BigCommerce Reviews

Pros

BigCommerce Support team is excellent. They respond to our inquires quickly with solutions. They are available on 24/7 for our support which is a grate thing about this platform that their competitors don t have. This platform offers lots of features that will help, any kind of online businesses. Such as Store setup, Inventory Management, Order Management, Marketing Tools, Website Builders and many more. Platform is very easy to adopt. Easy to configure. It offers many integration options with other tool, which makes this platform has no limitations. It has grate security features, so you have nothing to worry regarding any security issues. that helps us to build trust with our customer base. It has lots of custom templates that we can create colorful and attractive checkout pages and designs.

Cons

Their plans has Sale Limits. Also, the ability to recover abounded carts is available only in Higher-Tier Plans. Other than that, there is nothing to complain.

Pros

The ease of use was a major factor in my decision to go with Bigcommerce. There are many choices out there for online retailers to build their storefront. I liked the ease of customization and the large amount of standard features. Their integration with online marketplaces and social media really saves a lot of time.

Cons

There is an annual sales cap that I'm worried about, but when I get to that point I will just upgrade the service to where I need it. There are not enough free store style templates available. Custom styles get very costly. Some features that should be standard are non existent.

Alternatives Considered

Shopify

Reasons for Choosing BigCommerce

I liked the layout and template choices more with Bigcommerce.

Switched From

Shopify

Reasons for Switching to BigCommerce

For my use, it was the superior product.

Pros

BigCommerce does make it easy to list and sell products online. The product manager is pretty comprehensive, and most of the pages are made for you - including the home page. It includes several SEO features out of the box, which encourages users to make higher quality listings that will sell easier.

There are many custom themes for Bigcommerce, and most of them look great.

The interface has gotten a much needed facelift in the past few years.

Cons

If you're trying to do more than the basics, Bigcommerce (BC) is difficult to work with. App extensions are present, but nowhere close to the breadth and depth of functionality available to WordPress.

They do have a theme editor, but it requires tricky setup and command-line actions to update. Compared to Shopify's theme editor which is all in-browser, the BC theme editor is lacking. Documentation is available, but I found myself scrounging around on forums for many basic features not listed in the docs. The in-browser theme editor is buggy and unreliable.

For editing static pages, BC's WYSIWYG editor is meager and unnecessarily strict. The linter strips out perfectly valid code (like blank divs), and there's no way to include CSS on a page – meaning that any @media queries or breakpoints have to clutter up the main CSS file. There are very limited options editing your home page, and almost no options to edit your shop pages.

And maybe it's just the theme we started using, but the pages load VERY slowly. It takes several seconds to asynchronously load the page content, so javascript running on a product page may not run for 3-4 seconds after the user lands! Not ideal

The email editor is painful. We found ourselves designing in mailchimp and copy/pasting into BC when done. There's no way to send a test email either, do you have to complete an order each time you want to see that updated order email.

I mentioned the interface is better, but it's still quite buggy.

Pros

Everything is so easy to work with and helps us a lot to focus on eCommerce business.

Cons

So far nothing has bothered us in a wrong way

Pros

I loved the versatility available for building product pages, being able to set it up so pricing adjusts automatically for different product options, and the import/export functions to update large inventories via Excel documents instead of manually editing within the web app.

Cons

Initial setup can be confusing, especially when new to e-commerce and knowing how to tell it to calculate tax, shipping, etc. Their customer service is great though, so if you're confused about a setting you can call and talk to someone very quickly. I rarely ever waited more than 5 minutes to talk to a rep.

Pros

I like that I don't have to worry about maintaining my own website servers as I did when I was running my own platform.

Cons

Lack of transparency on the pricing. Recently I was over billed several months in a row. When I wrote to them to raise the issue, they took three weeks to respond. Then they told me that their system raises prices when my sales revenue goes up, but will not lower them again when sales revenue falls. So it's my responsibility to watch my billing like a hawk and inform them when I fall to a lower pricing tier. Otherwise, they'll continue billing me on a the more expensive tier even though their own billing page indicates I should be paying far less.

Alternatives Considered

Shopify

Reasons for Switching to BigCommerce

I was told BigCommerce was better at handling large catalogs.

Pros

Out of the box, BigCommerce has more built in features than other online carts out there. Pretty straightforward setup making it fairly easy to get up and running in little time.

Cons

Not as easy to customize themes/store interface. When you edit the source code you need to make sure you document what was done as the changes don't carry over when you update the theme of your site.

Alternatives Considered

Shopify Plus and Shopify

Reasons for Choosing BigCommerce

We wanted to lessen the time required to update and maintain our ecommerce site so we could spend our time and money on marketing and other efforts.

Reasons for Switching to BigCommerce

Out of the box, Bigcommerce offers more built-in features that I would need an app for in Shopify which adds to the cost and slows down the site.

Pros

Bigcommerce is very developer and user friendly. I found it to be stand out when developing a custom theme, and was able to easily integrate a clients inventory system and train them to use the system faster than with competing tools.

