2022 BigCommerce Review: Is It Right for Your Business?

BigCommerce is one of the leading ecommerce platforms, connecting buyers and sellers across a wide selection of verticals. The company has enjoyed rapid growth over the past few years, but some are questioning whether or not this growth can continue at an unsustainable rate. In order to find out how BigCommerce stacks up in terms of profitability for businesses, you need to look no further than their latest review from 2022 which provides detailed statistics about their business model.

The “bigcommerce vs shopify” is a question that many small businesses are asking. The two platforms have some similarities and some differences, which can make it difficult to decide which platform is right for your business.

BigCommerce is a fully hosted ecommerce platform that allows you to create an online shop and sell it across a variety of platforms, including enterprise and ecommerce applications. It is recognized for its zero transaction costs and scalable solutions, making it ideal for high-volume, expanding enterprises that want a sales platform that can keep up with them.

BigCommerce also includes inventory and Management of Products capabilities that can handle more variations and modifiers than rival ecommerce platforms, making it ideal for firms with huge inventories or complicated product assortments. Monthly rates begin at $29.95 per month.

BigCommerce

What We Enjoy

• There are There are no transaction costs., and there are 65 payment gateway alternatives.
• Inventory and Management of Products software that works
• Customer service that is well-reviewed and available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week
• Reporting tools that are extensive

What Isn’t There

• It is not suitable for beginners.
• Its plans include sales volume restrictions.
• There are currently no shipping discounts available.
• Only higher plans include abandoned cart retrieval.

Factors to Consider

• Starts at $29.95 for software.
• There are There are no transaction costs..
• PayPal powered by Braintree and 65 additional payment gateways
• Point-of-sale: Third-party services are necessary and are not provided.

Features to Look For:

• Tools for creating bespoke work orders and digital products are native to the platform.
• Product varieties and modification choices abound.
• Selling capabilities on corporate and ecommerce applications (Google Shopping, Walmart Marketplace, and PriceGrabber)
• Even on the most basic plan, you can get real-time shipping prices.

Go to BigCommerce to learn more.

When Should You Use BigCommerce?

BigCommerce is one of our top-rated ecommerce systems, with a rating of 4.38 out of 5. BigCommerce, in fact, comes in second place to Shopify as the finest overall ecommerce solution.

BigCommerce is especially recommended for:

• BigCommerce is ideally suited for high-revenue enterprise organizations, as its name suggests. PayPal, Square, Amazon Pay, and Apple Pay are among the payment partners it supports. It is highly appealing to high-revenue organizations because to the absence of transaction fees and the flexibility to search for the best Processing of Payments rates.
• Businesses in need of a scalable ecommerce platform include: As your company develops and your requirements change, you may upgrade to different subscription packages offered by BigCommerce. Aside from your own website, the platform enables you to sell across different channels such as Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook, as well as use its SEO capabilities to enhance traffic and conversion rates.
• Online shops with a long track record that have outgrown their existing platforms: As previously said, you will not outgrow BigCommerce. It also includes useful tools and tips to ensure a seamless transition.
• BigCommerce allows online companies with a huge range of products, such as clothes retailers, to build up 250 product variations and up to 600 variants.
• Businesses that sell a combination of physical, digital, and service-based items may use BigCommerce to do so without the requirement for a third-party integration.
• Online businesses with a worldwide reach: BigCommerce’s free theme and basic plan enable you to sell in numerous currencies. It also recognizes a visitor’s IP address and immediately swaps currencies.

When to Use a Substitute

• Shopify may be a better alternative if your firm is engaged in small-scale selling or has just a few goods. For $9 a month, the Shopify Lite plan enables you to add checkout buttons on your social network profiles. You might also go through our list of the top free ecommerce Builder of Websitess.
• Check exploring Shopify, Square Online, and Squarespace if you don’t know how to code and want a fast and straightforward setup. They are said to be highly straightforward and simple to set up by users.
• Square Online is the greatest solution if you have a brick-and-mortar business and want to add an online component for pickup or local delivery sales. It allows you to create a complete website or a small one-page site at no cost.
• Squarespace is our preferred Builder of Websites for a user-friendly, all-in-one solution if selling isn’t the major emphasis of your small company website and you simply need a small business website.
• WooCommerce or PrestaShop are excellent options if you require a completely customized website and online shop hosted on your own infrastructure. These are open-source platforms aimed largely at programmers.
• A WordPress ecommerce plugin like WooCommerce would be a better alternative if you currently have a WordPress website and want to develop or expand an online shop. These plugins are comparable to BigCommerce in terms of functionalities, but they also have the benefit of being as customisable as WordPress.

