Bigcommerce Review: Is It the Right Choice for eCommerce?

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Ease of Use	9/10
Support	10/10
Features	10/10
Pricing	8/10

Typical Customers: Companies with 10-50 employees & $1m-$10m in revenue

Support Options: 24*7 via phone, chat, or email.

Bigcommerce

A reliable eCommerce platform, BigCommerce is a leading software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that assists all-sized businesses to develop, innovate, and grow their online businesses. Moreover, it offers customization, enterprise-grade functionality, and performance with ease and simplicity.

BigCommerce strengthens your brand at a lower ownership cost than other leading eCommerce platforms. It’s API-driven headless ready, offers robust security and best-in-class performance, lowers replatforming time, reduces operating costs, drives critical needs with market-leading services and partners, etc.  

BigCommerce is not just an eCommerce website builder; it’s comparably an excellent value. Its exceptional store management caliber is outstanding, which helps the merchants stay ahead of the curve. Some of its native features are :

• Coupon and discounting tools
• Robust product catalog
• Flexible shipping & real-time quotes, etc. 

Furthermore, BigCommerce integrates with eBay and Amazon and holds social selling power that allows you to sell on Facebook. 

The shipping caliber of this eCommerce platform is quite robust. It’s the only cloud solution that possesses a deep integration with ShipperHQ, which is an advanced shipping rate calculator and rules engine. This integration lets the merchants offer real-time quotes and apply custom shipping rates.

What Are the Pros and Cons of BigCommerce?

Pros of BigCommerce

• BigCommerce demands no platform commission or fee on any plan (unlike Shopify). 
• Its unique user-centric, built-in features control the quickly rising price. 
• It offers seamless multichannel integration that permits you to manage your Facebook, Amazon, Pinterest, and eBay stores within BigCommerce. 
• BigCommerce comes with robust SEO support for organic growth. 
• As it is fully hosted, you don’t need to fret about the server and maintenance costs. 
• Moreover, it arrives with reliable business management strength. 
• BigCommerce accepts various payment modes with no transaction fees (not applicable to the basic plan). 
• The theme designs of BigCommerce are of the best quality. 

Cons of BigCommerce

• BigCommerce is not easy for users as some of its things are pretty challenging to locate or understand. 
• Revenue-led billing may appear like a disadvantage for stores with tight margins. 
• If you have a few goods to sell, BigCommerce won’t offer you ease for using its features as you can’t get the most out of it. 
• BigCommerce has no native POS features.
• Themes may appear to be costly.
• Certain design elements of BigCommerce are not flexible. 
• Its design caliber is not user-friendly and stable. 

How Much Does It Cost to Create an Ecommerce Website?

Pricing, Fees, and Payments for BigCommerce

BigCommerce provides a 15-day free trial and allows the users to test everything and set up their online stores perfectly from start to finish. 

If you are running a free trial, you can’t sell anything to your customers as it will demand an upgrade. 

BigCommece comes with three main plans: 

Standard Plan

This basic plan demands $29.95 per month and is best for beginners. It provides everything one needs from the day one and even doesn’t limit the size of your eCommerce store in any way:

• Unlimited storage,
• Unlimited bandwidth,
• Get limited products,
• You can accept PayPal and credit cards,
• There’s a transaction fee of 1.5%. 

This plan includes some paid features also, like:

• Personalized Products
• Reward Points
• Subscription/Recurring
• Upselling & Cross-Selling

Plus Plan

The next BigCommerce plan starts at $79 per month, and it comes with all the Standard plan features and some plus features.

This plan includes some paid features also, like:

• Personalized Products
• Reward Points
• Subscription/Recurring
• Upselling & Cross-Selling

The Plus plan of BigCommerce arrives with unique features at an affordable price. It’s worth upgrading to this plan even if you have just reached the lower revenue limit. 

Pro Plan

This BigCommerce plan starts at $299.95 per month. It offers a logical setup for eCommerce businesses with an expanding inventory, and its product filtering feature will enhance the user experience. 

