BigCommerce vs. Salesforce Agentforce Commerce vs. Shopify Plus

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

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.

Incentivized

Shopify Plus makes order management simple and less error prone. Connecting our ERP allows us to seamlessly manage our product listings, fulfill orders, and sync customer data. Limitations to the number of product variants requires attention from our staff to make sure our products sync without issue. Other than being arbitrary, there's really no need to limit the number of product variants.

Incentivized

• 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

• 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.

Incentivized

• Syncs directly with ShipBob WMS.
• Shopify Scripts and the Script Editors allows us to tailor our checkout screen.
• Gives us advanced sales reporting, showing trends, performance, year to year, and even projections.
• Scalable for high volume, handles spikes in traffic without downtime.

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.

• 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.

Incentivized

• When linking to our communication service some customers have several emails with orders and only one email generates orders. It would be nice if we could combine all of this information into one account.
• If a customer has multiple accounts you are also unable to edit the email address as it is already used, another reason merging accounts would be helpful.
• Some of the processes in Shopify are too easy to complete. I’m certain scenarios a peony of “are you sure you would like to complete(this action)” would be extremely helpful and avoid mistakes that are not reversible.

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

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

It is extremely easy for merchants to get to know how Shopify Plus works. Comparitive to other platforms such as Magento and WooCommerce it is extremely lean and easy to operate, meaning clients who migrate over to it find it very intuitive to use. There is also a lot of guides and up to date information online

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

We have only had one instance where the platform went down in the time we have been using it.

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

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 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.

Incentivized

Always are quick to answer our questions and help us find a solution

Incentivized

The in-person training was thorough. Trainer was pretty dry, but covered everything really well.

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

Implementation went fairly smoothly.

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

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.

Incentivized

Shopify had the quickest go-to-market and most robust API among the products we compared. CommerceCloud required a VERY LONG integration phase that we just didn't have time for. BigCommerce fell short on the number of features and API coverage that we needed. Overall Shopify gave us the most bang for the buck.

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

• 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

• In my experience I see most of the retailers see better sales after moving to Demandware.
• Site performance is really good if the application built with best practices suggested by Demandware.
• Service integrations have some limitations in terms of quota etc but still all are inside manageable grounds.

Incentivized

• The pricing of Shopify Plus over the regular Shopify Account solution is about 10x if not 20x the cost. But with this cost comes the increased reliability and trust you have in your eCommerce Software solution/website. We still have a great ROI with the Shopify Plus Pricing.
• With Shopify Plus, we have been able to drill deeper into a more robust eCommerce experience for our customers
• With Shopify Plus, we have been able to customize our Website further with recommended apps, features, and customizations based on our Dedicated Account Reps expertise.

Incentivized