Growing BIG with BigCommerce
Updated August 09, 2019

Growing BIG with BigCommerce

Kari Docekal | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Pro

Overall Satisfaction with BigCommerce

BigCommerce is being used as our online selling tool across our organization. It syncs to our Amber POS system, making inventory control easy. We have been a brick & mortar store for years and just launched our site with BigCommerce a week ago, finally making our products visible to the online audience.

Pros

  • Connectivity! BigCommerce has a variety of partner apps that work together seamlessly. They really do a great job with integration.
  • Simplicity! I am new to building a website and could not be happier with the amount of instruction given on how to complete all sorts of tasks. I love the WYSIWYG editors, constantly ensuring that my listing and emails appear exactly as I expect them to.
  • Info! BigCommerce does a remarkable job at providing endless sources of support. There are documents and step by step instructions for virtually any feature available!
  • Live Chat! BigCommerce offers a 24/7 live chat feature where support reps can help you to diagnose and fix any number of technical issues that may happen. They are knowledgeable, patient, and friendly!

Cons

  • Transparency. BigCommerce has great connectivity and integrations, but connectivity with my Amber POS leaves me with many hiccups. I think BigCommerce should look into their 3rd party integrations and make sure to let customers know which features don't sync. I have two stores, but the connectivity between Amber and BigCommerce pools my two store's inventory into one inventory number causing some confusion as to which store to pull the item from, etc. I realize this has more to do with Amber POS than BigCommerce, but if I knew to connectivity was so limited, I might have looked for a different program.
  • Training/Idea Sharing. BigCommerce reps on live chat are mostly very helpful. I have had an instance where a rep had no solution for my problem and recommended I get IT help, only for me to talk to another rep and get a fix for my issue within 5 minutes. Maybe some sort of database where reps can type in a brief description of the problem encountered and the fix found, that way if another rep encounters that issue, he/she will have some known fixes to try.
  • We've attracted more site visitors
  • We've increased the number of transactions/order
  • We've lost some money on shipping
  • We've increased our average order value
Not available
I have nearly 6000 individual sku items in my store and BigCommerce still handles everything at the same speed. It seems like I can endlessly add categories and items to my hearts content!
Honestly, our APIs are handled by a member of my team. I know we use a few, but I am not sure which ones and their functionality.
BigCommerce is similar to Magento in many ways. I believe it really stands out because it is a more visual application. Magento looks very much like a plain old database and it takes some digging to find the features you need within the program. BigCommerce give you a more visual display of what you are working on, making it more pleasant and user friendly in my opinion.
I think BigCommerce is especially well suited for those selling an item with choosable features (color, size, etc). It handles these listings easily and makes everything run smooth for both customer and company. I think it is less suited to companies that offer VIP rewards to their customers, if these rewards are based upon anything other than a % or $ off per order. We have a structure where customers can receive discounts to purchase items at a certain % above cost, I have not found a way to build our rewards system within the program yet.

BigCommerce Feature Ratings

9.7
Product catalog & listings
10
Product management
10
Bulk product upload
10
Branding
10
Mobile storefront
8
Product variations
10
Website integration
9
Visual customization
10
CMS
10
9.0
Abandoned cart recovery
8
Checkout user experience
10
10.0
eCommerce security
10
8.7
Promotions & discounts
7
Personalized recommendations
10
SEO
9
9.0
Multi-site management
Not Rated
Order processing
10
Inventory management
9
Shipping
7
Custom functionality
10

Using BigCommerce

4 - We have eCommerce and marketing employees working with BigCommerce every day to improve our website. We have a two person team tackling most of our product listings and data entry, while another works on graphics and banners to keep the site visually interesting. We work on everything from email marketing to order fulfillment and everything in between.
Everyone in our business is new to the BigCommerce program. We have all pooled our skills to learn as much as we can to keep ourselves moving forward and keep our business growing. We have a team member who specializes in IT, so we rely on him quite a bit to communicate with BigCommerce support reps to troubleshoot issues as they come up.
  • Using the mass edit/upload feature to bring our products over from our POS into BigCommerce saved us so much time and energy!
  • We love the variety of templates offered. The homepage has a huge impact on how a potential customer sees your company, by working with the Cornerstone template, and editing it to suit our needs, we were able to create a site that looks great and is user friendly.
  • Another feature we use often is the coupon manager. Being able to offer specific coupon code discounts to customers has had a big impact on our customer service. Instead of just offering apologies in cases of damaged shipments and the like, we are now able to offer shopping discounts on future purchases. This helps us bring some convenience back into the mix when a customer might otherwise feel neglected or unhappy.
  • Our POS system is a bit outdated and is not very mobile. I used to occasionally have customers contact me outside of our normal business hours wanting to know our stock on certain items, and I was never able to give it until I was back in the office in front of our in house system. Now, I can just check the stock via BogCommerce! It may not seem like much, but this has saved a handful of sales while allowing me to feel more sure about what I have available.
  • When we first signed up, we had no idea that with just a few clicks, we could have our entire catalog uploaded to social media. The majority of our customer base hangs out on platforms like Facebook and Instagram, so this connectivity provides a prefect opportunity for us to expand our sales even more.
  • We plan to connect our store to Ebay in the future, which BigCommerce can help make much easier with its integrations.
  • We have plans to use BigCommerce's connectivity with MailChimp to start a monthly newsletter as well as other email campaigns.
We are really very likely to renew our use of BigCommerce. The reason I chose 9 instead of 10 is simply because of the hiccups we are running into with our POS. BigCommerce is excellent, but we may even want to take a step further and get into and ERP that can take care of everything. Since we are a brick & mortar store first, and eCommerce second, our POS is very important to our day to day operations.

Evaluating BigCommerce and Competitors

  • Price
  • Product Features
The single most important factor in our decision to choose BigCommerce, was the fact that it featured integration with our existing POS. It is honestly the only system we could find that had any sort of connectivity to the programs we were already working with. It was important to us to have that integration, but we realize now, that the integration available is somewhat lacking. We love BigCommerce for other reasons now.
We would honestly just skip all the hassle and go with an ERP. BigCommerce is an excellent tool, don't misunderstand, it's just that the amount of things our company specifically needed to update would've better been taken care of by one program rather than many programs with lacking connectivity. We need better inventory management, a POS for our brick & mortar, an eCommerce platform for our web store, as well as a CRM to keep track of our customers and leads. BigCommerce helps with some of this, but not all.

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