Likelihood to Recommend The ONLY reason we left
Volusion was fear that
Volusion was going to go out of business and our website/data would all be lost. I feel BigCommerce is lightyears behind
Volusion in website/inventory control. In our experience, BigCommerce customer service severely lacks knowledge, at least compared to what we had in our 7-1/2 years with
Volusion . There were times
Volusion even helped us with stuff BigCommerce could not understand. I just feel sick about moving and that should not be the case. In my opinion, I downgraded heavily for the feeling BigCommerce would not be going out of business. I just feel sick.
Read full review The eCommerce catalog side has a lot of benefits to it and has been much easier to work with and customize than the CMS side. It is this integration and using both for a branded marketing website that has the user journey from browsing and leading into the eCommerce side that has been the bigger challenge, outside of the overall stability of the releases with the bugs we have encountered. I think the solution is well suited if you are mainly a catalog site. We, however, sell machinery and solutions that are not sold via the eCommerce site and we need to showcase them on the website. However, we have a core industrial catalog of consumable products that support the machine and solutions purchases which are very well suited for the eCommerce catalog. It is the CMS/Catalog integration that has caused a need for more customizations to the platform and as a result increased costs to maintain, lowering our overall ROI from the solution. We are also a bit hamstrung by having to rely on our development partner to make changes that our digital agency is better suited to do for us in the CMS. It is requiring extra cost and resources as a result. If more functionality could be surfaced, it would be much better.
Read full review Pros SEO - fast loading speeds, helps us rank on Google Product customization - allows us to customize templates to our needs to fit all viable information Integration with other platforms - seamless connection to other properties like Google Ads and Analytics Read full review Integration Jobs/Connections - Providing a good out-of-the-box solution to hook into ERPs and common endpoints. Design and Development Partner Network to work with - If you have customizations in mind, the Optimizely partner network will give you the chance to find a suitable partner to meet your needs. Good layout/flow/settings breakdown - There are a lot of "redundant" settings, but the more management access, the better. Read full review Cons Better and easier localisation for stores outside the US Speed - it is not the fastest Make sure that third-party theme developers update regularly and use best practice Consider EU and country-specific rules and legal obligations and make customers aware of whether BC is actually fully compliant Read full review Need the ability to look at more of our user data Need the ability to refresh our sandbox environment with production data in quicker, more efficient ways Classic CMS is very limited in ways end users like myself can edit widget content Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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!
Read full review Usability 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.
Read full review Quite flexible and easy to use for daily marketing user tasks, like updating page listings, promotions, and copy. More in-depth tasks like managing product attributes, rearranging product taxonomy placement, and CMS editing are not user-friendly and require a careful and detailed process to follow.
Read full review Reliability and Availability 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
Read full review Performance 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.
Read full review Support Rating 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!
Read full review It's a mixed bag. The team has been very nice, but there has been an underlying feeling of condescension because we have complained or "caused trouble" over the inadequacy of the CMS component. Also, support for modifications or UI changes has been terribly slow. Understandably, COVID has made life hard for everyone, but there is an expectation that we complete our work immediately, but their team will "put it in queue" when we have a request or find a bug. Further, we certainly feel that we were sold a list of capabilities that we have not seen come to fruition. Finally, the change of ownership 3 times (Insite -> Epi -> Opti) over our implementation period has been both confusing and disruptive.
Read full review Online Training 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.
Read full review Implementation Rating 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.
Read full review Alternatives Considered We switched from
Shopify due to the restrictions they implemented on our industry. While we spent tens of thousands of dollars investing in our
Shopify store, we can't have them cutting us off anytime they want. We reviewed
WooCommerce , but didn't like the storefront or backend. Plus it seems like Wordpress/
WooCommerce runs into tons of hacking issues and bugs.
Read full review I was not very involved with this process. It has been 3 years since we made a decision and I can't even remember the name of the other companies we were considering. I was in a different role then so I was less involved with the eCommerce department. I do remember really liking the people we were working with. That played a huge role in our selection since we would be working with them for years on the site.
Read full review Scalability 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.
Read full review Return on Investment 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. Read full review Automation of updates and integration with ERP has saved time and provides reliable data for the website in sync with ERP Integration with external PIM has saved time and provides reliable sync with content data for the website. Changes and improvements have been slow and difficult. Read full review ScreenShots Optimizely Configured Commerce Screenshots