Last resort letdown...
So we have had a Volusion Store for just under 8 years now and do a sizeable business there. As they are losing market share we were …
Starting at $29.95 per month
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What is BigCommerce?
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.
Recent Reviews
How BigCommerce Differs From Its Competitors
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Popular Features
- Product catalog & listings (413)7.878%
- Visual customization (403)7.474%
- Mobile storefront (401)7.373%
- Product management (410)6.868%
Reviewer Pros & Cons
Video Reviews
3 videos
User Review: BigCommerce Takes Sales Online For Sellers With Ease
02:35
User Review: Business Depends on BigCommerce With Easy-To-Use Platform & Great Customer Service
02:54
User Review: BigCommerce Keeps Focus On Product For Business While They Handle The Software
04:25
Pricing
Standard
$29.95
Cloud
per month
Plus
$79.95
Cloud
per month*
Pro
$299.95
Cloud
per month*
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://www.bigcommerce.com/essentials/…
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Starting price (does not include set up fee)
- $29.95 per month
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What is BigCommerce?
According to the vendor, BigCommerce is one of the leading cloud ecommerce platforms for established and rapidly-growing businesses. Combining enterprise functionality, an open architecture and app ecosystem, and market-leading performance, BigCommerce aims to help businesses to grow online sales with less cost, time, and complexity than on-premise software. BigCommerce powers B2B and B2C ecommerce for more than 60,000 brands, 2,000+ mid-market businesses, 30 Fortune 1000 companies, and industry-leading brands, including Assurant, Ben & Jerry’s, Paul Mitchell, Skullcandy, Sony, and Toyota.
The vendor says that the product provides the following benefits to customers:
The vendor says that the product provides the following benefits to customers:
Customize and innovate at a lower total cost of ownership
Build in HTML, CSS, and Javascript
96% of brands relaunch in 2-4 months
Test and push changes without downtime in a local environment
Focus on generating sales, less on monitoring security & performance
PCI DSS 3.2 certified at Level 1
99.99% median uptime
Multiple layers of security through the Google Cloud Platform
Leverage your existing tech stack with flexible APIs
90% of platform data is exposed to APIs
400+ API calls per second
Headless commerce out-of-the-box, across any front-end
Solve your toughest challenges with SaaS
B2B, Wholesale
Headless Commerce, Wordpress
Multi-channel
International
Build in HTML, CSS, and Javascript
96% of brands relaunch in 2-4 months
Test and push changes without downtime in a local environment
Focus on generating sales, less on monitoring security & performance
PCI DSS 3.2 certified at Level 1
99.99% median uptime
Multiple layers of security through the Google Cloud Platform
Leverage your existing tech stack with flexible APIs
90% of platform data is exposed to APIs
400+ API calls per second
Headless commerce out-of-the-box, across any front-end
Solve your toughest challenges with SaaS
B2B, Wholesale
Headless Commerce, Wordpress
Multi-channel
International
BigCommerce Features
Online Storefront Features
- Supported: Product catalog & listings
- Supported: Product management
- Supported: Bulk product upload
- Supported: Branding
- Supported: Search & filter
- Supported: Mobile storefront
- Supported: Product variations
- Supported: Subscriptions & downloads
- Supported: Website integration
- Supported: Visual customization
- Supported: CMS
- Supported: Customer service tools
Online Shopping Cart Features
- Supported: Abandoned cart recovery
- Supported: Tax calculator
- Supported: Shipping calculator
- Supported: Integration with Amazon
- Supported: Integration with eBay
- Supported: Checkout user experience
Online Payment System Features
- Supported: PayPal integration
- Supported: Returns & refunds
- Supported: Single-click checkout
- Supported: eCommerce security
- Supported: B2B features
eCommerce Marketing Features
- Supported: Promotions & discounts
- Supported: Personalized recommendations
- Supported: SEO
- Supported: Product reviews
- Supported: Social commerce integration
- Supported: Customer registration
eCommerce Business Management Features
- Supported: Multi-site management
- Supported: Order processing
- Supported: Inventory management
- Supported: Accounting
- Supported: Shipping
- Supported: Custom functionality
Additional Features
- Supported: High Availability (HA) infrastructure that allows us to deliver 99.99% uptime
- Supported: Open Platform: 90% of the BigCommerce platform data is exposed to the API
- Supported: Server-to-server API functions enable a headless commerce on WordPress and more
- Supported: Develop, test and push changes without downtime in a local environment using the Stencil CLI tool.