Cons

I don't have a great deal of trouble with Bigcommerce. I think the main gripe is that abandoned cart recovery requires a more pricey monthly plan. This feature would be great for smaller businesses trying to get started.

Alternatives Considered

Adobe Commerce, WordPress and Shopify

Reasons for Switching to BigCommerce

I work with a few eCommerce platforms, but I chose Bigcommerce as the platform for some clients as it was great to use and develop with during the trial.

Pros

Love the templates available for my store and customization options.

Cons

Price difference between the level of subscriptions can be a little high. Some basic features fall into a higher subscription.

Alternatives Considered

WooCommerce and Shopify

Reasons for Switching to BigCommerce

BigCommerce was visually more appealing to me. I loved the designs available.

Pros

The ease of using Bigcommerce was a huge plus for our business. It was easy to navigate and program the software to fit our business needs.

Cons

The options for adding different clothing options didn’t exist making it difficult for our customers to choose their sizes in the drop down sections.

Alternatives Considered

Volusion

Reasons for Switching to BigCommerce

Bigcommerce was the cheapest for our business

Pros

Order management is the strongest point of BigCommerce, and that is exactly what you want from an online store. Integration is simple and accurate, reporting and analytics are comprehensive, and the scalable pricing structure is the cherry on top. An excellent product.

Cons

I really don't have any complaints about BigCommerce. Oh wait, I thought of one - Stop asking me to change my password every 3 months - it's annoying !

Alternatives Considered

WooCommerce

Reasons for Switching to BigCommerce

We use both, but I feel BigCommerce is the better solution. It offers more features.

Pros

It is stable. User interface is good. Best Tech support I have ever had from a shopping cart.

Cons

Big Commerce is missing may native features that other shopping carts have already built in. The number one feature is instock notify you have to pay for and since they have apps for it they will never make it native. There store search is one of the worst but f you pay for a app you can get a better search. Also problem when you do find a app there is a big chance that support for the app is a hit or miss.

Alternatives Considered

Adobe Commerce, Shift4Shop and Shopify

Reasons for Choosing BigCommerce

Volusion raised there rate from 525.00 per month to 1950 per month.

Switched From

Volusion

Pros

I love the way the interface is set up. It is very easy to manage and everywhere you need to access is easy to find - You can also customize different status' so we can identify every situation quickly. We are just starting to use the Blog feature and we are very excited about how easy this is to manage.

Cons

The blog themes are kind of generic. We had to have our blog template designed so it would stand out and match the overall look we are going for.

Pros

Cloud based, more-reliable-than-magento hosting, decent discount rules engine, compatible with most major "Shipping Manager" softwares like Shipstation etc

No overly-restrictive terms of use, suitable platform for sellers of "high-risk" items.

Better than Magneto in practice for 85% of small to medium businesses.

Cons

Poor optimization for speed, poor user-facing checkout experience, tepid app ecosystem, objectively inferior automation and reporting tools, admin UI is clunky, customization of themes is difficult and costly, new features/product launches are paywalled and often incomplete, didn't stop billing us when we canceled service to switch to Shopify, experienced a glitch which inexplicably hid paid orders...

Out of the box Shopify does practically everything better while minimizing the potential for errors during setup, configuration, optimization, and daily use of your store.

In almost every metric and use case Shopify dominates Bigcommerce. Bigcommerce is playing catchup, and it's obvious from the back end of the software their team is struggling to stay competitive. While we were on the platform some updates appeared to suffer from "Microsoft syndrome" in that they looked pretty but had minimal depth or practical utility (think 3D paint or the latest version of windows media player).

Bigcommerce only comes out ahead in pricing, terms of service, and a few configuration edge cases (which can mostly be solved by Apps in Shopify.)

Pros

At our agency, we were used to working with WooCommerce, Shopify and we had never really worked with BigCommerce. Until we decided that it was time to step things up for one of our clients. We had a delightful surprise to see that BigCommerce is one of the most complete platforms out there, that is extremely user friendly whilst being robust and complete.

You have every type of solution you can imagine within your platform. From Wholesale B2B to a simple one page shop, you can build it all. BigCommerce offers amazing templates you can choose from, and also the Cornerstone which is a blank canvas.

As an agency, we've gone through the partnership process and we are officially a part of BigCommerce marketplace!

Cons

What I don't like is how the development can be a bit different than what we're accustomed to, and not as user friendly as Wordpress. For instance, on Wordpress our team can set up the background in a friendly way for our customers to use and manipulate sections without the need of a developer 24hs helping them.

Now as far as BigCommerce goes, the way some pages are set up require you to have an intermediate understanding of HTML if you want to manipulate some text and imagery.

I find this quite difficult since our clients are the ones changing content on the website once we hand it off to them.

Pros

Overall, for just only eCommerce, BigCommerce is great, and I have been using it for 10 years now. It is easy to use and customize, and has lots of great features (however you do have to pay for higher end features). No percentage fee is nice for smaller stores, but once you get to a certain scale, others offer no percentage as well with way more features.

