BigCommerce vs. Cart.com vs. PaperWeight

BigCommerce is really well suited for someone who wants to get selling quickly, but may not have endless developer experience, or even web design experience for that matter. Their templates, even the free ones, are very attractive and supported by tons of third party apps. I think the only times it is not a slam dunk recommendation would be if someone is dead set on using another solution like Shopify, or if they are not looking for an ecommerce site and more of a flat website, this would be overkill.

Incentivized

The Multi-Store eCommerce platform is by far the strongest feature. Anyone who has a direct to consumer business and a business-to-business side should use cart.com. Also, if you plan to grow to a 7 figure business, it is best to start and stay with cart.com because Shopify will get ridiculously expensive as you grow.

Incentivized

Very easy to use and customize homepage, dashboard, and multiple landing pages of courses. Easy for setting up intuitive dashboards, rating users, and receiving ratings. Create and edit content or upload documents and make edits. Easy to segregate functions based on user roles. Multi-device support is not so seamless though overall it is responsive and scalable on the web.

Incentivized

• We really appreciate how easy it is to add products, and variants of products.
• The integrated site analytics is pretty slick and tells us how our customers are utilizing our site/allows us to recognize trends.
• Adding sales badges is a breeze and allows us to target specific items for sale to market!

Incentivized

• Multi store eCommerce platform is the best part about Cart.com.
• Pricing is a super high value and rewards you as you grow.
• Free templates are attractive.
• The Rule Engine feature is very powerful and we use it a lot.

Incentivized

• PaperWeight has amazing features for freelance reviewers who can provide insights on how a course can be structured using interactive content.
• PaperWeight is scalable, responsive, secure.
• Freelance reviewers find easy to use PaperWeight.
• We could also rate and provide feedback on the work delivered by freelancers which is visible to a group of users who can allocate future work based on the profile feedback.

Incentivized

• In my experience, customer support FAILS terribly in knowledge of getting a BC site live
• In my experience, the back side/ dashboard is very archaic compared to Volusion, will add hours of work to your week.
• In my experience, pretty much anything you NEED is done with an "app" at additional cost. I think we have a few hundred dollars in apps already on top of cost of BigCommerce.
• I feel coming from Volusion to BigCommerce was so depressing but we do feel secure that the company will remain in business. We are looking for something else already.

• The integrations are good, but not great. Shopify is really good at integrations.
• Tech support is fairly slow and it can take several days to a week to get a simple question answered.
• Stronger reporting. It hasn't changed in the last 4 years.

Incentivized

• PaperWeight could improve its usability experience across all devices. Sometimes there are some glitches when viewing on another device.

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

BigCommerce even with add-ons such as a PIM and B2B functionality wins for small businesses on affordability and ease of use. No servers or updates to worry about and no expensive agencies to pay. This being said, if the budget were no issue, for larger organisations Magento is perhaps a better option.

Incentivized

None of them did Multi Store platforms.

Incentivized

We like the light-weightedness of PaperWeight, scalability, and its ability to meet our needs at a reasonable cost. Pre-existing relationships and business process outcomes helped in making the decision to go with PaperWeight. The product roadmap being aligned with our own roadmap also was a huge factor in the decision-making in favor of PaperWeight.

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

• 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

• The pricing model is a great value adding to our bottom line.
• Our inventory management is accurate and easy with the multi-store pulling into the same dashboard.

Incentivized

• It has [made it easy to] find freelancers for our course reviews.
• We can trust the reviewers who are onboarded on our portal and we feel safe to share business content with them on PaperWeight.
• We are able to prevent [unauthorised] downloads of our content.

Incentivized