- Supported: Omnichannel management (Amazon, Ebay, Facebook, Instagram, POS)
- Supported: Global CDN, localized payments and multi-language support
BigCommerce Screenshots
BigCommerce Videos
Create differentiated commerce experiences on the industry’s most versatile enterprise solution.
BigCommerce Company Values
Scale your business with WordPress on the front-end and free up server resources from things like catalog management, processing payments, and managing fulfillment logistics, with BigCommerce on the back end.
BigCommerce Integrations
BigCommerce Competitors
BigCommerce Technical Details
| Deployment Types | Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
| Mobile Application | Apple iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Blackberry, Mobile Web |
BigCommerce Downloadables
Frequently Asked Questions
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.
BigCommerce starts at $29.95.
Reviewers rate Product catalog & listings highest, with a score of 7.8.
The most common users of BigCommerce are from Small Businesses (1-50 employees).
BigCommerce Customer Size Distribution
| Consumers | 0% |
|---|---|
| Small Businesses (1-50 employees) | 60% |
| Mid-Size Companies (51-500 employees) | 30% |
| Enterprises (more than 500 employees) | 10% |
Comparisons
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Reviews and Ratings
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Reviews
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August 01, 2019
BigCommerce has it all at a great price.
Big Commerce host our on-line religious goods store, Truedevotionasl.com which would be considered a department of our organization. The store extends our physical store here in Massachusetts and allows our most popular store items to be available throughout the United States. It also has the advantage of being open 24/7.
- Everything needed to run an online store is contained in one package.
- All aspects of selling and buying work flawlessly and maintained. I have never experienced downtime.
- The help department is knowledgeable and eager to help.
- Big Commerce supports Mail Chimp which handles mail campaigns with built in automation.
- The only thing I can think of would be to make overseas shipping easier but I see that as a problem with the post office. Rates for insured delivery are too high; some are willing to pay but it takes time to give the customer an exact price. We discourage out of the country sales—too much hassle.
July 31, 2019
Review of BigCommerce
Bigcommerce is used across our entire organization with expansion into the US and Canadian market planned for later this year. Allows us to easily take orders from any of our wholesale customers once they have signed up.
- Speed: One of the fastest loading sites I've had the pleasure of working with.
- Ease: from setup to UX, BigCommerce has a very easy to use system & great UX.
- Tracking sales: Allows us to have a dashboard of our day/week/month.
- Needs improved theme templates with more options. Compared to WordPress & WooCommerce, BigCommerce is lacking in this area.
- Easier customization without a dev.
- There are some things that come standard on other websites like Shopify but BigCommerce does not have without user customization like a decent customized menu.
July 30, 2019
Great for small businesses!
BigCommerce is used as our main website and webstore. It synced with our other 3rd Party E-Commerce Managing Software, therefore we spend little time in the back end of BigCommerce because we use the 3rd Party software to manage our BigCommerce Account.
- Website building, designing, and launching.
- Product and Customer management.
- Customer support.
- Backend design can be difficult to navigate.
- Backend site code can be difficult to use.
- Product relations can be limiting.
July 30, 2019
Big Commerce is Great!
We use it to sell our products on the internet. It helps with the mechanics of an online store.
- Big Commerce websites can be customized within the themes that are selected. Big Commerce does most of the website work for you. You just plug in your own products, photos and pricing.
- Support has been excellent. Many times I'm working at odd hours and they are always available. Customer support seems very knowledgeable and I haven't been frustrated with their answers the way I am with other companies.
- Pricing at the beginning is very reasonable. After you get bigger it kicks in more, but by then it's not so much of a stretch.
- I think the menu system could be a little more clear. I usually have to click on every single heading before I find the right one that I want to use.
