Likelihood to Recommend The ONLY reason we left
Volusion was fear that
Volusion was going to go out of business and our website/data would all be lost. I feel BigCommerce is lightyears behind
Volusion in website/inventory control. In our experience, BigCommerce customer service severely lacks knowledge, at least compared to what we had in our 7-1/2 years with
Volusion . There were times
Volusion even helped us with stuff BigCommerce could not understand. I just feel sick about moving and that should not be the case. In my opinion, I downgraded heavily for the feeling BigCommerce would not be going out of business. I just feel sick.
Read full review Any business that needs to keep track of orders and payments would benefit from Shopify Plus. Customers information, orders, and payments are all saved and available for reference. You are able to refer to past orders to review trends and offer future purchase suggestions. Shopify Plus is also easy to use so it does not take long to train employees how to use this system.
Read full review Pros SEO - fast loading speeds, helps us rank on Google Product customization - allows us to customize templates to our needs to fit all viable information Integration with other platforms - seamless connection to other properties like Google Ads and Analytics Read full review Scales incredibly well. Forget about hardware concerns, load balancing, downtime, etc. and focus on eCommerce. We've seen merchants go from a few thousand dollars per month to having million dollar days, all on Shopify without having to worry about performance or scaling systems. Great new features consistently being added, ahead of the curve on almost everything Solid API to build on and work with, a few annoying quirks here and there for super complex use cases but overall very well documented and works well Most Merchant Success Managers are good and genuinely want to be helpful A fantastic user interface, very logical and easy to use Tons and tons and tons of out of the box integrations. Easily the best integration marketplace of the e-commerce platforms. There's an app for that. Read full review Cons Better and easier localisation for stores outside the US Speed - it is not the fastest Make sure that third-party theme developers update regularly and use best practice Consider EU and country-specific rules and legal obligations and make customers aware of whether BC is actually fully compliant Read full review The Account Managers/Reps have become more scripted and seem like they are busier and handling more clients than before. It doesn't seem as personal and special anymore like when we first upgraded to Plus. Shopify still has missing features in their software that might not have an app in their app marketplace available that fills this void. The 24/7 support doesn't seem as dedicated as they once were. Read full review Likelihood to Renew I personally would not even consider another e-commerce website platform.
Bigcommerce may have the same (or close to the same) functionality and integrations as other SaaS platforms but they excel at customer service and tech support. At the end of the day you need a company that will answer the phone in less than a minute especially if you're having a 5 alarm issue. That said, we hardly ever have any issues. The site was down for a few minutes one time 5 years ago. Sometimes we have issues with coding or apps and they help me with that too. They even walked me through installing our new theme when the contracted developers told me that wasn't included in the development of our new website.
Bigcommerce comes out with new innovations every year, not including apps that other people write for the platform, and there are a lot of those and new ones all the time. And there are a LOT of awesome themes to choose from (Halothemes are the best).
And the price is reasonable!
I'd give Bigcommerce my business any time and recommend them to anyone looking to run an e-commerce website. You could even use them for a non-shopping site, we have one of those too!
Read full review Usability I think that overall it has a great front end for the customer. On the back end, it takes a little spin-up time, but in just a couple of hours you can really have your head wrapped around everything you're going to need 99% of the time. It takes me about 5 minutes to train a new user on how to interact with customer orders.
Read full review Reliability and Availability So far in my time with BigCommerce I have not had any down time when it comes to my webstore or accessing it at any time I need to. Knowing that they have such a good uptime, it makes me feel comfortable that my customers can access things anytime, but also keep sales going 24/7
Read full review Performance I have not had any issues with pages loading slow or any real other issues, not that I have encountered so far. Speed of the site and images loading are fantastic and everything just seems to work nicely, which may seem like a simple thing to say about things, but when something just WORKS! Its rather nice vs fighting with things to work right.
Read full review Support Rating Because they are always there no matter how simple or complex the question is, if they don't know the answer they don't fake it and just make you go away feeling frustrated.. they get you to someone that does know the answer. I always appreciate their help and their honesty!
Read full review Always are quick to answer our questions and help us find a solution
Read full review Online Training They have a comprehensive online help file system that makes it easy to do almost anything. They cover just about everything you'd want to do with your online store with images, clear descriptions and in some cases video. I will, however, say the videos should be a little more professorially done and not sound like the employees are doing it in their cubical.
Read full review Implementation Rating A certified BigCommerce design and solution partner will usually comprise a team of highly experienced designers, developers and marketers. It is our view that in the vast majority of cases, this will pay dividends in the long-term - especially for those teams that could use the extra support.
Read full review Alternatives Considered We switched from
Shopify due to the restrictions they implemented on our industry. While we spent tens of thousands of dollars investing in our
Shopify store, we can't have them cutting us off anytime they want. We reviewed
WooCommerce , but didn't like the storefront or backend. Plus it seems like Wordpress/
WooCommerce runs into tons of hacking issues and bugs.
Read full review Shopify had the quickest go-to-market and most robust API among the products we compared. CommerceCloud required a VERY LONG integration phase that we just didn't have time for.
BigCommerce fell short on the number of features and API coverage that we needed. Overall Shopify gave us the most bang for the buck.
Read full review Scalability I believe after seeing all of the parts of this platform, one is able to develop the business and keep adding on select features for the business. There are multiple options for purchase with the various platforms once the business grows more. The different features being offered by the platform can lead us to scalability.
Read full review Return on Investment Provides a robust platform to sell a high-risk product. Page Builder saves you time and money by negating the need to buy a template. Includes robust promotion settings that allow for codes and automatic discounts, bulk discounts, and customer groups (i.e. military discount), all native options. Read full review Shopify Plus has been a very cost effective solution for us. As our business grows, it's easy to train new hires on how to use Shopify Plus. What we've lost in the missing features of Shopify we've made up for in the other areas. Read full review ScreenShots