BigCommerce Review: Features, Benefits, Drawbacks

23 Dec · 6 min read

BigCommerce is a leading E-commerce platform. It allows business owners to start an online store, customize it according to their creative preference, make attractive store experiences pleasing for customers with design tools and sell a variety of products. People can build and control their online store from anywhere in the world with the possibility to grow. BigCommerce does not need you to buy any web hosting to use it. BigCommerce is an easy-to-use (SaaS) Software-as-a-Service platform for which you only have to pay a monthly fee for using it. It also offers customizable templates to help you in designing your online store. BigCommerce makes it easy to display and delivers effective tools to help you market your product to online customers. BigCommerce surpasses its competitor by delivering fast commerce experiences.

BigCommerce stores are the most popular with 74.6% of live stores in the United States. 37.5% and 17.5% of stores are switching to BigCommerce from Shopify and WooCommerce respectively.

Features:

1) Customization - BigCommerce is a highly customizable e-commerce platform. BigCommerce allows consumers to improve templates to their specific needs as a company. These templates assist you quickly in building an online store that relates to customers and displays your products. The stencil upgrade framework also enables designers to customize shopping cart templates. BigCommerce themes deliver "Akamai Image Manager" without any extra cost. This image manager automatically optimizes every image for all devices and browsers to provide fast load times with a stunning display. Before publishing, BigCommerce also allows you to test the website to ensure everything is perfect.

2) SEO Optimization - BigCommerce believes that analytics is a key differentiator, So its in-house team continues to want to improve the dashboard. BigCommerce has many in-built SEO features to help companies boost their visibility organically. Its analytics dashboard shows customer insights and the performance of products etc.

3) Payment & Inventory Management -BigCommerce can accept payments from various major third-party payment providers such as PayPal, Apple Pay, Amazon Pay, and more. It allows corporations to decide on which provider is good for them based on different features that align with their target customers. BigCommerce did not also penalize businesses that use non-standard payment gateways. It helps you in managing inventory and orders from one location. As your business grows you can use third-party fulfillment apps to scale.

4) Application Integrations - It can also include external applications to sustain a marketplace of tested and authorized third-party apps. The company finds custom elements and features to improve its sites with the help of app developer communities and the marketplace. BigCommerce offers a different and important function that doesn’t need external applications to function.

BigCommerce's Pros and Cons:

Pros	Cons
It has more features than any other e-commerce website which saves you money by not using third-party apps.	BigCommerce automatically upgraded your plan to a higher plan if the annual sales limit has been exceeded at the end of the year which can lead to unexpectedly higher costs.
Adding product variants in the store is very easy and flexible. Also, Business owners can add as many product variants as they want.	BigCommerce does not offer any email marketing tools which is a disadvantage when compared with its competitors.
BigCommerce is an e-commerce platform that can comfortably grow both small and big companies and help them to scale it.	It does not support selling any subscriptions or taking periodic payments from the customer.
BigCommerce doesn’t charge any transaction fees with any of its plans which is very helpful for Small and Medium BigCommerce stores.	You have to use a third-party app for a multilingual feature in BigCommerce.
BigCommerce has one of the best and most advanced SEO features in an e-commerce platform.

Benefits:

Easy to Use - Setting up an online store on the BigCommerce website is a very fast and easy process. This e-commerce platform is the best option for any beginner or expert. BigCommerce can even help in connecting buyers across channels. It can create an online store easily that provides you with all the tools and resources that are required to manage a business.
Plans at Reasonable Price - BigCommerce is a very affordable platform as compared to others for online vendors. It gives an all-in-one solution at a reasonable price for a monthly subscription fee.

BigCommerce offers three plans -

Standard for $29.95/month
Plus for $79.95/month
Pro for $299.95/month

You can also use the platform for free for 15 days before buying any plan.

Best Security - BigCommerce offers Robust Security to consumers. Customers' confidential information is safe and certifiably secure with a BigCommerce platform. It is very trustworthy and has world-class uptime as it functions on a high-availability infrastructure.
Advanced SEO Features - BigCommerce provides great SEO features. It is a big factor that is considered while selecting an e-commerce platform for your store. SEO helps in gaining relevancy and BigCommerce offers strong SEO tools that can help you increase places in search engines with tools like editing page titles, meta descriptions, URLs, etc.

Drawbacks:

Limited Free Themes - BigCommerce offers various customizable themes for your online store but only 7 of those are for free and others are paid. Having paid themes means that many business owners will be buying a theme to complete the customizable design they want. Also, The cost of paid themes starts from $145 up to $235 which is an added cost that is not included in the regular monthly fee.
Target Market - BigCommerce is developed for businesses that are looking to boost their market and growth. So, BigCommerce is not the most suitable fit for your business if you have already achieved a certain level in the industry and already know your target customers. BigCommerce is not necessarily designed for bigger companies because it is aimed toward mid-market customers.
Annual Sales Threshold - BigCommerce’s plans are generally based on the company’s online sales per year. The Standard plan only costs $29.95 a month, but it's for businesses that do less than $50,000 per year, and then BigCommerce automatically upgraded your plan to a higher plan if the annual sales limit has been exceeded at the end of the year which can lead to unexpectedly higher costs.

Conclusion: Is BigCommerce Right for your business?

BigCommerce is the best option for large businesses that operate totally online and looking to expand their horizons with advanced built-in features and more design functionality for online stores.

Some of the alternatives tools to BigCommerce are -

Shopify: It has great business tools which are easy to use with great customer support.
Wix: Wix is an e-commerce platform whose drag-and-drop feature allows you to customize your online store with ease. It also offers Artificial Design Intelligence that builds an online store in a few minutes.
Volusion: It has great data analytics tools. It also includes plenty of payment gateways such as Apple Pay, PayPal, etc.

There are also other ways to start an online store like building a custom website with the help of a software provider like Amplifyre, Amplifyre is a platform where you can hire your software development company, depending on different parameters to find the most skilled partners for your digital needs from various companies. And then you can sell your products or services individually without depending on any e-commerce platform to market your product.

ECommerceSaaS

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