Cons

The worst part about BigCommerce is their ability to integrate with outside software. Many small eCommerce stores are based out of a physical retail store, and there is NO easy, cheap, or even good way to integrate your in-store inventory with your BigCommerce inventory. For instance, if you use the popular Square POS in your retail shop, you have to pay an expensive 3rd party software for a janky, somewhat working system to that keeps your online inventory in sync with Square, so when you sell something in the store, it removes that stock online. BigCommerce refuses to take this issue seriously, which is unfortunate because I can't recommend it to anyone that has a physical retail store and wants to keep live inventory online.

Pros

Big Commerce have done an excellent job of identifying and integrating the components necessary for a very robust large scale online store. It is wrapped in a very inflexible templated front end that requires programming to break out of.

They clearly recognized this shortcoming and have deftly pivoted to a headless model that tosses the client-side rendering to... WordPress.

Cons

The theming/template/programming model of native BigCommerce is an investment. It is a specialty that does not feel like a career investment, rather it is a commitment to be a Big Commerce partner/developer. I suppose that with a pool of large clients this might seem monetarily attractive, at the end of the pool with smaller clients and smaller jobs, customization work required will often exceed their needs or desires and even at the small business end of things, e-commerce websites have become content marketing tools as well as storefronts. The out of box BigCommerce sites just don't accommodate the rapid transformation required.

A free WordPress plugin for headless BigCommerce machinery under the hood certainly addresses this... for now, but I see incredible advances in the flexibility and programming model of Wix. If (when?) they get that to scale to faster performance on larger datasets... look out World...

Pros

Bigcommerce is a very good alternative to building your website, in fact probably better. It has a lot of features and different pricing bands which compared to other systems are a lot more fairer. Can integrate with a lot of multi-channel providers or integrate services into as well as specifically designed apps for you website.

Cons

Can be hard to change the template yourself to make it different other than purchasing different templates.

Alternatives Considered

Shopify

Pros

Ease of Use and Straight Forward. It works well.

Cons

I had GREAT difficultly replacing my billing credit card. My previous credit card had been compromised. I needed to replace it. My undergrad degree is in Electrical Engineering! It took me 1 hour and a call to Customer Service to replace my card number to bill me.

There should also be a BACK UP credit card, in case the old credit card fails. But there is none.

Sometimes my customers call me because they canNOT understand the check out OR their computer may have a virus that does not allow them to check out. Amazon does NOT have this problem. If Big Commerce can make a check out that is equal to Amazon's, I and my customers would be happier.

Pros

I love the general ease of use on the front end, while having a massive amount of control on the back end. Pricing has gone up over the years, but has always been fair in my opinion. With BigCommerce, I was able to single handedly set up my own online shop, add products, design the site based on their templates, and then stop back and focus on the day-to-day tasks of running a business.

Cons

Their inability to have a robust iPhone app or even a truly useable mobile admin site is inexcusable in 2019. Customer service is usually good, but I've also had some fairly rough experiences.

Pros

My business is a healthcare practice with a brick and mortar shop and online store for purchasing products and services. BigCommerce has been so easy to work with. I have been with them for some 10 years plus and couldn't be more satisfied. Customer service is top-notch, fast, and always available 24/7.

Cons

I want to be able to go in and make a printable catalogue. I don't know that any software provides that, so not a complaint.

Pros

I had not previously used BigCommerce before taking on a new client in the retail space, but they had invested a good amount of time and effort and wanted to continue using BigCommerce moving forward. I was apprehensive at first, but quickly realized that BigCommerce is extremely capable and more than sufficient for almost all ecom build needs. I was especially impressed with their inventory management abilities and the ease with which we were able to integrate new SKUs into our build.

Cons

Some of the backend felt like it could have been designed a bit more carefully. I would frequently encounter situations where I had to click through multiple fields in order to either input or manage product data, and while this seems inconsequential at first, when working with SKU lists of several hundred products, those extra clicks add up.

Pros

Big Commerce in general is very easy to use. The ecommerce site that we set up looks lovely, and seems to work most of the time. Looks professional and syncs well with paypal to process payment.

Cons

There have been a few times that our site went down for unexplained reasons. Luckily customers have let us know and it was resolved quickly once we reached out to bigcommerce, but it is disconcerting that it went down in the first place. One time all of our products just disappeared. BigCommerce support was able to find them and re-establish all, but still not sure why that happened. This software seems expensive for a small business with a small budget, and then to have issues like this. They did not offer a refund or anything, and we have no way of knowing how long our site was down for.

Pros

This software offers a lot more customization than its competitors. For a small shop, other programs may be enough but we personally deal with high order volumes and different tiers of customers at different price groups. Big-commerce allows us to keep these groups separate while still maintaining the same level of customer satisfaction across the board.

Cons

The product still lacks a few customization options. This has limited us to differents sale types. We can understand when dealing with 1000's products and multiple customer groups, this could be difficult, but its something we would like to see in the future.

Pros

As a web based business it is imperative that my website work and as a small business I have to be able to keep it going myself. BigCommerce fits both of those for me. I have set it up and managed it all myself. Some things are easier than others but overall this software is great.

Cons

Although they are constantly adding apps that integrate, there are not as many options as some other companies but they are constantly adding and updating them.