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BigCommerce Review 2020- Is it the best eCommerce platform?

Bilal Uddin

Bigcommerce Overview

Bigcommerce rating – ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

Bigcommerce is in the race of becoming the leading website builder and eCommerce platform. It offers various tools and integration that helps to grow online stores easily. Its built-in features, themes, and marketplace & social media channels integration assists online businesses to grow immensely and quickly.

Ecommerce sector has been growing at a fast pace, multiple online platform jumping on the bandwagon in the race of getting the bigger chunk of this market. Bigcommerce is one of the leading eCommerce platform competing with giants such as Shopify, Magento, and WooCommerce.

Its overall market share in eCommerce is 1.66% with over 27000+ domain, which may seem low but still enough to barge in the top 10 leading eCommerce platforms.

Source: Datanyze

In this Bigcommerce review, I take a deep look inside this eCommerce builder to understand its features and tools to know for what audience it is suitable.

Here are some of the factors I walk through to review Bigcommerce

Bigcommerce Pros and Cons

Pros

Cons

Easy to Use

Ease of use is one of the top priorities for us in evaluating an eCommerce platform. The more an eCommerce platform provides comfort to the store owners in customizing their store, the more they can focus on other essential functions such as marketing.

Is Bigcommerce it easy to use? Here is our honest answer

Bigcommerce interface is more or less similar to Shopify’s; also, they provide a tutorial and step-by-step guide to set up an online store. The dashboard is self-explanatory, which makes it much comprehensive to use. The first thing you will see after landing on the dashboard is options that will help you set up your store in a matter of minutes such as products (to add products), setup shipping settings and tax rates.

The main issue with Bigcommerce is its technical complexities, which may need an advanced developer to perform some tweaking, especially in its Stencil Framework that is a cup of tea of non-tech savvy entrepreneur.

So, you may require some developers helps in setting up your online store on Bigcommerce.

To manage product is easy, you will not find any problem with customizing anything. Bigcommerce is a great online store builder that provides all the necessary and powerful tools to design the store, but it requires some tech-savvy hands to manage your store with ease.

Features & Tools

Bigcommerce offers all the great features to start and design a beautiful website. You do not need much technical knowledge to manage the product and set up payment options.

It has everything required to start an eCommerce store including customized shipping, dropshipping features, and easy tax system setup.

Here are some noteworthy features of Bigcommerce

Customizable Checkout Option

Recently, Bigcommerce makes a significant transformation in its coding access. Now it provides an option to access the Checkout JavaScript. You can change and make everything on the checkout page as per your preference. You can learn more about the customization checkout here.

Payment Gateway Options

The payment option is one of the essential parts for eCommerce entrepreneur. Bigcommerce is very flexible in letting the user select its payment. It does not force you to use its payment gateway, you can choose any payment provider with zero transaction fee, and it only takes the credit charges that are set by the payment gateway.

Bigcommerce offers more than 65 pre-integrated payments that are supported in 100 countries. Also, it allows one-click mobile payment setup and supports numbers of currencies. Some of the famous payment gateways includes,

The best part is that Bigcommerce does not charge any transaction fee for using any third-party integration system.

Learn more about Bigcommerce payment here.

Shipment Option

Apart from offering a wide variety of payment options, Bigcommerce also provides a wide range of shipping options. You can also have different shipping perks with Bigcommerce third party shipping integration that includes the free-shipping option, shipping labels, and get real-time quotes.

Other shipping benefits include packing & branding the shipment and creating the return policy of delivery.

The shipping services you can use in Bigcommerce

USPS

DHL

FedEx

You can easily make your customer satisfaction by offering them numbers of shipping perks such as one-day delivery, in-store pickup, and order tracking. Besides, you can perform shipping service without much hassle by automating your shipping functions and managing all the shipping services from one central point.

Learn more about Bigcommerce shipping here.

Sell All Kind of Products

Bigcommerce allows selling a wide range of product (almost every kind) including physical goods, digital goods, and services. In its editor section, these all types of selling categories are already included.

Marketplace Integration

Bigcommerce allows integration with different marketplaces such as Amazon and eBay to boost the sales of your store. From Bigcommerce essential panel you can sell your product on every significant place including

You can directly import your products to these platforms from your store; you do not need to write product details on each channel. All channels can proceed from Bigcommerce dashboard, so you do not need to check every sales channel manually.

Abandoned Cart Recovery

Bigcommerce’s Abandoned Cart Saver feature allows you to re-target the customers who left the store without completing the checkout process. Three automated emails will be sent to the customers who left cart abandoned this feature will help you to achieve the sales funnel and ultimately increased the store’s revenue.

Click here to learn how to set up an abandoned cart saver feature.

This feature is a great helper in converting your unpaid customer into a potential customer.

Automation Tools

Bigcommerce provides multiple automation tools that you can use to calculate taxes and shipping rates. These tools are very useful in optimizing the store functions and save a lot of time for you to focus on different strategies.

