BigCommerce is a SaaS platform that allows SMBs to develop eCommerce sites. Features include the capabilities to design the storefront, configure products, manage payments, generate traffic, and optimize conversion.
$39
per month
CommerceV3
Score9 out of 10
N/A
CommerceV3 is an all-in-one eCommerce platform that will both build and host store platforms.
In my view, CV3 meets our needs better by allowing us a much easier way to manage the front end the way the templates are structured. BigCommerce recommended using an FTP tool to download, modify, then upload. Shopify has some very sophisticated templates, which, in my mind, …
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. TR verified that a representative sample of customers was invited. More Info
I believe CommerceV3 (CV3) is best suited for small to mid-level catalog companies. You would want to make sure to integrate CV3 with your back end system or you'll be doing a lot of manual entries or manipulating data for table uploads. You can easily manage the templates in CV3 with a basic knowledge of HTML and work up from there
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. TR verified that a representative sample of customers was invited. More Info
CV3 provides us a plethora of marketing tools to customize offers and campaigns to our customers. I've used BigCommerce and Shopify and neither comes close to the capability of fine tuning sales, offers, and discounts by product, category, customer and more.
The purpose of partnering with any e-commerce platform is to provide a secure site and stable checkout process for our customers. CV3 has been amazing at keeping our site up and running through peak traffic and attempted hacks. The checkout process has been rock solid and also integrates seamlessly with PayPal. I've used Amazon Payments in the past without incident, but decided to end that option due to Amazon's policies.
CV3's architecture on the back-end is designed to be plain and simple which provides an easy-to-use interface to streamline our work. The template driven structure to manage the front-end will become a favorite for most programmers in no time at all. In fact, I'm not a programmer, but do customization and design changes almost on a daily basis with ease. Any changes made to a template may be viewed on a staging server before pushing live. Templates, as well as other data may be downloaded any time for backups. Exports and imports of product data is simple and powerful allowing me to change massive amounts of data easily.
Customer support is always a contentious issue with most providers, however, CV3 has by far been the best I've encountered in over 30+ years of experience with software vendors. They are very responsive and escalate the issue to the proper person without having the redundancy you experience with so many other companies. They understand the issue the first time, and tell you the truth.
Any e-commerce business is about shipping. CV3 has the most powerful tools to control shipping. It will challenge the most creative minds on how to best merchandise products based on weight, dollar amount, global geographical location, dimensions, category, exception rules, by carrier, all the way down to the sku level which can have it's own set of rules. It gets complicated, but it works great and ties in with the promotional features as well.
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.
An area I'd like to see enhanced is the sku level pricing calendar. You can set specials prices to start and stop at certain dates and times, but it's fixed to certain years. You can't have your chosen items go to seasonal pricing every year at the same time, you have to change the years each year.
There are multiple product setups: basic, parent with children, and sub-products. Each type exports on the same datasheet all intermingled and this can be tedious isolating the different types for editing and re-import.
Vendor and Brand are data points on each item, but they are not controlled by a table. We end up with the same vendor or brand misspelled multiple times.
There is no FTP capability (PCI issue?) and no blog site with the parent domain. These have to be handled using a separate sub-domain.
The shipping calculator for customers should be available anywhere there is a shipping option presented during checkout.
Faster live times. Currently, it takes about 5 to 10 minutes to see template/product changes pushed to the live cdn.
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!
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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!
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. TR verified that a representative sample of customers was invited. More Info
In my view, CV3 meets our needs better by allowing us a much easier way to manage the front end the way the templates are structured. BigCommerce recommended using an FTP tool to download, modify, then upload. Shopify has some very sophisticated templates, which, in my mind, required a senior level programmer or lots of outsourcing for even minor changes. Neither of the other systems come close to CV3's marketing capabilities through their promotional tool without any add-ons. Shopify, for example, is stripped down and if you want a certain feature you have to find one of their approved partners, sign-up, integrate the feature and hope it works. To purchase all the features we're currently using in CV3 you'd have quite a list (and expense) of partners. Examples would be enhanced shipping capabilities or the ability to customize a product purchase. CV3 has features specifically geared for a catalog company, like request forms and capturing key codes. Plus, built-in rewards program, wishlist, gift certificates, bulk email, and data feeds for Google Shopper, Channel Advisor and SingleFeed.
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. TR verified that a representative sample of customers was invited. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
One positive impact has been the use of product reviews. This feature has helped us weed out bad products and promote good ones while allowing customers to share their experience.
It's a fixed fee user agreement which favors increasing sales.
The stability of the checkout process has helped conversions and lowered support.
Having integrated inventory with our back end has helped meet customer expectations.
The promotional capabilities of CV3 has allowed us to provide new and different offers keeping customers engaged.