Video Review of BigCommerce

Examples of BigCommerce Stores

BigCommerce is the ideal choice for enterprises with a large product inventory, custom or work-order tools, and a scalable solution. The companies listed below are excellent examples of companies that take use of BigCommerce’s unique capabilities.

1. merriment

Bridesmaid dresses are available in a broad range of designs, colors, and sizes at Revelry, an online store. BigCommerce was chosen by its owner, Michelle DeLoach, due of its quick loading speed, ability to create shoppable Instagram posts, and inexpensive transaction costs (thanks to PayPal by Braintree integration).

On its ecommerce site, Revelry implemented a multistep approach. You may get samples to try on at home online and then order custom sizes for your dresses after that.

Variants with color swatches are shown on Revelry’s product page.

Skullcandy (Skullcandy) (Skullcandy

Skullcandy is a high-end audio company that sells earbuds and headphones (both wired and wireless). BigCommerce was chosen because of its flexibility, adaptability, and cost. Jenny Buchar, the company’s Director of Digital Experience and Operations, said she was persuaded to switch to BigCommerce after seeing that its nontechnical staff could set up its worldwide shops’ checkout, taxes, shipping, and payment options with easy default settings.

Skullcandy is an excellent example of successful ecommerce branding. It has consistent web branding aspects that add to its overall positioning.

Skullcandy takes use of BigCommerce’s multilanguage capabilities to reach a worldwide audience.

Each Skullcandy product is organized into categories, which lead to custom-designed product sites.

3. Cycles of Glory

Glory Cycles began by selling bike components on eBay and has now grown into a multiplatform ecommerce company powered by BigCommerce. Its president, Clive de Sousa, said that the firm need a website that could grow with the company. Its previous platform couldn’t match that demand, so company switched to BigCommerce and used its eBay interface to move goods. It’s still available on eBay and will be on Amazon shortly.

Glory Cycles is an excellent illustration of how ecommerce businesses must develop as they expand.

BigCommerce’s parent and child categories are used by Glory Cycles. You may sort by accessory, brand, model, and price using the navigation filter.

Pricing for BigCommerce

BigCommerce’s price guide has four membership tiers, starting at $29.95 per month. The yearly sales restrictions and availability of premium services like saved credit cards, Google customer reviews, and limitless API calls are the key variations between the tiers.

Pricing for BigCommerce Plans

*Based on a 12-month trailing period.

**Only available on the Pro plan: Starts at $299.95 per month for online sales under $400,000, then $150 per month for every $200,000 beyond that.

The aforementioned costs do not include all types of taxes (e.g., U.S. sales, VAT, and GST).

The following are included in all plans:

• There are no transaction costs.
• Staff accounts, goods, file storage, and bandwidth are all unlimited.
• Channels of distribution (online storefront, Amazon, eBay, Walmart, Google Shopping, and social media channels)
• Live customer service available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week
• Integration with BigCommerce’s mobile app and POS
• Integrations with payment systems (Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Amazon Pay)
• Multicurrency
• A secure socket layer (SSL) certificate

The Standard package also includes real-time shipping estimates, professional reporting tools, coupons, discounts, and gift cards, in addition to the foregoing.

All of the features of the Standard version are included in the Plus package, as well as an abandoned cart saver, persistent cart saver, customer groups, and saved payment cards.

In the meanwhile, the Pro plan adds product filtering, custom SSL (Secure Sockets Layer), and Google user reviews to the Plus plan’s capabilities.

