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
Hootsuite
Score 8.1 out of 10
N/A
Hootsuite is a social media management platform for building brand awareness, engaging with customers, and driving business results. Users can schedule posts across multiple social networks (including Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and YouTube ), manage organic and paid social content together, keep track of customer conversations, integrate with over 200+ applications, and gain actionable real-time insights from social media to make critical business decisions from…
$249
per month per user
Agentforce Commerce
Score 8.1 out of 10
N/A
Salesforce Agentforce Commerce (formerly Commerce Cloud, and Demandware before that) is a cloud-based eCommerce solution for enterprises with merchandising tools, such as sorting, filtering, and image zooming, allowing customers to browse products.
$4
per month
Pricing
BigCommerce
Hootsuite
Salesforce Agentforce Commerce
Editions & Modules
Standard
$39
per month
Plus
$105
per month
Pro
$399
per month
Enterprise
Custom
per month
Standard
$199
per month (billed annually) Starts at 1 user, 10 social accounts
Advanced
$399
per month (billed annually) Starts at 1 user, unlimited social accounts
Enterprise
Custom Pricing
per year
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
BigCommerce
Hootsuite
Agentforce Commerce
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
Yes
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
Optional
No setup fee
Additional Details
A discount is offered for annual billing.
Plans can be paid monthly or annually, with a discount for annual pricing.
B2B Commerce:
Starter - $4 price/order
Growth - $6 price/order
Plus - $8 price/order
B2C Commerce:
Starter - 1% Gross Merchandise Value
Growth - 2% Gross Merchandise Value
Plus - 3% Gross Merchandise Value
B2B2C Commerce:
1% Gross Merchandise Value
- Ease of Use: With guided onboarding, BigCommerce enables us to manage stores independently within days, reducing the need for extensive technical support.
-Comprehensive Built-In Features: BigCommerce provides a wide array of native features, minimizing reliance on …
Other than Shopify all of these solutions require a lot of development and maintenance as they are very custom. Shopify had a good product for direct to consumer but not as good on the B2B facing side of our business. We also don't like the stance they are taking on customer …
BC easily beats Shopify, and since Magento has moved to M2, it easily outpaces Magento as well. Salesforce Commerce Cloud is more powerful and robust but requires a significant investment that is not necessarily desirable for those looking for something more lightweight, which …
We initially narrowed down our search based on the features that we needed and our belief that the platform would have them. This was in addition to SLAs, support, etc. We came down to Shopify Plus and BigCommerce Enterprise. At the end of the day, we felt that we would get …
1. The learning curve of Shopify is not too steep, so it does create hinderance for non-technical folks 2. I personally found the AI-powered insights in Shopify to be more accurate than the ones provided in Salesforce Commerce Cloud.
All relative to your organizational size. Shopify works for small to mid, Magento for small to large, commerce tools would be a large-scale plus. Hire a skilled consultant to help you make a decision of this caliber!
All the options and demos were good; we see them all efficient and best suites; the option to choose Salesforce commerce cloud came into the picture when we thought of integrating customer service and promotions as we already use Salesforce service cloud as the support backbone …
We selected Salesforce Commerce Cloud over other vendors in order to enhance customer relationships. Maintaining existing customers is comparatively easy. It thus helps to maintain strong customer focus and also to improve partner and supplier relationships. In addition, in …
Associate Director, Client Leadership for Michelin
Chose Salesforce Agentforce Commerce
Since we are operating within the Salesforce platform such as the DMP and Marketing Cloud, integrating Commerce Cloud was an efficient and consistent way to streamline the processes.
At the time, Salesforce was the leader in the Gartner quadrant and it was an easy to use platform that really understood us. They had a process of understanding your needs and adapting the solution to those needs. The services they provide are really useful.
When I think of Salesforce products, I sometimes think of them interchangeably as one big lump. It's hard not to be incredibly immersed in the ecosystem day in and day out and taking advantage of resources like Trailhead. While Microsoft Dynamics compares in quality and …
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.
Hootsuite presents my team everything we need to manage the social media function. Even writing the "what can be improved" section strained me, because there really isn't a whole lot to complain about. At this point, I (and my social media manager) need to explore the platform more, specifically OwlyGPT, campaigns, and listening. It's pretty much everything we need right now
Global Sites; larger commerce organizations but not too large where the % rev-share would affect its feasibility in a feature comparison. Salesforce is rock solid in infrastructure and rarely has outages or issues; it scaled appropriately for holiday peak and was able to accomplish anything we put our minds to as long as we staffed development appropriately. The latter, however, is not to be overlooked. Developers are necessary and expensive.
Reporting. We are able to pull accurate and concise data points on our channels.
Planning and calendaring. We love that we are able to have our teams plan out content across months so that we are never feeling behind schedule on getting content out there.
Traffic - When we have sales, our traffic will increase exponentially and their cloud can handle the huge uptick in traffic we receive without overloading our servers.
Site updates - it continually monitors in the background for any upgrades or updates needed so we don't have to go in and do it ourselves. A real time saver!
Integration - outside plugins and add-ons are easy to install with Salesforce commerce cloud as it allows a seamless integration of extra plug ins onto our site.
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.
TikTok is an area for improvement as it's newer to Hootsuite. It would be beneficial to be able to link non-business profiles on TikTok to Hootsuite as many businesses use personal accounts to access TikTok's expansive music library.