It arrives with the Plus plan features and more like:

• Custom SSL (Secure Sockets Layer)
• Product search filtering
• Google customer reviews
• Store credit cards
• Customer groups to reward repeat shoppers
• Abandoned Cart Recovery
• Landing Page Builder
• Digital Products
• Product Export/Import
• Real-Time Shipping Rates/Tracking
• SEO Tools
• Subscription/Recurring
• Zoomable Product Images

This plan includes some paid features also, like:

• Personalized Products
• Reward Points
• Subscription/Recurring
• Upselling & Cross-Selling

Enterprise Plan

This plan includes premium features and support for high-volume businesses. It comes with custom pricing to meet your business needs. It offers all the Pro plan features and more, like:

• Price lists
• API support
• Priority support
• Custom facets (product filtering)

It’s worth upgrading to the Enterprise plan if you have a large business, but don’t rush. Instead, you can upgrade your Pro Plan to increase your revenue limit. 

Benefits & Features Of BigCommerce

BigCommerce comes with lots of robust features; let’s check out some major ones:

It’s the best-in-class feature of any eCommerce builder, and these reduce your third-party reliance. With BigCommerce, you will have almost everything you want right at your fingertips, at no extra charges. 

Themes and Design

It’s as clear as day that to stay competitive; your online store should include all the latest sales tools to remain competitive. But, a factor that will make you stand uniquely in the crowd is your website design. 

BigCommerce comes up with 100+ themes; about 12 are free themes, and 100+ are paid themes. 

You can search the themes by the layout of your choice or by industry. Also, you can preview the themes you pick, which will give you an idea of how well your site appears in that look. 

Also, if you change your mind after choosing a theme, you can change it later. 

You will get fully mobile responsive themes. 

Product Options, Variants, and Categories in BigCommerce

BigCommerce eases the addition of product variants compared to other eCommerce platforms. One selling various versions of one product will find this feature quite helpful. 

BigCommerce surprises with its features of auto-generating SKUs for various combinations of variants. 

BigCommerce’s Abandoned Cart Saver Feature

After entering the email, some customers abandon their shopping cart full of products at checkout.  Here BigCommerce arrives with one of the most helpful features, which permits the merchants to send an automated email to magnetize them back to their purchase. 

Also, with BigCommerce, you can personalize the emails and incorporate discount codes. 

Selling In Multiple Currencies

The business owners can meet their global shoppers’ needs by accepting payments in 100+ currencies and providing local payment modes through their preferred gateway.

Selling In Multiple Languages With Bigcommerce

Although BigCommerce doesn’t possess any in-built multilingual capabilities, still, you can sell in various languages using this eCommerce platform as it arrives integrated with the translation app, Welglot. 

BigCommerce and Welgot can offer your website in up to 100 more languages; moreover, the translation is automatic, with a manual edit option. 

Dropshipping with BigCommerce

Being a merchant, you might also be interested in learning how BigCommerce handles dropshipping. 

Dropshipping is a selling model that permits you to stay free from keeping the stock you are selling. In lieu of that, you just accept an order, send its details to the supplier, and further, he sends that item (order) to your customer. 

The best part about this model is that it doesn’t demand any start-up capital to purchase any stock you need to start selling. 

BigCommerce permits dropshipping, but to attain your purpose, you will need 3rd party app from the BigCommerce app store to reap its advantages, like Ali-Express Dropshipping and more. 

Point Of Sale Functionality In BigCommerce

One of the best functions of BigCommerce is a point of sale (POS) that permits the merchants to handle sales on a physical store and the online store. 

BigCommerce POS is the spot where a retail transaction is achieved. At POS, the merchants calculate the amount the customers need to pay, indicate that amount, prepare an invoice, and offer them various payment options. 

File Uploads And Custom Fields

Merchants who want to capture the texts to meet an order, like customized gift printers who wish their customers to provide them a JPG of a logo for their t-shirt, will find the BigCommerce approach quite good for file uploads and custom fields. 

In BigCommerce, it is easy to create custom fields and data capturing straightforwardly. 

Tax Rules and VAT MOSS

Automatic Tax Calculation

One of the biggest challenges of developing an online store is that merchants may lead to selling their goods along with different tax rates, which should be noticed in your products’ pricing. 

Here, we can thank BigCommerce as it permits automatic tax application; that’s a big time saver. Although, for that, you need to research and install a 3rd-party app, for example, TaxCloud, etc. 

Digital Goods And The European Union

Suppose the merchant intends to sell his digital products to European Union customers using BigCommerce and is likely to reach  €10,000/year in revenue performing the same. In that case, you need to learn about VAT MOSS. 

It’s a way of VAT payment if your business sells certain digital products or services to other EU countries. VAT MOSS needs the merchants to apply VAT’s country-specific rates to digital products, even if your business is based out of the EU. 