- I've never been able to figure out if I have people signed up for the blog in Big Commerce. Because of Facebook, I don't really use it, but I have no clue if I'm letting down valued customers.
- We don't get updates about new apps that are available. One app that I used for a bit then just disappeared with nothing else to replace it.
July 26, 2019
BigCommerce All The Way!
BigCommerce handles our online shopping cart. We grow pecans in Louisiana and were looking for an affordable eCommerce solution to help us manage our phone orders. Although customers can order by themselves online, there are lots of customers that have questions and want to speak with a live person when placing an order. BigCommerce is user-friendly and if you do have a question or problem the support staff is awesome.
- BigCommerce has customizable templates to aid in designing your store. The templates can be browsed to find the best one that fits what you want your store to feel and look like. Some templates are free for the small business getting started.
- There is an integration with Paypal.
- Sales reports are available that are very helpful when reviewing overall sales.
- I do not like the Alvalara tax integration. I needed help in setting up Avalara and when I called Avalara they wanted to charge me an unreasonable fee. I expressed to them that I did not think a small business person would be able to pay their fee so I turned Avalara OFF.
BigCommerce has many great functions for an internet e-commerce website. We were able to deploy it very rapidly from our previous e-commerce hosting company, and BigCommerce is so easy to use that individuals with very minimal training at my office were able to pick up on it right away. We use it for our e-commerce website, as well as a great deal of other functions, like order tracking.
- Very intuitive and simple in the eyes. It is so easy to pick up that we had individuals at our company start using it with minimal training.
- Above all, BigCommerce is quite robust, and has a great deal of tools "under the hood," as well as having a great app store.
- BigCommerce is very customizable, and following their templates is not required, as anything can be customized.
- Compared to their competitors, BigCommerce offers more reliability, as we have had zero downtime since signing on with them.
- Tech support is a pain with BigCommerce. As much as I enjoy their software, be ready to wait for days for their tech support to get back to you.
- The free templates that BigCommerce offers are so basic that they might as well not offer them. I understand they are starting points for a website, to build from something that's not scrach, but I've seen much better free templates by their competitors.
- BigCommerce is third-party app dependant. Any website built with BigCommerce has to have several apps from their app store just to get up and running.
July 25, 2019
BigCommerce has grown with our business
BigCommerce is used across the whole organization at this time. We recently moved our coffee site to Shopify but BigCommerce is our main system. It is our main ECommerce platform where 98% of our business is done annually. We use it for marketing information and collecting customer data. It is also our primary inventory management system.
- Adding products.
- Promote products.
- Creating discounts and coupons is very easy.
- Reporting sales.
- Customizable searches for customers.
- Would like to see the additions of wish lists for customers to be alerted when items are back in stock.
July 16, 2019
Very user-friendly and simple for any sized business
BigCommerce is where all of our sales go through. We used to run off of 100% phone-based sales but wanted to differ from this, so we created our site on Big Commerce. We picked them due to functionality (having wholesale and retail pricing) and platform pricing. We have been very happy with the results of BigCommerce so far and run 100% of our sales through the platform.
- User-friendly to create a website.
- Always updating to keep up with the newest technology.
- Great customer service - if anything goes wrong they fix it fast.
- There are some small details I wish were different. This includes organizing checkout.
- Optimizing address entry.
- Better sales analysis.
- They have a great list of apps, but I wish some basic things were built-in vs getting a 3rd party app.
July 10, 2019
Why you should go with BigCommerce
BigCommerce is used for our whole organization as our storefront for four different global retail sites.
- Ease of use is good.
- Excellent SLA and uptime.
- Excellent for customer service oriented retail business.
- Coupon code functions are limited.
- Like other eCommerce platforms, they rely heavily on 3rd party integrations.
BigCommerce allows us to sell our sports nutritional supplements direct to our customers. It's maintained by our web team which sits in our marketing department.
