BigCommerce Reviews: The Perfect Ecommerce Platform, Offering A Performant, User-Friendly Ecommerce solution

BigCommerce Reviews

Whether you’re launching a new business, or you already have a well established one, BigCommerce is the perfect ecommerce platform - offering a performant, user-friendly ecommerce solution, and beautiful responsive design. They’re also our recommended solution for B2B and wholesale ecommerce businesses, due to the extra features they offer to this type of business.

Alongside great technology, they have a thriving app store, large and engaged community, and highly detailed blogs offering lots of great advice for succeeding in ecommerce. There’s no doubt that BigCommerce provides you with everything you need for a successful front-end operation, but you also need to consider all of the processes and workflows that happen behind the “buy button”.

Sales order fulfillment, multi-location inventory management, managing purchase orders with vendors, full warehouse operations, updating accounts and financial reports; all these parts of your business need to be supported by systems and technology outside of BigCommerce.

In this guide, we’ll discuss some of the core activities that are best placed in a back office solution, and how you can ensure you’re optimizing your BigCommerce store and BigCommerce-powered operations.

What is BigCommerce?

BigCommerce is one of the world’s major SaaS eCommerce platforms, empowering over 153,817 eCommerce stores. The platform provides you with a complete engaging online shopping experience through key features and benefits such as Multichannel selling, Cart-level discounts, Abandoned cart saver, and so much more. Some of the renowned brands using BigCommerce are Skullcandy, Clarks, Hush Puppies, Gillette Venus US, Fujitsu, Toyota, Kohler, and Cetaphil, etc.

Top 5 Benefits of Using BigCommerce for Your eCommerce Business

The BigCommerce platform provides you with the utmost benefits for your eCommerce store. Here, you can find the top 5 benefits mentioned below.

Endless Customer Support

Once your eCommerce store goes live, you would want to make sure that no problems arise, which may hamper the performance of your website, leading to a massive loss. Keeping this in mind, BigCommerce offers you 24/7 support (live chat, email, and phone) for your online store during the need of the hour, so that you don’t have to face any loss.

Affordability & Free Trial

BigCommerce is one of the most popular eCommerce platforms, not just for its impeccable features, but also for its affordability. And, the best part is that it offers a free 15-Day trial, where you can uncover all the aspects of what the eCommerce platform has to offer, and finally decide if it is worth the investment. The cost-efficiency is one of the prime reasons that makes BigCommerce stand out from the others, thus helping you save your hard-earned money.

SEO Friendly

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plays a vital role in making your online business more visible to the outside world by allowing you to gain relevant traffic. BigCommerce covers you with all the required SEO fields for your eCommerce store such as the URL Structure, Metadata, Product and Category Description, and Keywords. It provides quite a lot of SEO tools that will help your store in ranking well in search engines, along with increasing the visibility.

Ease of Use

The BigCommerce platform is very user-friendly. If you are a new user to BigCommerce, you don’t have to worry much about having to figure out on how to get started, as it is very easy to use when compared to most of the eCommerce platforms. This makes it convenient for you to quickly set up your online store, and also saves a lot of time by allowing you to focus more on growing your business.

Multichannel Selling

BigCommerce provides you with access to integrate your eCommerce store in marketplaces such as Amazon, eBay, Google Shopping, etc., which helps in driving more traffic to your eCommerce website. With BigCommerce, you also get access to integrate your online store on social media channels such as Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram.

BigCommerce Features Overviews

BigCommerce has already built lots of features directly into their platform, and they’re constantly adding more. I’ve highlighted some key out-of-the-box attributes below as well as a few of BigCommerce’s recommended integrations to help round out its core offerings. Keep in mind that some of the features (such as faceted search, customer groups, and the abandoned cart saver) are only available at higher price points.

Admin

• Bulk Import/Export: Use a CSV file to transfer your product information easily.
• Customer Segmentation Lists: Group your customers by purchasing trends, location, and demographics, so you can market to each group differently.
• Product Options & Variants: Create and assign virtually unlimited variants (color, size, style, etc.) to specific products. BigCommerce is quite proud of the flexibility of this feature compared to the competition.
• Inventory Management: Enter and track stock levels from within your control panel and configure stock level notifications for both you and your site visitors.
• Built-In Blog: This is a particularly nice feature to have already built-in. Blogs help increase your traffic from social media and also improve your site’s SEO.
• SEO Tools: Take advantage of optimized URLs and automatic sitemaps. You can also customize URLs, titles, header tags, and meta descriptions.
• Analytics: Track your site’s performance and your customers’ habits.

Storefront

• Social Sharing: Allow customers to post your products and their purchases on social media platforms.
• Faceted (Filtered) Search: Let customers find what they need faster by offering a sidebar that filters products by factors such as color, size, and price.
• Product Reviews: Enable product reviews to inspire trust in your site’s visitors.
• Private & Public Wish Lists: Customers can keep track of the products they want.
• Recently Viewed Products: Show that others are looking at your site.

Checkout

• Abandoned Cart Saver: Available on the Plus plan and above. Potentially recover 15% of abandoned carts.
• One-Page Checkout: One-page checkout is the default checkout setup for BigCommerce stores, encouraging quick transactions.
• Customer Accounts Or Guest Checkout: Give your customers the freedom to choose.
• Coupons & Discounts: Make discounts apply to a specific category, brand, product, cart, etc. with this highly-customizable feature.
• Stored Credit Cards: Available at Plus plans and above.
• Tax Calculations: Configure tax rates manually inside BigCommerce or use a third-party integration such as Avalara AvaTax.

