Very satisfied with BigCommerce
June 11, 2019
Very satisfied with BigCommerce
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Pro
Overall Satisfaction 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.
Pros
- 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.
Cons
- 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.
- We've attracted more visitors and increased revenue.
- We've increased orders.
- We've been able to offer many different custom features to our products without any difficulty. It is much easier to bulk update product options with BigCommerce than the previous system we used.
$500,000 to $1 million
We haven't needed to use the APIs yet. I just went through the partner training and took the API (Tech 201) certification training and I was really impressed. There are times that I wished I would have known about the API sooner. I tried to read the documentation a few times and didn't understand it. I'm glad that they put together a video series and tutorials to explain this because there wasn't a lot of documentation.
We started the business on Yahoo! Merchant 15 years ago. Yahoo! had a difficult to use proprietary language called RTML that I had to learn to be able to customize the pages. There were many things that I couldn't customize or couldn't access. I was really excited about the switch to BigCommerce. The biggest thing I didn't like about BigCommerce was that all of my changes were live on BluePrint. I really wished there was an easier solution than having to copy all of the files from a Sandbox account over to my store. It was hard to keep the changes up to date between the live store and the Sandbox. It seems like this has been fixed somewhat with Stencil and this was the only feature that we had with Yahoo! that I was surprised was not available on BigCommerce. My company bought its biggest competitor and this business came with a Magento site. That was when I researched other ecommerce solutions and decided on BigCommerce. I could not switch away from Magento fast enough. It made me very nervous to be responsible for everything on the site especially things like the shopping cart or security updates. I am a decent programmer but the learning curve was very steep with Magento. BigCommerce was a dream to work with compared to Magento.
BigCommerce Feature Ratings
Using BigCommerce
4 - Tech support, owner, CFO, production manager, customer service
1 - I am the tech support for BigCommerce. I answer questions about any problems from the other users. I also am a programmer and I use BigCommerce to customize our sites. My skills include HTML, CSS, javascript and the technology that supports the Stencil framework. I also keep track of the domains, SSL and install apps for things like shipping.
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