- Solid uptime
- Decent feature set
- Consistent development/feature roll out
- Some features require third-party apps
- Slow front end response times in Australia
- Custom development required to extend the platform
BigCommerce is being used as our e-commerce shopping cart and website. For us it combined the right amount of design flexibility with back end resources and features. We can easily add new products and deal with customer service issues and questions right from the account. We have good access to customers' profiles which make placing orders or making changes on behalf of the customer a breeze.
- Customer Profile and Order Management
- Good data analytics
- Good customer Service
- No subscription for product support
- No saved payment method support without a third-party
- No landing page creator/editor without using a third-party
We utilize BigCommerce as a way to sell our products via e-commerce and reach out to our many customers across the globe.
It allows us to have a much further reach than we would without an e-commerce solution.
It allows us to have a much further reach than we would without an e-commerce solution.
- Allows us to offer a wide variety of options for our products
- Integrates with our existing accounting and inventory solutions
- Has an easy user interface for our customers
- Making sure that all features are well tested and 100% ready to go before launching. We had several issues where we were urged to start using a product to find that it was "broken" or jeopardized our selling ability due to glitches and customers not being able to check out.
- Pricing could be less for the service offered. Originally pricing was very affordable, however, it has went up significantly in the past serveral years. Originally $250 a month to now over $1000 a month for the same services.
- More Product Option Functionality, Scalability, and ease of copying rule sets for these option sets.
June 25, 2019
SafetySmartGear.com on BigCommerce
We utilize BigCommerce (BC) as our web platform. I do the overwhelming majority of product development and maintenance across 2000+ product pages with tens of thousands of SKUs. We have a sales staff that enters in large quantity, printing and phone orders. My biggest issue with BC is that we are unable to utilize SQL database which makes exporting/importing a bit more involved than it needs to be. Product and SKU development is excellent however. We came from Volusion, so I've noticed that I can generate far more product pages and SKUs on BC. However, not having the SQL behind this obviously is the trade off.
- Product Page/SKU Development
- Built-In Facets
- Order Statuses are Easy to Read/Respond
- Tracking Shipments
- Plug-Ins
- We've had issues with ShipperHQ and hope that there are more options in the future
- Page Load Speed
- Lack of Shipping Plug-In Solutions other than ShipperHQ
June 24, 2019
Big Commerce Good Alternative to Magento
We migrated from Magento 1 to BigCommerce as we didn't want to go to Magento 2. Currently, about five people in our company of 18 access the BigCommerce platform as other departments don't need to access it. BigCommerce offers a nice platform with many features but to get the most desired features you will have to go with a more pricey plan than just the basic plan. The order management layout is very nice and easy to understand. The BigCommerce gift certificate system is a bit lacking in the sense of you cannot edit or manually create gift cards and will need more development time and money for such options. However, this maybe the case with most of the SAS companies nowadays. We like that the BigCommerce system is managed and we don't have to worry about applying security patches, updates, etc., like we did with the Magento system. Product creation is simple and straightforward. We don't like that there is no system for additional admins such as one "Super Admin" and then "Admin" with different permissions. BigCommerce only has "owner" status and only account is the owner. If you are dealing with software developers that need admin permissions, you will have to turn over your owner admin details or the company cannot access certain parts of the admin panel. Overall, I think BigCommerce is a good fit with companies looking for alternatives to existing systems or companies who plan to have a large product catalog. There are probably better less pricey choices if you plan to sell just a few items.
- Order Management is easy with a nice simple layout.
- Frontend site is modern and easy for customers to navigate and checkout orders.
- Product creation is straight forward and easy to figure out.
- No finance charges for using a third-party merchant account.
- Lack of admin options. No structure for different admin accounts just one owner account.
- Gift Certificate system is not very manageable. You cannot edit or manually create gift cards.
- Pricing. You only get the most desired features with the highest priced plan.
June 21, 2019
BigCommerce Saved Us Big Time!
We moved to BigCommerce in response to the sunset of Magento 1. After trying and failing to implement Magento 2 Community Edition with the features we need, we decided to look elsewhere. The final decision came down to Shopify and BigCommerce. BigCommerce was more responsive to our enterprise needs and won the day. We manage our entire operation of a catalog and 6 e-commerce sites from our ERP (Mail Order Manager). With minor custom code, we were able to implement BigCommerce rapidly and painlessly.
