Item: BigCommerce
Rating: 9
Author: Frank Cienniwa

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros and Cons

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.

Return on Investment

We've already seen an increase in mobile use of our sites, this has increased conversions overall.
We've been able to handle the move to BigCommerce and maintain the new sites without adding any employees.
It's very early in our implementation, so true ROI numbers are not available. However, all signs point to BigCommerce being an excellent choice, even over the free Magento Community Edition.

Approximate Annual eCommerce Revenue

$10 to $50 million

Scalability

It appears that BigCommerce will support the growth of SKU count without being noticeable. It's hard to rate this without having scaled BigCommerce beyond 4000 SKUs. However, the speed of the API tells me that large (10000+) SKU counts should not impact the speed of the API or the CMS at all.

BigCommerce Customization

We are using the API to download orders, customer information, and tokenized payment methods into our ERP (Mail Order Manager). We also use the API to synchronize purchase orders, inventory levels, and product status to the BigCommerce backend. Once an order is processed and shipped, we use the API to push the order status and tracking information to BigCommerce.

Alternatives Considered

Shopify Plus, Magento Commerce Cloud (formerly Magento) and Magento Open Source

Magento 1 was sunsetting so we initially looked to upgrade to Magento Cloud or Magento 2 Open Source. The conversion process was horrible and unable to be performed by our staff. The costs that developers quoted us were upwards of $100,000 PER SITE (we have 6!). This, of course, was not an option. We then reviewed many other options and narrowed down to Shopify Plus and BigCommerce. Frankly, Shopify was not responsive at all to our requests so we abandoned them.

Likelihood to Recommend

BigCommerce is well-suited for scalability. As our company and SKU count grow, we know that BigCommerce will be there to support us and give our customers a top-notch buying experience. Since the bulk of small and mid-size businesses do not have the capital to invest in development, I'd like to see BigCommerce spend more time building out their core feature base. Interfacing with experienced retailers (brick and mortar, catalog, and e-commerce) which will help determine the core feature set that BigCommerce should have.

BigCommerce Saved Us Big Time!

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with BigCommerce