So, to facilitate it, you need to manually set up tax rates as BigCommerce doesn’t offer an automatic way to attain this. 

Shipping Options

BigCommerce offers a wide range of shipping options. With BigCommerce’s 3rd-party integrations, you can provide free shipping to your consumers, get real-time shipping quotes, and print shipping labels. 

Now, BigCommerce provides its all-in-one services for the next-level shipping tools. You just need to install the new  BigCommerce Shipping app for free and reap the advantage of special discounts.  

Enhancing Your Bigcommerce Store’s Functionality Via The App Marketplace

If BigCommerce’s standard stack of features doesn’t meet all your needs, you can append functionality by purchasing apps from the BigCommerce app store or the ‘Ecommerce Apps Marketplace.’

You can get a broad range of integration in the app store, and these will allow you to add various additional features to your BigCommerce store. 

Also, you can add applications that deal with various aspects relevant to running an online business, like accounting, marketing, CRM, shipping, etc.

Products and Inventory

BigCommerce is an ecommerce builder that allows merchants to sell physical, service-based, and digital products without using an app. 

Moreover, BigCommerce eases the addition of product variants compared to other platforms. It would be best for the businesses that sell various versions of one product. 

Through Facebook, eBay, and Amazon integrations, your inventory and your product listings will get synced across every platform. 

Is It Easy To Use

Store management, orders management, adding products, reviewing analytics, and performing anything needed in your routine work are easy.

Store set up, design tweaking, and doing everything that comes under one-time tasks can be somewhat confusing. You may need a support team that can help you with web stuff. 

Unlimited Products, File Storage, And Bandwidth

BigCommerce hasn’t set any limits for catalog size, the number of requests on your site, or the storage space. 

So, even if you have chosen the Standard tier, there’s no need to upgrade your plan to add more products or keep up with better load times. 

BigCommerce websites perform better when optimized with straightforward designs and compressed assets. The best part is you won’t have to pay any extra charge for better bandwidth. 

Single-Page Checkout

A seamless checkout is essential for conversions as the customers step towards the final purchase, and the chances of mind change or a distraction increase. 

BigCommerce holds a single-page, simple checkout that diminishes distractions and increases the possibility of customers completing the purchase. 

Less Downtime

BigCommerce leaves an impression of a 99% uptime rate, like various cloud-based solutions. It’s essential for increasing sales and building customers’’ trust to shop from stores even during the rush of holidays or flash sales. 

One more best part of cloud hosting is that the merchants don’t need to pay for updates and maintenance. 

Coupons & Gift Certificates

Varied BigCommerce plans arrive with a fantastic set of tools that business owners can use to improve loyalty and increase sales. 

You can use a flexible discount system to offer your customers special purchase incentives targeting specific criteria. For example, you can roll out a Buy 1 Get 1 Free or Free Shipping offers to set a minimum cart value. 

Every BigCommerce plan incorporates coupons that are a valuable model to make visitors go all out to create a member account or sign up for a newsletter. You can include a coupon code with a specific advertisement and track how effective a marketing campaign is. 

Product Videos

Adding products video is a standard feature with all BigCommerce plans. You can add the videos using a YouTube channel and make them appear on the right of the product page. 

A product video is the best way to showcase a product, including a profound demonstration and magnetizing people.

Bulk Pricing

A feature that permits the sellers to incentivize the purchases at a bulk buy by offering bulk discounts is bulk pricing.

This feature is much helpful for bulk buying products. That’s why BigCommerce has always been a compelling pick for B2B stores. 

Ratings & Reviews

This eCommerce platform, BigCommerce, arrives with a simple customer ratings and reviews system. You can activate it with a single click and make it available on any product page.

You can even set the reviews for automatic or manual approval and set up management to avoid spamming. 

Product Swatches

Every BigCommerce plan permits product listing with multiple options, like color, size, or pattern. 

BigCommerce offers various helpful choices for options formatting, like checkboxes, dropdowns, and size selectors. The sellers can use image or color swatches for the products with visual variations, offering customers each variant a quick preview. 

Customer Groups & Segmentation

BigCommerce’s Plus and above plans facilitate customers’ classification by a group known as segmentation. 

All types of stores can use this feature, but it holds significance for B2B storefronts. 

Moreover, you can append segmented customers to a loyalty program that catches up with special offers, a wholesale group with reduced costs, a membership group that gets discounts, or a tax-exempt group. Business owners can limit certain products and categories to specific groups also. 

