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
inkFrog
Score 5.9 out of 10
N/A
inkFrog headquartered in Phoenix provides auction management and ecommerce listing software for vendors selling through major ecommerce platforms (e.g. Amazon, eBay, etc.).
$11
per month 300 listings
Laravel PHP Framework
Score 9.8 out of 10
N/A
Laravel is a free, open source web application PHP framework.
BigCommerce is fully hosted SaaS product which handles the security, performance and upgrades whereas others need my intervention. It has strong built in B2B features that may be lacked in other platforms such as WooCommerce. It has strong APIs and ecosystem of integration …
We looked at Sellbrite. We really liked Sellbrite in view of its glowing reviews and integration with Etsy. However we didn't fully trial the program so I am not able to comment here more than to say that Inkfrog is by far the most economical option. We currently pay around $10 …
We used to use the eBay store and turbolister in the past for our eBay listings. InkFrog stacks much better than just the basic eBay store, which opened up our business to save a large amount of time as our eBay store keeps growing. We have also used quite a few other inventory …
WordPress with WooCommerce provides the good support for WooCommerce but as it is built on top of the WordPress limitations kick in whereas we can build whatever we want using Laravel PHP Framework. Laravel PHP Framework and WordPress is open source whereas Shopify is not 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.
Inkfrog is a useful upload tool for adding stock from your website to eBay and now also to Amazon, although we don't sell via the latter and we only list to eBay UK. I think it works better as an upload tool than an all-in-one eBay shop management tool and some tasks are easier to do directly on eBay itself. eBay also offers insights - such as offering trending prices - that Inkfrog doesn't. However it is useful in terms of being able to bulk adjust item pricing to include the cost of eBay selling fees. Inkfrog is probably ideal if you have a recognisable product to sell - with our offering it struggles with mapping shop categories (we use lots of sub and sub-sub-categories). Certain listing capabilities cannot be reproduced, such as quantity discounts, and I've never got to grips with mapping products with options and variations, so a lot is left out of our full inventory. Ultimately you will still need to find some time in your day to manage your eBay store - Inkfrog is not 100% reliable sometimes. Inkfrog will also take some of your time and a lot of patience, but ultimately is a huge timesaver for uploading products so it is worthwhile.
I would say that Laravel is not a suitable framework for high-frequency, high-volume, real-time interaction or processing millions of records in batch operations. It shines for standard database web applications (CRUD, Admin Panels, etc.) and is a fantastic multi-developer framework.
inkFrog handles product variants really well. Their platform pulls the SKUs and information directly from BigCommerce and then lets me easily customize each variant with different pictures which is really helpful.
It also makes adding multiple listings very easy. Since it imports the item specifics and description directly from BigCommerce I don't have to go through each listing one by one and I can just bulk upload our products onto eBay.
inkFrog also lets me set different templates for shipping, or profiles from different items and then I can apply those in bulk to items which saves a huge amount of time since I don't have to go through every item and change specifics.
Laravel utilizes the best possible PHP standards and coding practices.
Laravel uses many widely-accepted community libraries and builds upon them, rather than re-inventing everything.
Laravel has many components available from the community and is extremely easy to build custom components for, either with custom code or by integrating existing third-party PHP libraries.
Laravel is flexible enough to power pretty much any kind of application I can imagine.
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 pre-built themes are really bad. Thankfully we don't have to use them and created our own.
The other issue regarding these themes is that they are locked behind a paywall and are a premium feature; subpar themes should not be charged to consumers.
InkFrog also connects with other marketplaces that we also sell on, such as Amazon. Unfortunately, it does not work as well with other marketplaces as it does with eBay, which is a shame since we would prefer to have it all in one place.
Laravel is updated regularly, which is great. However, in order to get the latest features, use the newest 3rd party libraries, have the most current security updates, and ensure that the newest features of PHP are usable, you have to continuously upgrade your Laravel application. This costs time and money, obviously, and if you don't stay on top of the updates you will quickly fall behind. This is the case with any open source software, but it needs to be considered for any team considering using Laravel or any other software.
Because of the size of the Laravel community, there are a LOT of 3rd party libraries. Some of these are great, some are less than great. Sometimes it's difficult to evaluate the quality of a library, making it difficult to trust many libraries. Developers need to be cautious and thoughtful when considering using new software.
Because of the rapid development of the Laravel framework, the size of the community, and the simplicity of being able to publish content online - it is very easy to find documentation, tutorials, or other "advice" that is not up to date, or that has outdated information.
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!
Laravel PHP Framework has continued to exceed my expectations. It supported me in the development of a high quality and stable web application that is mission critical for the organization. I cannot imagine wanting to use any other tool for web development. Documentation, unit tests, and numerous integration options make using Laravel PHP Framework a natural choice.
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.
As I mentioned earlier Laravel PHP Framework has lot of in built feature as well as there is vast set of packages available to add the features in your application. It has very large community who can help when you feel stuck somewhere. This is why this rating is justified.
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
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.
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!
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.
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.
We looked at Sellbrite. We really liked Sellbrite in view of its glowing reviews and integration with Etsy. However we didn't fully trial the program so I am not able to comment here more than to say that Inkfrog is by far the most economical option. We currently pay around $10 per month, whereas Sellbrite is nearly $50.
Supporting unit testing is bigger plus point in Laravel than any other framework. Developing with Laravel is much easier. Other frameworks have value in market, but Laravel has taken the lead in popularity among PHP developers in recent years. The large community supports you if you have problems. Using Laravel, integration became easy with third-party libraries, but it was costly too.
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.
Overall inkFrog has had a positive impact. It has really freed up huge amounts of time that would be normally spent manually managing eBay listings one by one.
It also has had a very positive impact by using the inventory management which again frees up huge amounts of time since I don't have to go through and manually manage all of our listings. We also do not oversell items anymore which is a giant plus.
inkFrog's template customization has also really really helped by making our listings much more aesthetically pleasing and more professional looking which builds a lot of trust with our eBay customers.
