BigCommerce vs. PrestaShop

Big Commerce is great for managing our items for sale all while serving as a home base for our customers. - Whether they want to buy PPE, learn about PPE or have any questions or concerns, they know they can come to our site and get the service/product they need!

Incentivized

I really wouldn't recommend PrestaShop to every person or business. This service has very good features to be able to create an online store and allow customers to add products to their cart instantly, it allows to make electronic payments quickly and the money reaches the company's wallet instantly, without However, it has many disadvantages, PrestaShop does not have a technical service to help implement the software on the website, so if you are thinking of using PrestaShop, you must first have a good team of web developers who are capable of integrating PrestaShop with the Wordpress site without any problem, in addition, PrestaShop takes up a lot of space in the Hosting service, each product that you add to the PrestaShop catalog occupies much more Hosting space and this causes the catalog to take longer to load when the client comes to visualize it. To use PrestaShop I recommend a very powerful Hosting that is able to withstand the high consumption it has.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• Quite easy to use compared to other open-source e-commerce software.
• Has lots of free plugins to help you set up a great basic shop.
• You can easily create your own unique site.
• Lots of payment option plugins and you can use them to sell globally.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• Since it starts as ready to go platform it's difficult to protect your store from being copied by someone else
• Without a developer, you depend on Prestashop's modules marketplace that lacks free extensions
• Since it isn't an enterprise level platform the use of Prestashop is strictly related to the size of your business

Incentivized

BigCommerce is a great platform! It does the job and has a very good API set. I would definitely recommend it to others, but I would warn them about the cost associated with BigCommerce. There are lower cost solutions, but definitely not as feature rich as BigCommerce. It's definitely not perfect, and has a few wrinkles to iron, but nothing is ever perfect. It does the job for us and I do enjoy using the platform!!

Incentivized

Considering the problems we had and still have, 0.

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

The lack of performance and the unstable system make it very hard to use it for a serious e-commerce application.

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

100s of implementation and so far no major security breaches.

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

Some caching and optimization is definitely needed. However, it is not as bloated as other CMSs with lots of plugins needed.

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

Since we use PrestaShop OpenSource there is only community support. What we found is that many other users fight with the same problems and there seems no solution or input from the PrestaShop developers' side.

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

When you look at the landscape of e-commerce platforms, BigCommerce really sets itself apart by being built for serious growth from day one. While Wix is great for simple drag-and-drop projects and Shopify excels at getting a basic shop live in an hour, they both often hit a "plugin wall" where you have to keep paying for third-party apps just to get standard features. BigCommerce, on the other hand, packs those advanced tools—like faceted search, customer groups, and multi-currency support—directly into the core platform. Compared to WooCommerce, which gives you total freedom but leaves you responsible for all the security patches and server maintenance, BigCommerce offers that "Open SaaS" sweet spot. You get the stability of a hosted platform with the flexibility of open APIs. Plus, the fact that they don’t charge transaction fees regardless of which payment processor you use is a massive win for the bottom line. It’s essentially enterprise-grade power without the usual enterprise headache.

Incentivized

As compared to other open-source systems, PrestaShop has the most elegant backend interface. Most of your standard eCommerce features come default: 1. Invoice and Delivery documents in PDF, 2. Promotion and discount mechanism, 3. SEO functionalities, 4. Quick access, 5. Statistics, 6. Categorization, Brands, Attributes, Features/Filters, sorting, pagination, list or grid view. The next best thing is the stability of versions. Currently, at only ver1.7, this is the only open-source CMS that doesn't require the constant nightmare of updating and breaking the site. The open-source community is still offering modules for ver1.5, 1.6 and 1.7. If you need modules to enhance the features, it is also a one-time cost since the versions are so stable. The experiences with 3rd party module developers are very good so far. Most modules are from EUR49-100.

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

This is the best example of "If it's not broken, don't fix it!".

• In my experience, BigCommerce added hours to our work week vs. Volusion due to poor inventory control features we were used to.
• Eventually, as our sales accumulate and we are billed more (tiers), we will be paying $200-$300 more each month on site and app costs vs. Volusion.
• We feel secure in our fears of company going out of business vs. Volusion.
• I just wish we did not have to see Volusion as a risk as it's a much better platform for our business.

• If you don't have open source developers on staff it will be costly.
• The out-of-the box solution is not really a solution. Be prepared to hunt down modules to do standard things you'll want to do.
• The interface is unlike the e-commerce usual. There will be a learning curve and don't count on online documentation.

Incentivized