Hootsuite does have room to improve the analytics capabilities. There could be more ways to customize each aspect of their reports. There isn't much manipulation of data in each type of data set.
Simplicity is an area of improvement for Hootsuite. The streams are one example of an area that is super cluttered and difficult to view. Their platform could really use an aesthetic overhaul to make things look more pleasing.
The UX within the Business Manager portion of Demandware, the primary interface for marketers, is generally a confusing, inconsistent mess. Particularly infuriating are the lack of consistency for search and sort behavior within the tool.
A number of useful features, such as the ability to set schedules or tie features to unique customer segments, have seemingly arbitrary limitations imposed.
Demandware's idea of leveraging the community to be a learning resource and a sounding board for new ideas and features is a nice theory, but in practice it doesn't work for businesses with a lot of customization. I'm left with the impression that individual support is not a priority.
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!
At this time we are satisfied that Hootsuite offers the most of what we are looking for at the most reasonable price point. As the social media landscape and monitoring/scheduling software changes, so do our needs. We re-evaluate our tools semi-annually or as new tools emerge onto the market. If we find at any point that we aren't gaining an advantage, then we are open to switching products.
A huge factor influencing our decision to remain on the Demandware platform is that our new parent company is standardizing all its luxury brands in the US on it. We are fortunate. However, even if we had remained an independent company, I believe we would continue on the Demandware platform for all the reasons outlined in this review. I appreciate the stability the platform has provided to our eCommerce site in the last three years as well as the continuous improvements and technological advances being rolled out that will allow us to keep the site fresh, engaging, modern and stable. I've heard many horror stories from colleagues on other platforms who struggle with the expense and complexity involved with making what should be minor and simple changes and updates to their sites.
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.
I will give Hootsuite a rating of 10/10 because it has delivered measurable business impact through social media. It helps centralize and streamline content planning, approvals, scheduling, and reporting in one place. It has significantly reduced manual workload and improved team efficiency. We achieved higher engagement rates, faster customer response times, and improved lead quality through social channels. It has also helped us with centralized reporting across different social media channels.
The overall ease of using the system. Consolidation in location for our team members. Mobile application for on the go research, as many of our team members are constantly traveling to job sites or to meet clients. No more duplicate calls to current customers, since we have 12 different divisions that span the company. Mostly the ability to look at the database when our team members begin cultivating a new lead/prospect with a potential customer to see if anyone within the team has a relationship with that person or the company they work for.
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
Gliches have made it a bit of a bind, particularly when you just want to 'click and send' a web article after you have read it - and then you have to deal with support (a great team but not always able to solve the problems with the gliches). Gliches with it loading properly, gliches with 'double ups in FB on the posts (the personal page and the business page if both clicked will lead to 2 lots of postings to each page!)
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.
HootSuite does everything it is designed to do very well: the product's performance is very reliable and efficient. Like other tools, there is always a room for new developments and updates, and the HootSuite team recognizes this and focuses on new development as well.
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!
I can manage all of my accounts on one site! It's absolutely amazing! The dashboard is helpful to see how you are doing as well. Still getting to understand the analytics and may need to reach out for help on this
They are very responsive and a support technician will be assigned quickly. Even if there is further clarification needed for the ticket, or a solution is not immediately available, you feel that someone is there and staying on top of the issue. Most common issues are resolved quickly and satisfactorily.
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.
The online training is decent; however, it takes a lot more time to search for answers to my questions. Having a training session with a live person was much more effective as they were able to quickly address the business needs I have.
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.
Simple and easy to use, and have never had any issues. We like how it saves me time and allows me to plan in advance. I plan on using this for as long as I can and will encourage others to use it too. If you haven't tried it you should. I hope my review is helpful to everyone.
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.
Hootsuite offers a wide range of tools at a somewhat steeper cost. If you manage multiple platforms and want to survey the content being shared and interacted with across all of them, Hootsuite seems to have an easier platform to do that with. HubSpot CRM allows us to integrate our social platforms into our existing CRM, which is a cost saver, but Hootsuite is social media-focused, so the set-up is easier.
When I think of Salesforce products, I sometimes think of them interchangeably as one big lump. It's hard not to be incredibly immersed in the ecosystem day in and day out and taking advantage of resources like Trailhead. While Microsoft Dynamics compares in quality and offerings, it doesn't offer the same engagement and resources as Salesforce in its communications, social, and marketing, which makes a difference in terms of relevance and help. Commerce Cloud comes with the support you need to succeed and the tools you need to grow. In a high demand consumer world, we need products like this to keep up and get ahead. The minute we catch up, we're behind. Salesforce helps you stay on pace and create the unique and personalized experiences customers everywhere expect.
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.
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.
For our organization, all ROI was on time saved and efficiency: for creating posts, for scheduling and publishing, for interacting with users, and for analyzing performances. It all comes in one place and this makes a very huge difference in your workflows. We would say that Hootsuite went beyond our expectations on this front, for example with the dynamics UTMs and the media library. Saving time was the main reason why we wanted to purchase the platform and it did not disappoint at all.
The ROI in time was also fast to get. The learning curse is very short and this is also an important element. Benefiting from the platform did not take long to be experienced.
