Big Cartel vs. BigCommerce

It's well suited for simple e-commerce and basic inventory management needs.

Incentivized

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.

• It's very easy to use and does not require a lot of configuration or setup.
• It has been extremely reliable. Clients never have issues with purchasing from it and it has always has been up for us.
• It's very fast. It loads quick both on the consumer/front end and also admin/backend.
• Pricing model is flat, not percentage of transactions.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• For our needs I really can't think of anything!

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

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!

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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!

Incentivized

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.

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• The basic plan at $10/month easily saves us that in time from having to manage our own e-commerce system on our own site.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized