Very satisfied with BigCommerce
June 11, 2019

Very satisfied with BigCommerce

Stephanie Nagy | TrustRadius Reviewer
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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
We have no problems adding more products every month. We've added thousands of products to both of our sites without ever having a problem. The bulk upload tools are great. I can customize many fields for SEO quickly and easily to upload hundreds of products at a time. Once I have a template for a type of product page I'm all set to add as many products as I need.
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.
I think for a small, mid or large size business without much customization that BigCommerce is a great out of the box solution. It has a lot of value for the price. I think that there are cases where BigCommerce is not as well suited. It seems like in the help forums that people struggle with presenting different options to different users and sometimes come up with the solution of purchasing multiple storefronts for subdomains or for a wholesale vs retail site. I think that the more customization a customer wants the more they need to hire outside help to find a solution.

BigCommerce Feature Ratings

Product catalog & listings
10
Product management
10
Bulk product upload
10
Branding
10
Mobile storefront
Not Rated
Product variations
10
Website integration
10
Visual customization
10
CMS
Not Rated
Abandoned cart recovery
10
Checkout user experience
10
eCommerce security
10
Promotions & discounts
10
Personalized recommendations
10
SEO
10
Multi-site management
10
Order processing
10
Inventory management
Not Rated
Shipping
10
Custom functionality
10

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.