BigCommerce - eCommerce SaaS platform for Power Users
May 15, 2019

BigCommerce - eCommerce SaaS platform for Power Users

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Enterprise

Overall Satisfaction with BigCommerce

We are using BigCommerce as our eCommerce platform for selling consumer goods on the Internet. Since BigCommerce is a SaaS platform, it solved the problem of needing to have to run the eCommerce platform either on premises or on a colocation facility. We also do not need to become the experts of the day-to-day functions of running the underlying eCommerce software.
  • BigCommerce has a mostly complete API set - almost anything you want to do with the system, you can do remotely via APIs (there are limitations)
  • BigCommerce phone or chat support is superb!
  • BigCommerce community forums are helpful and actively moderated by the BigCommerce support team.
  • BigCommerce needs to work on improving/enhancing the APIs to be able to add more powerful filtering when retrieving data sets via the API. For instance, it would be able to retrieve a list of data while using common filters such as "not equal to" or an "IN" type of statement or a "LIKE", etc. Some of these filters have already been implemented in V3 of their APIs.
  • Everything that can be accomplished in the BigCommerce control panel should have an equivalent API endpoint in order to do the same. One example is being able to create user accounts for the control panel via API. Every aspect (or most at least) of the store configuration or settings should be able to be set via API.
  • More advanced searching or filtering for the Store Logs or Admin Action Logs. This helps us track down who did what.
  • The Control Panel permission system could be updated to be more fine grained especially if you have Sales associates that are handling incoming phone requests and placing orders on the behalf of customers through the Control Panel. Also, if the order was placed manually on the behalf of a Customer then the Sales Person's ID should be associated to the order in order to track who did what. This should be a be a default behavior. Also, when setting the permissions for a particular user in the Control Panel, the interface should reflect what the user has permission to do, or not do. If the person can only view products, but not manage products (add, edit, delete) then those options should be removed from the screen.
  • The system needs more Order Statuses. If you want to place an order "On Hold" due to inventory problems or whatever reason, there is no status for "On Hold" so you would have to use some other available status as a kludge to accomplish this. Actually, it would be great if the merchant can add their own custom status codes because there might be a necessity to sync up with an ERP system.
  • The Orders API is not yet updated to V3 of the API set. I know this is something that is being worked on. I'm hoping that when all the endpoints have been built out for V3, then BigCommerce will turn their attention to the Python, Ruby, and PHP modules since I'm a heavy Python user to do backend work with BigCommerce.
  • With BigCommerce there has been some reduction in TCO due to the fact that we no longer need expensive Magento Enterprise licenses, along with server collocation costs, and the man power required to maintain both Magento and the underlying servers.
  • With BigCommerce have noticed a little more traffic on the website and that could be due to the website running faster than our previous eCommerce platform. More traffic with a higher conversion rate is always a good thing.
I gave it an 8 because we've had some slowdowns in the previous 5 months with a few brief moments of complete downtime. I do admit, BigCommerce resolves the issue quickly and the servers are either back up or back to normal operating efficiency in the a matter of minutes.
We are heavy API users. The APIs were one of the reasons why we chose BigCommerce. They touted faster APIs over their competitors. Their REST APIs are simple to use and are very straightforward. We use them for just about everything from product management, or order management. We even use the APIs to manage the categories. We've built a mechanism to download the categories and rebuild them if needed in one short Python script. We have also used the APIs to build our own custom order management and shipping module for our ERP system. Most off the shelf or SaaS solutions didn't handle our quirks to our liking, so we built our own. So far, so good!
We used to be a Magento shop and ran our own servers and maintained all the server software but that became a daunting task. Upgrading Magento is a completely nightmare, which is why so many are still on the 1.x platform and haven't made the jump to the 2.x platform. The learning curve for the Magento code is extremely steep. You can learn it, but it will take awhile and it can be frustrating. That being said, after 6 years of being on Magento, we were done with that platform. We did look at various Magento cloud solutions, but we were not convinced that it solve our problems. I guess you can say, Magento left a bad taste in our mouth. Besides, have you seen all the security issues they have an credit card scrapers? Scary!!!

When we made that decision, we decided to look at other SaaS platforms and at the time the biggest two were Shopify Plus and BigCommerce. I'll be honest, it was a tough decision between the two because they both had some features that I really liked. The reason why we decided to go with BigCommerce was because of the way we were treated as a potential customer.

We had a very long evaluation period with both Shopify and BigCommerce trial accounts, but the Shopify account wold expire after 2 weeks. Very annoying! This never happened with BigCommerce. They let use kick the tires as long as we wanted. We figured if they treat us that well now, then hopefully they will treat us the same or better as a customer. So the great customer support, the great list of features, and the easy-to-use APIs is why we chose BigCommerce.

BigCommerce has great support and a rich API set and is very well suited for corporations that have the in-house skill to leverage those APIs. Of course, BigCommerce is a great platform for selling online. That's the main purpose for BigCommerce, but the data in BigCommerce can't just live in BigCommerce so it's great they have the APIs to be able to access the data for syncing with ERP systems.

BigCommerce Feature Ratings

Product catalog & listings
9
Product management
8
Bulk product upload
8
Branding
7
Mobile storefront
7
Product variations
7
Website integration
7
Visual customization
7
CMS
7
Abandoned cart recovery
7
Checkout user experience
8
eCommerce security
8
Promotions & discounts
7
Personalized recommendations
7
SEO
7
Multi-site management
4
Order processing
6
Inventory management
6
Shipping
6
Custom functionality
6

Using BigCommerce

8 - We have a variety of users in multiple departments including the following: Accounting, I.T. Consumer Service, Marketing, Shipping
5 - The marketing department is responsible for making sure the items, categories, and descriptions are accurate. The I.T. department is responsible for any updates using API calls. The I.T. department is also responsible for maintaining any in-house integrations to the ERP system. We also have outside vendor helping us with frontend design and UI changes.
  • Online Sales
  • Product Management
  • Inventory Managment
  • Leverage Python for quick scripting using BigCommerce APIs
  • Leverage BigCommerce's templating system for enhancing frontend look and feel
  • Leverage BigCommerce's WebDAV for storing documents and other static content
  • Expand usage of BigCommerce's WebDAV for storing more static product content and documenation (i.e. product manuals, videos, etc.)
  • Build our own BigCommerce App and host on AWS or similar platform to enhance or augment the BigCommerce platform
  • Leverage Server to Server Checkout and other APIs
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!!