The Pros and Cons of Using BigCommerce as an Ecommerce Platform

BigCommerce is one of the best ecommerce platforms in the world, that has successfully garnered a lot of appreciation since it was founded in 2003. With customers in over 150 countries, it has been featured in Forbes’ list of World’s Best Cloud Companies in 2016 and secured numerous awards.

Even with established contenders in the market, it has secured clients such as Toyota, Travelpro and Gibson Guitars.Here are some of the most important pros and cons of this hostedplatform that you should consider before starting your online business:

Sales Limits & Transaction Fees

BigCommerce places a limit on annual sales of online stores, these are as follows:

• Bigcommerce Standard: $50,000
• Bigcommerce Plus: $150,000
• Bigcommerce Pro: $400,000
• Bigcommerce Enterprise: negotiable

There is also an order limit that can be revised as the plan is upgraded, the same applies for the sales limits. For instance with the ‘Pro’ plan, you can upgrade your sales limit by paying $150 for every additional increase of 200k in sales (up to a million).

One of the best things about BigCommerce platform is that there are no transaction fees on any of the plans. This is in direct contrast with other ecommerce solutions. However, the payment processing companies do charge a credit card transaction fees. The amount will depend on the payment gateway you choose.

Moreover, integrating a payment gateway with BigCommerce or any other hosted ecommerce solution can be a lengthy process. To avoid all this, you can opt for Paypal powered by Braintree, that not only is easy to setup but also offers preferential rates to BigCommerce customers.

Templates on Offer

BigCommerce platform offers a reasonable amount of responsive templates. Limited number of these are free, the rest are paid, ranging from $145 to $235. The free themes have a contemporary and professional feel and serve as a good starting point. However, its competitors such as Squarespace offer up to a 100 free themes.

Abandoned Cart Feature

BigCommerce’s abandoned cart feature is perhaps the best out there. It enables you to send up to three reminders to potential customers, who left your store without buying anything. You will have to pay for it unless you have opted for either ‘Plus’, ‘Pro’ or ‘Enterprise plans. Competing ecommerce solutions offer this feature free of cost but with limited flexibility to the number of reminders that can be sent.

Product Categories & Variants

One of the strongest features of BigCommerce platform is how unlike its competitor – Shopify that allows you to present only three product options (these can be increase with third-party apps), BigCommerce lets you do plenty. So for products that come in many variants, BigCommerce is likely to serve as the best ecommerce platform.

However, categorization of products have to be done manually each time, whereas Shopify takes a ‘smart’ approach to this, enabling this to be done based on product name or tags.

Bigcommerce SEO & AMP

BigCommerce offers exceptionally great SEO features that are very strong. You can easily edit page titles, meta descriptions, headers and change product URLs. Unlike Shopify and Squarespace, it also lets you create short URLs that are more SEO friendly.

The templates offered are responsive that can easily adjust to suit multiple devices and also work as ‘Accelerated Mobile Pages’ (AMP) – both have positive SEO implications. All free templates and a large number of premium templates facilitate AMP. Since it makes loading pages on mobile faster, the bounce rate is lower, which automatically improves your google rankings.

Moreover, BigCommerce platform has a built-in blog, it may not have all the functionalities of a WordPress blog but helps you run your inbound marketing campaigns effectively. To further enhance it, you can always opt for a third-party app.

Bigcommerce App Store

There are numerous apps on offer that you can utilise to deal with different aspects of your business; categories range from accounting to shipping. There are over 600 apps available on the app store. Where it beats the offerings by other ecommerce solutions like Squarespace, it is eclipsed by 2000 plus apps offered by Shopify.

Selling Digital Products

If you are selling digital products to EU customers, even if you are not operating there, you will have to apply country-specific rates of VAT to these products. It is a manual process where individual tax rates of different countries have to be applied.

Bigcommerce Support

When you start a free trial, you are provided with a lot of material to help you onboard. Once a plan is purchased 24-hour ‘live agent’ support is extended. However, you are encouraged to resolve your issue via the help pages first. Moreover, solutions can be reached via the BigCommerce community, that is ever growing.

Bigcommerce Analytics

There are numerous standard reports (which are really strong) that are provided to you, from marketing to finance reports.  For more detailed reports an extra fee has to be paid, the amount varies for each plan. Furthermore, you can also integrate Google Analytics into your site to extract more in depth information.

Point of Sale Functionality In Bigcommerce

Another excellent feature offered by BigCommerce is that it lets you integrate your physical ‘point of sales’ using three POS providers (more on the way). So you can integrate payment and sync inventory of your offline stores with your e-store. Other ecommerce solutions, such as Squarespace does not offer this feature and the ones that do, have restrictions in terms of the hardware and software that can be used.

Other Highlights:

• Dropship Option

If you are an ecommerce store that does not stock all its inventory and relies on other suppliers to send the product to the customer once you receive an order, then by using a third-party app, you can enable this feature on BigCommerce too.

• File uploads and custom fields

If you are a merchant selling customized products then to obtain information or pictures, you would need the custom field and file upload features that BigCommerce is offering.

• User Interface

Bigcommerce’s interface is very clear and intuitive, very similar to shopify and Squarespace in quality and appearance. The dashboard is similar to that of wordpress’, with a vertical menu on the left, giving you access to labels and key features; and with associated content on the right. An easy interface that would simplify most of your work.

• Pricing

Even though the starting price of the basic plan offered by BigCommerce, is slightly higher than those of other competing ecommerce solutions, it comes with a comprehensive set of features that compensates for the price being charged.

Considering both the cons and pros, BigCommerce serves has a lot to offer, when setting up an online store. From powerful marketing features to conversion-optimized templates, it is one of the best ecommerce solutions out there!

Please feel free to comment or reach out if you have any questions. In case you need any help with BigCommerce development, BigCommerce integration and support, please get in touch with us.

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