On top of everything else, Enterprise features limitless API calls, pricing lists, and bespoke possibilities for customers with more than $400,000 in annual online sales income.

Features of BigCommerce

BigCommerce provides a no-strings-attached 15-day free trial. To create a shop, you must first create an account using an email address, provide your store’s name, and answer a few questions about your company.

You may start by watching a video tour of the platform or following the steps to create your shop. If you get stuck or need assistance, contact the company’s support service through phone or live chat.

Below are some of BigCommerce’s most notable features.

Since the previous time we checked in:

BigCommerce has made significant improvements to their platform since we last updated this assessment in May 2021, including:

• New transactional email templates are now available.
• Google, Walmart, Amazon, TikTok, Wish, and Mercado Libre have extended their relationship to provide companies with development prospects via third-party product distribution, advertising, and selling.
• Merchants may construct and manage numerous storefronts under a single BigCommerce shop. Multi-storefront (MSF) was debuted in beta in 2021 and will be completely released in 2022.
• A business-to-business version (a new functionality for BundleB2B, which includes quote management, invoice portal, and payment method visibility control)

Builder of Websites

BigCommerce has more than a hundred free and premium website designs (starting at $150) that are all mobile-friendly and AMP-ready (Accelerated Mobile Pages). When compared to Shopify’s nine free themes with two to three variations and Squarespace’s 115+ theme packages, its free themes have remarkable similarities, with mainly color variances.

A free BigCommerce website theme sample (Source: BigCommerce)

BigCommerce’s themes, on the other hand, are wonderful since they provide possibilities for companies with little or huge catalogs. You may also search by industry or layout preference (grid or large images). Similar to other ecommerce systems that feature drag-and-drop builders, BigCommerce’s page builder, Store Design, allows you to change page components and see them reflected in real time.

With BigCommerce’s drag and drop editor, changes are updated in real time.

Management of Products

BigCommerce is the only ecommerce platform that allows you to sell physical, digital, and service-based goods without the necessity of a third-party app (often at a cost). Subscriptions, on the other hand, need the use of an app.

The “Products” tab on the BigCommerce dashboard provides an overview of your stock status. You may alter product descriptions and pricing, as well as update goods and add new items. You may also be as specific as you like with your metadata descriptions and both product and category URLs, enabling you to use SEO tools.

BigCommerce’s robust product variation management is one of its finest features. Unlike Shopify, which only enables you to create three product variations, BigCommerce allows you to build up to 250. It can also produce SKUs for all of the numerous variation combinations you create. Its product variation limit is up to 600, greatly above Shopify and Squarespace’s respective restrictions of just 100.

On your product dashboard, an example of how variations are shown.

You may create 250 product alternatives with 100 different variations.

Custom product fields and work tools are inherent to BigCommerce. If your items allow for customisation, such as engraving or picture uploads, you may quickly create custom fields and upload photos (up to 500MB). In Shopify, this can only be done using third-party apps.

With your items, you may include work-order elements like engraving, bespoke messages, and product swatch options.

When it comes to product categories, though, BigCommerce falls short. While it is quick and simple to create items and their versions, you must manually allocate each products to categories.

Unlike Shopify, which allows you to create categories based on tags and product names, BigCommerce requires you to manually construct categories.

Management of Inventory

BigCommerce allows you to manage inventory for your storefront items and set up low-stock alerts, but you must do so manually rather than relying on EOQ (Economic Order Quantity) data. Third-party connectors may be used to synchronize several sales channels.

Within your items page, you can set up inventory tracking. (Image courtesy of BigCommerce)

You may choose how to notify your consumers about stock shortages, such as concealing a product when it’s sold out or displaying a sold out notice with an availability date. You may also charge “authorize only” transactions, which enable you to authorize a charge without taking money from your customer’s account until you approve it. This is beneficial for selling commodities that don’t need inventory, such as reconditioned items, wholesale goods, and goods made on-site.

Processing of Payments

BigCommerce is recognized for not collecting sales transaction costs, however keep in mind that your payment gateway will still charge you credit card fees. When you utilize BigCommerce’s default payment method, PayPal powered by Braintree, you get preferential PayPal rates that reduce as you subscribe to larger plans.

