BigCommerce vs. IONOS Hosting vs. OpenCart

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

I run five websites off of 1&1 for different outshoots of the company. For our web needs it works perfectly. We have a midgrade hosting package and it works perfectly. I know if issues arose from traffic or storage space 1&1 would have a solution for us.

Incentivized

OpenCart is best suited for business owners looking to sell their products online. Building an OpenCart website requires no or minimal coding knowledge. Being a self-hosted system, it is not recommended for people who have no hosting plan or have no experience in hosting websites so it would be better to go with another platform that is hosted elsewhere.

• 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

• Private registration: 1&1 offers free private registration which makes them an automatic favorite.
• Reliable customer service: always someone available when I call in and I have never had my issue not get resolved.
• Easy to use dashboard: domains in one place with DNS settings and other things that can be tweaked. It's easy to add an SSL certificate to domains as well.

Incentivized

• OpenCart is well suited in cases where our eCommerce web development clients want a very specific design with very specific shopping cart functionalities.
• OpenCart is very flexible in its native ability to work with a wide variety of payment processors and payment gateways.
• OpenCart makes it both fast and easy to setup and configure a new shopping cart website, especially if you use one of the pre-made templates.

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.

• From my experience, customer services does not know how to address issues in an understandable language
• I feel that they arbitrarily overcharge w/o any explanation
• In my opinion it is really pricey

• It's a very buggy platform. Although OpenCart developers release new versions time to time after fixing bugs every version of OpenCart has a different type of bug.
• It should increase the security of the platform.

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

In over 8 years of operations, we have not had a single outage that affected us.

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

The email system has not impeded out mail flow in any way, and we do not notice the delays we sometimes see with other systems that include spam/junk mail filtering.

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

Rackspace I find to be too pricey for the service they offer. Pagely is very much WordPress oriented. I've had downtime with both that I haven't experienced with 1&1.

Incentivized

Honestly, when consulting my clients, I would always recommend WooCommerce over OpenCart. Although I've had clients that had existing OpenCart websites and they were fairly happy with them, making additions/changes/customizations from a developer standpoint was not the easiest compared to other systems. For very large shops, I always recommend Magento over anything else.

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 scalability of the email solution far exceeds our needs and would be suitable for organizations not looking for an enterprise sized multipurpose solution (O365, Google Workspace, etc).

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

• 1&1 host our email and domains adequately. We can easily add and remove emails as needed.
• 1&1 also works with our website platform, Memberclicks.

Incentivized

• Clients loves the design which is easy to integrate to; you can integrate multiple themes.
• Overall user experience is good, so number of conversions is good.

Incentivized