- Stencil-based themes gives us a fast and efficient front end.
- BigCommerce's uses of tokenized payments is much more secure than Magento 1.
- Big Commerce's support team responds rapidly to our needs (but we've barely needed them!).
- I look forward to seeing the BigCommerce universe of apps grow.
- Although Stencil is a fast and efficient responsive theme, we'd like to see more options for customizing the home page without engaging developers.
BigCommerce is our global eCommerce platform for 7 eCommerce sites. This includes 5 currencies and 4 languages. The eCommerce team manages BigCommerce. It addresses our need for a revenue-generating eCommerce platform, serves as our brand flagship store, and is the keystone to our company-wide marketing activities. Brand campaigns and product launches originate on our BigCommerce storefronts. The success of our website is indicative of the success of our company as a whole. Our site allows us to gauge demand and customer concerns quickly after launch and before most retailers carry our products.
- Customer service and account management.
- Easy to use admin portal for business users.
- Easier to customize than the competition.
- International: multi-language/multi-currency.
- More robust coupon/promotions engine.
- More robust reviews experience.
June 19, 2019
Big Commerce is a great e-commerce solution
We have an e-commerce business so our Big Commerce website is how our customers place their orders. This allows us to have our entire product offering online which means we don't need a printed catalog. This makes it very easy to respond to inquiries about our company and the products it offers.
- Support
- Reliability
- Ease of Use
- Code that enables me to input the code for Google Product Reviews.
- Increase the speed
June 18, 2019
I love BigCommerce. Given the chance to change platforms, I would hands-down go with BigCommerce again.
We use BigCommerce as our main eCommerce solution company-wide. It does an excellent job of streamlining our online retail sales by integrating apps such as Connex for Quickbooks, inkFrog for eBay, and ShippingEasy to make our sales flow more or less automated. Which is a huge plus for us as we are a small sales team so our employees fill many roles and having everything run through BigCommerce in a more or less automated fashion allows for more time to accomplish our other tasks.
- BigCommerce has a very easy to use user interface. Especially with customizing the themes. I am not a web developer so it is very helpful for someone with little experience to be able to put together a well functioning, aesthetically pleasing website.
- BigCommerce customer support is awesome. They are always very easy to get a hold of and always knowledgeable.
- The BigCommerce development team is also really good at connecting with us as customers and they really listen to our feedback to always improve the platform.
- As with any multi-use platform such as BigCommerce, there are some bugs that need addressing. For example, the BigCommerce native shipping platform is somewhat buggy and not very easy to use. We simply use a third party shipping platform with ShippingEasy so it isn't really a big deal.
- Some of the product editing features are a little tedious to use as you have to switch between different pages a lot. That being said they are currently working on a different version that the development team demo'd a little and it addressed these issues. The new platform just hasn't rolled out yet.
- One thing that we wish we had more control of is order statuses. BigCommerce gives you the option to edit the title of the existing order status, but you are not able to add custom ones which would be very helpful.
We use BigCommerce for our website sales and furniture catalog for our furniture store. It is used by all 3 employees, and it handles all our online sales.
- Customer support is very helpful.
- Training videos are helpful.
- Aligning with other business partners to improve website.
- 24 hours 7 days support .
- Sometimes there are long waiting times on the phone for support.
- We should have the option to get a call back instead of waiting on phone.
- I had a problem with syncing Pinterest and never got resolution.
June 17, 2019
Small Business and BigCommerce
We use BigCommerce as the hub for our business. As an E-commerce company, each employee uses some aspect of BigCommerce in their day. We use many different applications that use and support the information that goes into BigCommerce. We have grown 4x and still remain with the same number of employees that we have had before our growth because of the many applications that plug in to the BigCommerce platform that allow us to not do any manual data entry.
- Communicate new ideas, solutions and partners.
- The platform is open to allowing innovative products come in and utilize the framework of the system.
- We never have any downtime with the product.
- The product gives us value for our dollar.
- I would not say that there is anything that is difficult to use with the platform, but making anything easier is always best.