Shipping

• BigCommerce Shipping: Many of BigCommerce’s shipping features are available as a free integration. You just need to click install to enable in-depth shipping features.
• Set Zones & Methods: Set up all the locations to which you’ll be selling, then choose specific shipping methods for each area.
• Real-Time Quotes From Major Carriers: These carriers include UPS, USPS, FedEx, Australia Post, Royal Mail, and Canada Post. You can also set static quote rules, and your shoppers view all their tailored options when checking out.
• Offer Free Shipping: Drive conversion with free shipping.
• Shipping Labels: Print and pay for shipping labels from the BigCommerce dashboard with BigCommerce Shipping or through an integration with ShipStation.
• Integrated With ShipStation & ShipperHQ: For labels from other carriers, shipping quotes from multiple points of origin, and other advanced shipping functions, BigCommerce steers you toward its integrations with ShipStation and ShipperHQ.

Multichannel Selling

• Built-In Integration With Square POS: For in-person selling, Square is the option you’ll see promoted in your dashboard (as well as on the BigCommerce website), or you can peruse the app marketplace. Note that Square will be your payment processor for both online and in-person processing if you set up Square POS.
• Sell On Popular Marketplaces: BigCommerce has native integrations with eBay, Google Shopping, and Amazon. Plus, you can use apps to sell on Etsy, Jet, the Walmart marketplace, and more.
• Sell On Social Media: Use Buyable Pins on Pinterest, set up a Facebook Store, and tag products on Instagram.
• Channel Manager: Manage sales from your social media and marketplace channels from your BigCommerce admin.
• Sell Globally: Use integrations to accept multiple currencies and calculate international shipping and tax rates. BigCommerce now also includes multilingual support.
• BigCommerce For WordPress: Add a BigCommerce store to your WordPress site.

Bigcommerce Review: Pricing & Plans

Like I mentioned briefly a couple of paragraphs above, there is a free trial available. It’s 15 days, it lets you test everything and effectively set up your online store from start to finish. However, your customers won’t be able to buy anything from you if you’re on the free trial. For that, you need to upgrade.

The first one – $29.95 – is the best starting point in my opinion. It gives you everything you’d need from day one, and it doesn’t restrict the size of your e-commerce store in any way:

• You get unlimited products.
• Unlimited storage.
• Unlimited bandwidth.
• You can accept credit cards and PayPal.
• There’s a 1.5% transaction fee. (If you don’t want to deal with any transaction fees, you’ll have to upgrade to $79.95 / month.)

BigCommerce Reviews: Pros and Cons

BigCommerce Pros

• Orders are readily available with all pertinent information. Multiple search options make any one customer easy to find. Customer accounts can also easily be adjusted when necessary for changes after being placed, but before being charged. Sometimes customers don't realize there is an error until they review the email received after ordering and then it's a hassle. Big Commerce eliminates that hassle.
• Website product adjustments and updates are pretty simple. The system is easy to upload images to, add info or even shut off viewing until the product is ready.
• We have multiple websites for different products and having the ability to personalize them individually is great. Different themes and setups are necessary and made available by BigCommerce.

BigCommerce Cons

• My main struggle has been with multiple sites sharing data to the same web page. We had a popup that we didn't know where it came from, it took many moons to figure it out. Turns out it was another site. I don't know if there is anyway for BigCommerce to know that because we tried several fixes and found it on another site's 'popup' feature.
• We do have a different site that manages the reviews on our web page. So that feature is not utilized.
• Free Shipping is an option to turn on or off for each product. It would be nice if that feature had more options (like the coupon codes do). Maybe we could have free shipping on domestic packages, but not out of the country since fees are extremely different.

Let see reviews from member who used BigCommerce

• But to be honest BigCommerce does provide some features out of the box that Shopify doesn't. One of the biggest things I am missing about BigCommerce is having the cart on your domain. Shopify will only allow the cart on your domain on their Enterprise plans which means unless your store is a major player... you won't be able to justify the cost.
• Bigcommerce 2.2% braintree processing is a very nice feature. I have a store on both platforms and find shopify to be much more user friendly. Bigcommerce has roughly 30k products and Shopify has roughly 40. For large catalogs I'm not sure Shopify would work very well. They have no way of import/exporting via .csv files.
• Shopify, BigCommerce is hosted Interspire, but you do realize that the CLV vs CPA on hosted platforms is low, so you need to put in more effort to make a return. Nothing comes for free, if you can work with a closer CPA to CLV model it's not a problem, the wider you need it the more automation you need, Amazon Prime has a 15:1 spread.
• BigCommerce is decent, but after their price increase a year or so ago, my monthly cost went up 500% (from $40 to $200-- and it looks like they have since raised the price again to $250/month) with absolutely no benefit to me.
• I've been on BigCommerce Enterprise for 2.5-3 years and my experience is overwhelmingly positive.
• BigCommerce has the best customer service you could ask for. I’ve called them so many times I can’t keep track. 24/7 live phone support. Who even does that still?! It’s awesome.
• Bigcommerce is one of the best online store builders, it has been on several news channels and got a tremendous number of sales in past few months.

In summary

BigCommerce and Brightpearl form a cohesive technology stack for ecommerce businesses to focus on execution, instead of conforming to systems.

BigCommerce’s powerful and flexible front-end features give you complete control over your shopping experience and product catalog, and Brightpearl provides the flexibility to ship those products to your customers, all while automatically tracking your accounting, inventory and customer data.

Furthermore, as soon as orders are placed in BigCommerce - whether retail or wholesale - our integration steps in to download all of the details to Brightpearl, automatically routes them to the appropriate fulfillment center, logs activities within your CRM, and automatically adjusts your accounting with exact details on inventory costs incurred and recognized revenue.