BigCommerce is an essential ecommerce platform that has helped more than 150 online stores simplify management tasks, drive online traffic, and convert more sales. In a side-by-side comparison with other leading ecommerce platforms, BigCommerce stacks up to be reliable and supportive for its users. By looking at the good and the bad, let’s find out if BigCommerce is the right platform for you.
Comparing BigCommerce to the Best Ecommerce Platforms and Software
Despite not coming out on top, BigCommerce is still our #5 pick for its multichannel sales feature and smooth optimization for SEO, digital wallets, and faceted search. It offers a wide range of features that some users might find overwhelming, but with aspects like 24/7 customer support, BigCommerce supports its users really well. Whether you run a small online store or enterprise, BigCommerce takes away the complexity of selling online.
We reviewed dozens of ecommerce platforms on the market and narrowed it down to the top 11. We looked at each option to see who it’s best for, what features to consider, and how to find the best option for your needs. Want to scope out all of your options? See all of our top picks here.
BigCommerce: The Good and The Bad
Just like for all software on the market today, there will be both good and bad features to consider. In our experience, BigCommerce certainly offers more positive than negative qualities, which is the number one thing to consider before investing.
The Good
Multichannel Sales Capabilities: If you are interested in selling your products to multiple countries and regions, BigCommerce has got you covered on all fronts with its multi-storefront feature. With the power of a multi-storefront that you can manage all from one place, you can multiply your brand by seamlessly creating new storefronts for each facet of your business. As a completely customizable feature, BigCommerce helps you reduce costs, streamline your operations, and grow into new markets with customizable themes, currency, personalized transactional emails, custom pricing, unique product filtering options, and domain and SSL certificates.
Incredible Customer Support: Luckily, BigCommerce is one of the few platforms that goes above and beyond by offering industry-leading support and services on a 24/7 basis to answer all queries in under two minutes. BigCommerce offers its users onboarding teams to help you mitigate and launch your store with ease, 24/7 chat, email, and US-based phone support for technical issues alongside a Premium Services team for users on higher payment plans. On top of all this, BigCommerce also offers a wide range of in-depth online resources within its help center and provides monthly updates from its leadership team.
Ecommerce Management Features: BigCommerce helps you take the guesswork out of managing your ecommerce store by offering a fully functioning system with all of the tools you need. With more out-of-the-box features like native customer groups and multichannel inventory management, you won’t need to rely on third-party apps for management capabilities. BigCommerce lets you manage and track inventory with centrally processed orders and omnichannel sales. It allows you to create personalized customer shopping experiences, use your favorite shipping providers to save money, and launch quickly with its Page Builder feature.
Extensive Payment Gateways: Payment integrations are essential to an ecommerce platform, and BigCommerce does this beautifully. With access to 65 payment gateways, BigCommerce gives you the power to choose the best payment options that work for you and your customers, transact in your currency, and offer financing options, all without additional transaction fees, like most ecommerce platforms. With BigCommerce, you can offer your customers secure recurring billing options and built-in digital wallet integrations like Apple Pay, Amazon Pay, Google Pay, and PayPal.
The best part about BigCommerce’s payment gateway system is the opportunity to reduce costs as you grow with its pre-negotiated credit and debit card processing rates with PayPal. BigCommerce can lower your fees down to 2.2% with a $0.30 charge per transaction.
Easy-to-Use Mobile App: Keep your business moving on the go with BigCommerce’s mobile app. Many ecommerce platforms offer a mobile app, but they tend to work poorly with slow loading times and cluttered interfaces—but not this one. Available on iOS and Android, the BigCommerce mobile app lets you access all of your stores through one login, check key metrics, view and search all of your store orders, and stay in touch with customers via in-app phone and email links.
Comprehensive Reporting: It doesn’t matter if you sell a small or large amount of product per month because BigCommerce offers comprehensive reporting metrics for businesses on both small and enterprise levels. BigCommerce breaks it into three categories—product insights, customer insights, and marketing insights—making it easier to understand how your brand ranks in every area. Product and customer insights give you between eight to 10 metrics based on conversion rates, visits, revenue change, abandoned carts, page views, and repeat orders.
However, with the marketing insights, your reporting is based on which marketing channel had the highest first-order value and how many customers. The BigCommerce system produces all of its insights on a monthly basis.
The Bad
Poor Customization and Flexibility: Unfortunately, all ecommerce platforms will fall short somewhere, and for BigCommerce, it shows in the form of poor customization and flexibility. Despite its multichannel sales feature offering excellent customization, you can’t say the same about its templates, backend, and shipping functionalities for users on its most standard plan. Some users complain that the templates they get access to are rigid and can’t be fully customized, while the backend functionality is overcomplicated—leaving users feeling stuck.
When it comes to the shipping function, many users have stated that it’s not versatile, as there’s no way to edit it and add important information, such as tracking numbers. There is also no automation with this function, making users complete tasks manually in a time-consuming effort.
Insufficient Template Designs: Not only do many users find it difficult to customize their templates, but many of them have also complained that BigCommerce is severely lacking in template designs, to begin with. Templates are essential to providing a good user experience, but many users claim that BigCommerce offers a limited amount of free templates that are not mobile-friendly, are difficult to customize, and generally aren’t the best for ecommerce stores looking to make sales. The lack of template designs may end up causing you to spend more money by putting you in the position to purchase a design instead, which starts at $150 and costs upwards of $300 for the most professional themes.
Migration Issues: Migrating your ecommerce site should be a seamless experience. Unfortunately, some users found they had migration issues when transitioning from a competitor to BigCommerce. The most common issue users experienced was links and files not migrating properly, which made users responsible for manually uploading each link and file into the system instead.