June 17, 2019
Great for ecommerce, still waiting on a few updates.
BigCommerce is used across our whole organization. It is connected with Square and our Square register so we have fluid inventory from online and in store sales. We use it to manage and create our products as well as to manage orders and customers for online sales. This sometimes translates into retail sales and customers as well.
- It has a very small downtime compared to other ecommerce websites we have used.
- The open API can be great for developers to work with your site and company.
- The framework and templates that they offer are really nice and responsive.
- Integration into other apps is easy and works great.
- The customer support is usually great!
- We've been noticing a lag in the response rate to update our inventory when speaking to Square, we've had to de-connect and re-upload our inventory several times. Both companies insist it's the others responsibility. I would love to be able to cross communicate between the two since it's such an intricate and essential part of our business.
- We've found that a handful of times there has been a problem with our site and that it has gone down and we have received 0 communication from BigCommerce, we were the ones that found it and had to notify them. They had insisted it had only been a few minutes, in one case we had proof that it had actually been down for several hours. My team and I do not appreciate being lied to and would rather just have an apology and the truth.
- Recently, I had my only really bad experience with BigCommerce that made me double think whether we would continue with it. Something happened with the free template that they recommend, we had always used it and something where BigCommerce had updated and the template had not eventually caused there to be some pretty bad bugs and then the site completely shut down. While speaking to a representative, I was hung up on (presumably by accident but I'm not really sure) twice, and then had some frustrating conversations. It was discovered that the back end is responsive with the front end so both the rep and I were shut out of the site completely. Eventually I got into it, I was able to quickly switch over to a new random template before being kicked off. This was all while the site was still live and customers were trying to shop it. It was very frustrating as I was putting up all the suggestions on how to fix things and eventually it was I who fixed it while the rep was just on the phone saying sorry and connecting with other "specialists" in her department. Since there was no other template that looked good and was functional with our site, I had to spend $200 on a new template and rebuild our entire site that night. I asked for a reimbursement for this trouble, as I was not intending to ever buy a new template as the free one was amazing and we had customized it quite a bit. I have yet to hear anything and am pretty annoyed by this. Also, the template that I was using the top recommended template to use on their website even while we were having this problems. It was still up the next day as well, even though I had told them they should immediately take it down as it's not fair that this could happen to another person. I have not checked to see if it's still up, but I would suspect it would be.
BC is our e-commerce platform. Sales are made through BC from "stumble upon" visitors, prospects we target with AdWords and also is a convenient shopping platform for many of our current customers who prefer the ease of the website to their institutional purchasing systems. Our Sales Team uses BC to load up products, write descriptions, post blog articles and define the product mix. Customer service uses BC for order fulfillment and tracking as well as communicating with customers. Marketing uses BC to entice shoppers to buy and do business with us.
- Tech support is second to none. Strong native English speakers who are exceptionally patient and aware of what they can and cannot do. And even then, they try to help solve as many issues as they can.
- It's very easy and intuitive to use. When we were switched over from Magento I was dreading the change, but in retrospect, it was the best move we've made and we're very happy.
- Havent had to speak with billing in years because we've not had issues, but when we did, the experience was very unpleasant. The opposite of what tech support is.
- We're still on BluePrint so much of this might be our own doing for not upgrading to Stencil (yet) but the functionality and features are pretty limited. We hate the way the search is done with our theme. Customers stop me in the halls to say they can't find things. It really really sucks and I really don't care what version or theme you choose, no search feature should ever suck. We can't embed PDFs like WordPress sites do and that means either we leave off valuable tips for our customers explaining how to use a product (like the instruction manual) or we include all this into the product description and, really that is going to turn people off.
- Also - I HATE, HATE, HATE the way you spring password changes on people. It can happen in the middle of a hit storm. Who needs to suddenly be locked out of their control panel and have to think up a new password? BC seems to have no trouble running "ads" at the top of my control panel when I log in announcing everything on "your mind", why not at least put a countdown reminder there: "Your current password will be expiring in 10, 9, 8, etc. days" and give me the chance to redo it at my leisure?
