Good overall platform with a lot of potential.
Updated December 09, 2014
Good overall platform with a lot of potential.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Gold
Modules Used
- Abandoned Shopping Cart
Overall Satisfaction with Bigcommerce
As a web designer, many of my clients are retailers requiring an online shopping presence. Based on my client's needs, I select eCommerce solutions that best fits their goals and level of expertise/desired involvement. For one of my clients, BigCommerce was the best solution for their needs. Client can add their own blog posts, update product photos, manage orders, and manage inventory levels.
- BigCommerce supplies some very esthetically pleasing templates that can help clients get up and running very quickly. In addition, designers/developers have access to the templates and CSS to make many customizations so that the templates can easily become the client's own.
- BigCommerce provides wonderful features to help with natural SEO as well as other features to gain the client's more exposure in social media and other sales channels like Google, eBay, and Facebook
- Easy integration with 3rd Party apps like UPS, Fedex, USPS, PayPal, and various other payment gateways make setup and launch a breeze.
- Bug fixes are not handled in a timely manner and communication about the status of those bugs are not easy to come by. Nor is the communication of the issues that were resolved when new releases are made.
- New features and enhancements don't seem to be well thought out. The features themselves are wonderful features to have, just half implemented, leaving the client and designers frustrated.
- Communication is not a strong point with BigCommerce. New releases are made with release notes coming 2 weeks later and detailed information about features are too high level. Recently, bug fixes have been added to the release notes so that's an improvement. Template changes are not detailed at all so if you have customized your template (which almost everyone seems to do), you may miss out on new functionality.
- As a designer, I provided a proprietary shopping cart solution to my clients. However, the speed at which the eCommerce landscape was changing was faster than I could manage. So, I began the migration of my clients to larger scale eCommerce providers. BigCommerce has allowed me to confidently migrate some clients ensuring that their business is secure.
- Because of my proprietary shopping cart, clients had to go through me to make the simplest of changes (prices, copy, stock levels, etc.). Now, clients can manage their products, inventory, orders, promotions, etc. without having me be a bottleneck.
While no eCommerce provider is perfect, BigCommerce had an intuitive interface for my clients and a pretty powerful templating system on the back end. Magento's learning curve was extremely steep. Volusion seemed to be having uptime issues. Shopify had per transaction fees. 3DCart wasn't as polished, but just as powerful.