Persistent Cart

This feature accompanies BigCommerce’s Plus Plan, ensuring customers’ carts stay unaffected while moving between devices. 

For instance, if a consumer starts adding items to his cart on his smartphone and next jumps to the website on his desktop, the cart holding products should stay intact. 

Besides, a persistent card also ensures that the products customers add to their bag before logging in should be there in the bag even after login.  

B2B Edition

Now, BigCommerce provides a dedicated stack for B2B sellers, permitting them to make operations flawless and improve customer experience. 

Features of BigCommerce B2B Edition

• Product Filtering, customer success management, and priority support
• B2B-optimized Stencil themes
• Sales Representative Quoting
• Company Address Book Management
• Shared Shopping Lists and “Buy Again” Corporate Account Management with multiple tiers of buyers with specific permissions and roles
• Quick Order Pad permits users to add products through partial SKUs

BigCommerce SEO features

Image Optimization

Faster-loading images holding the correct size for the device they are on can significantly enhance page speed, and Google gives preferential treatment to these images in search results.

Well, with BigCommerce, you don’t need to fret about anything as it automatically performs all this image optimization for you. 

Merchants are impressed with the SEO capabilities of this eCommerce platform. To ensure that the store ranks high in the search engines, you need to invest in keyword research and link building, but BigCommerce’s outstanding technical SEO features are pretty robust. 

Blogging in BigCommerce

You are wrong here if you think a blog is not an essential feature considering an online store.

Blogging is an essential piece for the success of an inbound marketing campaign and, if done perfectly, can enhance a website’s SEO. 

In BigCommerce, the merchants get an in-built blog that can’t compete with a WordPress blog, still permitting the creation of all types of posts to magnetize visitors to your website. 

Bigcommerce Analytics And Reporting

BigCommerce offers users various reports, including:

• Finance reports (sales, tax reports, etc.)
• Marketing reports (how you won your customers)
• Abandoned cart reports. 
• Search data reports (the queries customers used while searching for the products they need in your online store)
• Customer reports (where your consumers come from, the percentage of new vs. repeat customers, their complete expenditures, and when they last placed an order)

iOS and Android Apps for BigCommerce

BigCommerce has rolled out a new app available for Android and iOS, actively managing your store. It facilitates:

• Access to all your stores with just one login.
• View and search store’s orders, access order details separately, and update the order status. 
• Check the store’s revenue, visitors, orders, and conversion rate by month or week.
• View and search store’s customers access customer details individually (including the order history).
• Contact customers via in-app email and phone links. 

GDPR Compliance in BigCommerce

With the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) introduction, various legal steps are there that site owner should take to make sure that they are protecting their EU visitors’ privacy enough.

Multiple financial penalties are there for not performing this. So, even if your business is not EU-based, you still need to act according to the regulators concerning the site visits from the EU. 

As per the GDPR rules, the critical aspects that the BigCommerce store owners need to do are:

• Process and store data securely,
• Offer enough privacy and cookies notices.
• Offer a pathway to choose or revoke the consent to non-essential cookies usage on a site before running or logging that consent. 
• Get explicit consent from visitors signing up to mailing lists; that’s fine to send them newsletters. 

The cookie consent is pretty tough to meet. Still, the best thing is that, unlike various competing eCommerce platforms, BigCommerce performs pretty well in helping you do so, unlike different competing eCommerce platforms. 

Help and Support

When you start with a BigCommerce free trial, you get various resources and support emails to assist with onboarding. 

If you want that, you need to learn a lot that will ease you to get your store up and to run. 

The buyers of BigCommerce plan to get 24-hour ‘live agent’ customer support from the brand via call, chat, or email. 

Before you catch up with contact support, you are motivated to try resolving your issue by searching for a solution to your problem via BigCommerce help pages first.

You can skip this step and get the live chat options, phone numbers, etc.

Those who try to sort their issues themselves can use a wide range of text and video resources BigCommerce offers. 

Conclusion – Is BigCommerce the Right Choice for You?

A top eCommerce builder, BigCommerce arrived with various factors and attained a leading position among different eCommerce builders. 

BigCommerce is best for large and fast-growing businesses, so the one looking for growth or is a novice shouldn’t use it.

Overall, BigCommerce performs well and offers people what they expect in an online store software. 

If you have a project in mind and need BigCommerce development services then get in touch with us. Emizentech is a leading ecommerce development company offering services worldwide for the past many years.

Frequently Asked Questions about BigCommerce