Here are some of the automation tools that Bigcommerce offers,

ShipperHQ – It calculates the shipping based on the policies that you have set. The rates can be calculated on product type, shipping methods, and carriers.

Avalara – It calculates taxes based on different conditions that help you to charge the right fee on checkout without any difficulty.

Apps

More than 600 apps are available on Bigcommerce Appstore. You can find all the useful apps to integrate with your store for different purposes such as MailChimp for email marketing, Quickbook for bookkeeping and accounting, and live chat for customer support.

Check all the paid and free apps of big commerce here.

Themes & Templates

Website design is the first impression that you give to your visitor, so it must be topnotch.  To entice your visitor with an incredible website presentation, Bigcommerce offers more than 100 themes to choose.

There are 12 free themes and 100+ paid theme.

It is a lot easier to choose the best theme for your niche as you can sort the theme search by industry. On the left, sidebar you can select the industry and select the best theme for your business. All the themes have unique features that are suitable for a particular niche.

However, paid themes are within the range of $200-$250 that seems a hefty price for a startup. Yet the themes are fancy, and they are without a doubt one of the best themes you can find in any website builder tool.

You can preview the template before paying for them, and you can switch the template anytime you want even after finalizing them. Other than that, you can have a mobile preview of your template, and all themes are mobile responsive to attract mobile shoppers.

It is effortless to personalize the theme, you just to click at the theme and make changes as you like.

Check out the theme here.

Customer Support

Bigcommerce help and support is worth mentioning. Its support service helps a lot to get over almost any issue with the website.

In the start, Bigcommerce offer 14-day free trial, it is like an onboarding process for you to get familiar with its features. In the trial period, you get the email support and every kind of help to get started your online store.

For your own learning, it provides tutorials, online forums, and video guides.

Once you sign up to Bigcommerce, you will get 24/7 phone and live chat support that answers every query on the spot no matter what time it is.

If you go for the Enterprise Pricing Plan (the most expensive plan), you will have a personal onboarding consultant. You can get instant contact with the most senior support staff to get the best help.

Bigcommerce SEO & Organic Marketing tools

The primary evaluation factor of any website builder is how strong its SEO features are. Well, in Bigcommerce case, they have pretty fantastic SEO tools to give an edge in organic marketing.

The essential tools are available to perform on-page SEO such as titles, Meta description, and header. Also, you can make customized and short URLs based on your product; many website builders do not offer this feature.

Short and customized URLs are very essential to perform better SEO practices.

AMP (accelerated mobile page) feature is also available in Bigcommerce that allow performing your page better on mobile and tablets. According to mobile-first indexing, Google gives higher ranking to the websites that are mobile optimized.

To optimize the website on every device, Big Commerce introduced Akamai Image Manager – It automatically optimizes the image for different devices to make your site load faster.

Bigcommerce merchants claimed that they saw a 70% improvement in their site load time.

The best thing is that these features come in all pricing plan and for that Bigcommerce deserve applause.

Dropshipping with Bigcommerce

Dropshipping is the go-to eCommerce model that is one of the easiest and more preferred options for the majority of eCommerce entrepreneurs.

When it comes to selecting a platform for an online store, it is one of the significant concern that does it support dropshipping or not?

Let’s see how well Bigcommerce handles dropshipping.

The best thing about BigCoommerce dropshipping is that it allows various third party integration. So, you can easily import the product from multiple supplier website and POD services.

Here is the list of Apps you can use to import dropshipping product in your store and find dropshipping suppliers

You can check other Bigcommerce dropshipping Apps here.

Bigcommerce Pricing

Bigcommerce offers four pricing plans starts from $29.95/month

Standard Plan – $29.95
Plus Plan – $79.95
Pro Plan – $249.95
Enterprise Plan – Custom Pricing

Before purchasing any plan, you get to use Bigcommerce for 15-day free trial so that you can totally understand and satisfy with your decision.

You can check the services for each pricing plan here.

Bigcommerce Alternatives

If you take Bigcommerce as the hosted solution and ecommerce platform, then the most significant competitors that Bigcommerce has is Shopify.

Both platforms are quite similar when it comes to pricing, interface, and features. You can check our detail comparison of Shopify vs. Bigcommerce to understand in detail.

Apart from Shopify, there are some more alternative to Bigcommerce,

Wix

WooCommerce

Squarespace

Volusion

Final Verdict

BigCommerce is one of the best website builder and eCommerce platform. It offers numerous preferable tools to optimize the eCommerce business such abandon cart saver tool and multiple SEO tools to perform prolific organic marketing practices that effectively contribute to boosting the online sales.

Although in overall market share it ranks on 9th position, but I personally rank it on 3rd position on my list of eCommerce platforms behind Shopify and WooCommerce. Its data reports, analytics reports, features, themes, features, and broad inventory attracted my inclination.

You can start whatever online business on Bigcommerce regardless of business size. It is an excellent option for you to start an online store and grow it exponentially. However, if you are a beginner, there are other better options for you than Bigcommerce.

Share your thoughts on Bigcommerce let us know in the comments if you have anything to share.