It offers 65+ integrated payment gateways to select from, all of which enable you to set up a one-click checkout, take mobile payments, and support numerous currencies on your website.

You may accept the following payment methods:

• On the internet (PayPal, Stripe, and more)
• Purchase Now and Pay Later (BNPL)
• Away from the computer (bank deposit, cash on delivery, check, money order, pay in store)
• Wallets on the internet (Amazon Pay, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Masterpass)

If you have not added a Purchase Now and Pay Later (BNPL) option to your online store, now may be the perfect time to.

Learn how to provide consumer finance, including BNPL, in our guide.

Selling across several channels

Aside from your web shop, BigCommerce provides a variety of options to sell your items, such as via social media channels (Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram). You may also sell your products on ecommerce sites like eBay and Amazon.

Your product listings and inventory are synchronised across all platforms when you connect your Facebook, Amazon, and eBay accounts. If you alter a product title in your BigCommerce dashboard, the change will be reflected across all platforms, saving you time and effort. If you connect with Instagram, you may improve the user experience by showing up to five goods on your account, each with extensive product views.

By linking or integrating your BigCommerce shop, you may sell in-person, on marketplaces, and on social media.

Multicurrency & Multilanguage Capabilities

The platform supports over a hundred different currencies and provides local payment alternatives via your chosen channel. You may also localize the front-end of your business to match the language of your target market.

BigCommerce’s free themes even allow for automated currency conversion depending on the IP address of a site visitor. It easily outperforms competing platforms that either don’t provide this option (such as Squarespace) or only offer it as part of a more costly subscription (like Shopify).

Set up several currencies in your BigCommerce shop and select whether to transact in the default currency or the currency specified by the client.

Sales & Marketing Features

Site banners, coupon codes, gift certificates, discounts, abandoned cart alerts, and Google Customer ratings are just a few of the marketing options available with BigCommerce.

BigCommerce offers a wide range of marketing tools to help you advertise your business online.

The Starter package, on the other hand, lacks the abandoned cart recovery option, making it somewhat more costly than Shopify, which offers the service even on its most basic plan.

It is, however, more adaptable than those found on Shopify and other platforms. While most platforms only allow you to send one automated email, BigCommerce allows you to send three. With the exception of the time spent putting up the automated messaging, this may enhance income with no effort.

This function generally pays for itself—if your site gets a lot of traffic, investing in a BigCommerce package that includes abandoned cart recovery is a good idea.

This is an example of an abandoned cart follow-up email. (Image courtesy of BigCommerce)

SEO

BigCommerce websites are all mobile-friendly and incorporate SEO tools including an automatic image optimizer, on-page SEO, sitemap production, and site speed boosters. AMP is also supported by all BigCommerce themes.

One of BigCommerce’s biggest features is the ability to set up and apply SEO from the back end.

You may quickly adjust the information, header tags, and titles of your shop goods, as well as build and alter product-specific URLs. You may also design short URLs (e.g., www.domain.com/custom-name instead of www.domain.com/products/custom-name) in contrast to Shopify and Squarespace.

From the product dashboard, you can create SEO meta descriptions and adjust product URLs.

The AMP functionality is also beneficial to SEO. It’s a Google initiative that tries to deliver your site’s information to mobile users quicker, lowering the amount of mobile visitors who abandon your site because it takes too long to load.

BigCommerce just released Akamai Image Manager, an image optimization service. Users who employed this functionality noticed a 70 percent reduction in site load speeds, according to BigCommerce.

Shipping Instruments

You may set up multiple shipping policies in BigCommerce, such as the ones below:

• Shipping is free.
• a fixed fee
• Rate that is determined by the price
• Rate depending on weight
• Pickup in-store
• Rates from third-party carriers in real time

Third-party real-time shipping prices are accessible in all of BigCommerce’s plans, unlike competing platforms that only provide this on pricier plans. Discounted shipping rates are not currently available for BigCommerce, unlike on Shopify.

