days

Cons of BigCommerce

• By comparison to some of its competitors, you have to pay quite a set to avail of abandon haul functionality .
• Limits are placed on annual on-line sales — and if you exceed them, you ’ ll motivation to upgrade to a more expensive monthly plan .
• The free themes are in many cases excessively alike to each other .
• The number of typefaces included in the complimentary themes is very limited .
• The page builder functionality needs quite a bit of improvement — based on my experience, it can be a sting buggy, and it ’ s bewilderingly implemented .
• Unlike some competing products, there’s no shipping discounts available on any plan.
• It could be a sting easier to edit the free templates .
• The built-in blog doesn ’ thymine facilitate RSS feeds .
• VAT MOSS rates aren ’ t presently catered for .

BigCommerce alternatives

As you ’ ve probably picked up on in this BigCommerce review, the platform ’ randomness main rival is credibly Shopify, which is similarly priced and comes with a comparable range of basic features. Read our BigCommerce five Shopify comparison or our Shopify inspection for more details on that product. Another option when it comes to building an on-line shop is to use WordPress in conjunction with an ecommerce tool such as Ecwid or WooCommerce. ( obligatory plug : we can help you with a WordPress ecommerce undertaking — contact us for more information ! ). You might besides wish to investigate Squarespace, which whilst quite not as feature-packed from an ecommerce point of horizon, is a in truth good product for those who wish to combine impressive visuals or message with some ecommerce features. In particular, Squarespace is actually flexible when it comes to laying out contentedness, and its blogging features are strong. Our full Squarespace review is here. If you already have a web site that you ’ re happy with, and wish to add ecommerce functionality to it, you could do worse than check out Ecwid. This lets you create a store which you can then add to any site through the accession of a elementary appliance. Another option is to use Amazon to sell your products — this differs from BigCommerce in that it is not a hosted web site builder ; it actually IS an on-line store ( and a very big one at that ). Our Shopify volt Amazon comparison highlights the differences between selling via a host on-line store and on a large on-line market. ultimately, other well-known solutions which facilitate the build up of on-line stores include Wix, Jimdo, GoDaddy, Big Cartel and Weebly — but it ’ randomness probably fairly to say that these are more ‘ prosumer ’ products ; BigCommerce is aimed at a more master, ecommerce-focused market. For more information on Wix, you might like to check out our Wix review, or our Wix v WordPress, Wix five Shopify and Wix vs Squarespace articles. For more information on Big Cartel, take a look at our Big Cartel inspection or our big Cartel v Shopify comparison. Our Shopify five GoDaddy comparison contains an overview of GoDaddy ’ s main strengths and weaknesses .

Got any thoughts on BigCommerce?

If you have any queries on this platform, or feedback on our BigCommerce review, do leave a comment below — we ’ ll do our best to answer any queries ! Your contribution helps us improve our contentedness, so we ’ re constantly very grateful for any of your thoughts .

More BigCommerce / ecommerce related resources

BigCommerce FAQs

What’s the best value BigCommerce plan?

The ‘ dessert spot ’ BigCommerce plan is probably the mid-tier ‘ Plus ’ plan — as it gives you all the functionality you need for an on-line store, along with one of the most authoritative commercialize features you can add to your shop, an abandoned haul saver .

Does BigCommerce charge transaction fees?

No — but any third-party payment processor you use will take a percentage trimmed of each transaction. These fees vary by requital gateway .

Can I sell video content on BigCommerce?

Yes — BigCommerce lets you sell digital products, including video. however, you will need to note that a charge size limit of 512MB applies here — so if your television subject is larger than that you may need to investigate a different delivery method ( for example a Dropbox associate or a dedicate downloads app from the BigCommerce store ) .

Can I create multi-lingual versions of my BigCommerce store?

You can do, yes, but it will involve making use of a third-party app, Weglot.

Can I sell in multiple currencies with BigCommerce?

Yes — so long as the composition you ’ re using supports this. All the rid themes do ; if you ’ ra considering using a paid-for theme and want to sell in multiple currencies, check with BigCommerce ’ s documentation team that the subject in question supports this .

Is it easy to upgrade or downgrade my BigCommerce plan?

You can upgrade at any fourth dimension. With respect to downgrade, you will need to note that because sales limits apply to each BigCommerce plan, if you ’ ve exceeded one of them, a downgrade might not technically be potential in a given year. More information about downgrading your plan is available from the BigCommerce documentation pages .Free BigCommerce trial Did you know ? This article is now available in French. Check out our ‘ Avis BigCommerce ‘ post on the fresh Style Factory France site .

source : https://techreviewz.net
Category : Review