June 12, 2019
It Just Works, It's Just Worth It.
This is the primary way we distribute our products to associates worldwide. We also use it as an access-restricted auxiliary information platform for our associates.
- Access Restriction - it's not just product access that can be granularly controlled, since product category pages can be used for controlling access to business information as necessary.
- Integration with 3rd Party Providers - shipping live rate calculation, shipping label creation and accounting are given richer functionality by third party developers, to which there was easy access
- Keeping things Simple - while still providing robust functionality. The simplicity and moderate platform lockdown actually adds an unexpected layer of security simply by not exposing too much functionality to users
- Platform Updates - We love how BigCommerce keeps updating the platform with useful features that we actually need, more than just the usual shiny bells and whistles.
- Fine-grained integration of some features - including two-way inventory and accounting management with third-party application providers
- Documentation of Store Variables - need more context detail, as well as availability in actual usage (i.e. sometimes variables just come up empty and it takes a little bit of trial-and-error to get some things working for specific but useful use-cases)
- Allowing fine-grained control of staff permissions - most of the necessary permissions are all-or-nothing (e.g. product inventory access requires full product edit access so most of the time only one person gets burdened with multiple responsibilities instead being able to effectively delegate inventory management to the warehouse manager while keeping product edit access i.e. price, description, etc. to sales administrator)
- Being on the legacy platform (and there's just a huge cost to move up to the new platform because there's no straightforward upgrade of our business customizations), there's no way to save the cart with the account; the cart is saved on the device. Some may see this as a feature, mostly it's a bit inconvenient.
- Platform Updates - kind of a double-edged sword, because they made a foundational platform switch (to Stencil) just as we came into BigCommerce and finalized all our customizations and workflows on the existing platform (the now-legacy Blueprint). As mentioned earlier there's no straightforward way for us to switch over to the new one, and we'll have to rework our interface and access customizations if we want to take advantage of the new platform's features. What we are most thankful for, though, is BigCommerce keeps fully supporting the legacy platform, which means our business can keep functioning as we need it to be. Hopefully they'll do this for life, or at least until we consider tackling the (high) costs (time, energy, money) of switching over to the new one just because we were so invested on the old/legacy platform.
June 11, 2019
Very satisfied with BigCommerce
We use BigCommerce to host both of our online sites. It is a great solution for hosting the parts of the business that we don't want to host (shipping, postage, order processing, payment, shopping cart) but allows a great deal of flexibility in customizing our sites. BigCommerce is a great choice because it has an open architecture. The sites have had almost no down time over the years we've used BigCommerce. Tech support is fantastic every time I talk to someone.
- The open architecture is great for programmers. I love the flexibility and ability to customize. Stencil is a great upgrade and allows even more flexibility.
- I like having everything in one place. I can do the majority of the work necessary for running the business in the main interface (out of the box) without add ons but there are many apps available if I want a custom service.
- I think the price is great for what BigCommerce offers. I looked at Shopify and didn't feel they offered enough customization. We came from Magento which required way too much involvement and risk on my part as a developer.
- I like that BigCommerce takes care of security updates and keeps on top of the latest technology.
- The Stencil CLI was crazy difficult to install. The directions were not accurate or easy to understand. In general, the updated Stencil help files are not complete. It took me an entire day and 4 reboots to get it working.
- I ran into a problem where a customer had created an account right after placing an order and the system flagged his account as a duplicate and he had trouble logging in. It would be nice to find a way to prevent this.
- I would like to see more tutorials for the Stencil, Handlebars, Javascript, etc. frameworks. There is basic documentation but not a lot of real world examples to show me how to use these languages.
- It is a testament to how strong your system is that I really had to think about this to come up with a few things to improve! I had no problem coming up with things I love about BigCommerce.
June 11, 2019
Why we use BigCommerce
We use BigCommerce as our face to the business community. It is our retail store as well as our custom design services.
- Overall system administration is very easy compared to other platforms
- Help desk is very accessible and knowledgeable
- Very strong cyber security
- New features are typically very buggy. Could do a better job of testing.
- Advertise new features during conference calls but availability is months away.