Reporting & Analytics

All BigCommerce plans provide detailed analytics reports and the most of their reporting tools. Unlike Shopify, which needs you to be on the $79 plan before you can see more detailed sales and customer reports.

The following are some examples of standard reports:

• Customer feedback (new vs returning customers, overall spend, order history, referral website)
• reports on marketing (customer acquisition)
• Reports on data searches (search queries customers use when looking for store products)
• Financial statements (sales, tax reports, and more)
• Reports of abandoned carts (if your subscription includes this feature)

Ecommerce Insights also offers more in-depth reports for an extra cost on top of your monthly membership.

With Insights, you can improve your analytics reporting. Its costs are determined by the length of your BigCommerce membership.

The Ease of Using BigCommerce

• Center for assistance
• User and developer documentation, tutorials, videos, and webinars are all available in the knowledge base.
• Community: Q&A, groups, forum, and town halls
• Email, live chat, and phone assistance are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

BigCommerce’s user interface is simple, and it looks a lot like the dashboards of Shopify and Squarespace. A drag-and-drop builder is one among its capabilities, however most users say it isn’t as straightforward as Squarespace’s layout builder. However, we found it simple to get started with product setup and management.

Users benefit greatly from the provider’s 24-hour phone, email, and live chat service. When you join up for a free trial, you’ll get a 10-minute conversation with one of BigCommerce’s specialists to talk about your company and objectives, as well as how BigCommerce can help you achieve.

Priority service is available if you subscribe to the company’s most expensive plan (Enterprise). This takes the shape of an onboarding consultant and priority phone conversations with the company’s most senior and well-trained support personnel.

In addition, you can make use of its comprehensive Center for assistance and library of video tutorials.

Alternatives to BigCommerce

BigCommerce’s largest competition is Shopify. In this BigCommerce vs Shopify comparison, we look at how they compare. Compare BigCommerce to our top-recommended ecommerce systems if you’re not sure whether it’s perfect for you.

Users’ Opinions on BigCommerce

Based on the amount of online reviews, BigCommerce is one of the most popular ecommerce systems. The platform’s personalization, low transaction costs, and 24/7 assistance are all cited as great benefits in the majority of customer evaluations. While the opportunity to personalize is appealing, most customers believe that it comes with a high learning curve for those who aren’t familiar with coding.

BigCommerce reviews received the following ratings on prominent user review sites at the time of publication:

Finances Online has a Customer Satisfaction Algorithm that collects and analyzes software reviews, comments, and opinions from a variety of social media sites to produce a score out of 100. BigCommerce has a 97 percent total user satisfaction rating.

When I was reading BigCommerce reviews, I observed the following patterns:

Conclusion

BigCommerce comes highly recommended, and for good reason. It is one of the most feature-rich ecommerce systems on the market, with its base plan offering excellent capabilities for scalability and expansion, including SEO tools (AMP functionality and image optimization), different currency support, and the option to build up hundreds of variations. This makes it ideal for firms that are huge, fast-growing, and generate a lot of income. The platform isn’t for you if you don’t want to progress or if you’re a complete newbie.

It all comes down to the kind of company you have when it comes to selecting an ecommerce platform. BigCommerce is required if you operate a big business that needs several user accounts or a huge product inventory. Sign up for a free 15-day trial now.

Go to BigCommerce to learn more.

You Might Also Enjoy…

BigCommerce is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that allows users to sell products online. The platform was launched in 2006 and has since grown into one of the most popular ecommerce platforms. BigCommerce offers a wide range of features, including an inventory management system, order tracking, customer service tools, and more. Reference: what is bigcommerce.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is BigCommerce good for small business?

A: BigCommerce is an ecommerce website platform that can be used for small businesses. It is easy to set up, and there are many features already implemented into the system.

What are the disadvantages of BigCommerce?

A: The advantages of BigCommerce are that it is easier to scale a website, and more people can be added with little effort. However, the disadvantages include lack of customization options as well as an inability to use existing plugins on other platforms like WordPress.

Who is BigCommerce best for?

A: For those who are looking for a comprehensive, easy-to-use ecommerce platform that can be customized in many ways.

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