Although migration isn’t an issue for users starting with BigCommerce, many experienced users will come from different platforms, meaning there’s a higher chance of losing important files and documents while getting set up with BigCommerce.
BigCommerce Pricing and Options
BigCommerce offers a pricing plan for everyone, no matter the size or functionality of your ecommerce store. Currently, there are four different options to choose from, including Standard, Plus, Pro, and Enterprise. You can also try BigCommerce for free for 15 days.
You also get access to no additional transaction fees and unlimited products, file storage, bandwidth, and staff accounts on all available plans.
Here’s a general overview of each plan to help you choose:
BigCommerce Standard
- $29 per month, billed at $348 per year.
The BigCommerce Standard pricing plan is an excellent option for anyone looking for the absolute basics. You get access to single-page checkout, discount integrations, and professional reporting tools with 24/7 support and up to $50,000 worth of sales per year, which is a substantial range for anyone running a small store.
The package also supports multiple currencies and real-time shipping quotes, so you can save time and give your customers the most accurate rates. BigCommerce gives you the option to use its special credit card rates, which are currently 2.59% plus $0.49 per transaction.
BigCommerce Plus
- $79 per month, billed at $948 per year.
The Plus plan is BigCommerce’s most popular package, as it comes with everything you need to grow your online store and increase conversion. Suitable for anyone who has been running a store for more than one year, the Plus plan features slightly more advanced tools, such as customer groups and segmentation, so you can create differentiated user experiences.
Conversion tools like Abandoned Cart Saver and Persistent Cart allow you to improve your customer’s experience by saving their shopping cart to their account or sending them personalized emails to encourage them to complete their purchase. The Plus plan also lets the customer store their card details to save time at checkout.
As a Plus plan user, you can make up to $180,000 worth of sales per year, and your special credit card rates drop to 2.35% plus $0.49 per transaction.
BigCommerce Pro
- $299 per month, billed at $3,588 per year.
Despite the BigCommerce Pro plan being pricier than the other two plans, it offers a wide range of comprehensive features that are suitable for anyone looking to scale their increasing growth. With sales capped at $400,000 per year, the Pro package helps its users consistently grow their business.
Improve your customer’s overall shopping experience with custom product filtering features that allow them to easily and dynamically filter products in faceted search. This package also comes with Google customer reviews, so you can showcase these reviews on your homepage.
You also receive significantly lower special credit card rates at 2.05% plus $0.49 per transaction.
BigCommerce Enterprise
- Contact sales for custom pricing
If you are looking for a full-service platform, the BigCommerce Enterprise plan is the way to go. You receive all of the features already mentioned, including the multi-storefront feature, customizable price lists, and unlimited API calls that help you automatically sync data from third-party systems. You also have the choice to tailor your annual sales number to the success of your online store.
Similar to the Pro plan, you will receive a special credit card rate of 2.05% plus $0.49 or lower per transaction.
BigCommerce Launch Services
Whether you need help with architectural rebranding, data migration, marketing, or project management—BigCommerce can do it all through its comprehensive launch services.
BigCommerce can help you build your ecommerce store from the ground up by allowing you to hire specialists in the field you need help in. Instead of wasting time and sometimes spending more money than anticipated, you can hire the help you need and get your money’s worth.
BigCommerce’s launch services can help you overcome complexity, design confidently, and build without hassle. Work with experts to create personalized launch plans and accelerate your time to market in as little as four months.
You will need to request a quote for each service, as it is currently not included in the Enterprise pricing plan.
BigCommerce Success Services
Similar to BigCommerce’s launch services, it also offers a success service that solely focuses on advancing your ecommerce strategies and business goals to help grow your business.
BigCommerce’s success services can help you find experts in customer success management, technical account management, SEO, and conversion. You also have the opportunity to undertake training for store setup and management and highly extensible certification courses.
If you choose a success service, BigCommerce will pair you with an expert with proactive outreach to help you create a success plan with strategies that will improve underperforming products, SEO recommendations, and opportunities to grow other channels.
You don’t need to do all the hard work with BigCommerce, especially with tech issues. You can hire a technical account manager and develop a technical runbook, understand escalation management, and receive regular advice and recommendations.
Need help with SEO and conversion? BigCommerce experts are ready to provide you with a variety of in-depth SEO reports and Google Analytics, helping you understand how each metric works to improve your business strategy.
How BigCommerce Ranks
BigCommerce is certainly middle-of-the-pack when it’s compared to other ecommerce platforms on the market today. But not coming out on top doesn’t mean that it’s a bad, or even average, platform—because it’s much better than that. With its wide variety of features, BigCommerce is one of the more reliable and supportive ecommerce platforms out there.
Here is a short overview of the top ecommerce platforms:
- Shopify – Best ecommerce platform for most
- Wix – Best ecommerce platform for beginners
- Bluehost – Best for automatic WooCommerce store setup
- Squarespace – Best portfolio-based ecommerce builder
- BigCommerce – Best for multichannel sales
- Shift4shop – Best ecommerce platform for developers
- Ecwid – Best free shopping cart extension
- WooCommerce – Best ecommerce plugin for WordPress
- Easy Digital Downloads – Best WordPress plugin for digital products
- Volusion – Best ecommerce platform for large stores
- Magento – Best enterprise commerce platform
Overall, BigCommerce is one of the more supportive ecommerce platforms, and for a good reason. Not only does it offer 24/7 customer support for all of its users, but it offers additional services to help you launch and manage the success of your online store.
With a wide range of features, BigCommerce offers the right tools you need for ultimate success, which we think users will enjoy.
In this case, the good outweighs the bad, and it’s definitely a platform worth looking into as a beginner or veteran alike.
