Follow Up BigCommerce Review
Updated October 22, 2019

Follow Up BigCommerce Review

Mark Linkhorst | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Plus

Overall Satisfaction with BigCommerce

BigCommerce is our web solution for an e-commerce website. It is the backbone of this operation and has been a huge improvement from Squarespace which was where our shop resided prior to the transition to BigCommerce. At this point, we use BigCommerce and applications associated with it like Shipstation which handles our fulfillment and logistics side of the operation which allows us to quickly pack and ship orders we ship with USPS thru our Stamps.com account that is connected to Shipstation for postage.

Beyond this, we've recently incorporated Eye4Fraud Application which offers services to allow us to process more orders that we may not have accepted without their insurance against fraud on the orders they approve. Having more eyes looking at our transactions for fraud is piece of mind and this application has cut back on the amount of declined orders which led to increased back and forth with customers as to why their transactions failed. International orders were problematic for individuals running their credit card multiple times with money hanging between them and their bank for days until the banks put the declined funds back on the customer's account. It allows us to process more orders we may have otherwise declined.
  • Organization of Orders
  • Organization of Products
  • Easy to use interface that can be changed with different templates and layouts.
  • BigCommerce prices their products on your yearly sales, so they help you with a lower cost if you are small and increase the price as you grow and succeed.
  • BigCommerce has great support that is available most times when you need them via chat almost instantly.
  • I've had an ongoing issue using FireFox as a browser where the Shipstation application will not launch, so I'm forced to use Safari to process the logistical side of things. It's worked out for the better in some ways as I can review other details in Firefox like looking for previous orders from the same customer while working simultaneously with Safari to generate a shipping label. Having better support to help me fix the Firefox issue would be appreciated rather than blaming Firefox for the problem.
  • At one point there were changes made on the backend of BigCommerce that the template we were using no longer supported. BigCommerce engineers helped with the transition however we can't manipulate the (Custom) option sets they created as they don't appear under our options or option sets. This means we have to create new ones ourselves if/when we want to manipulate the fields. So their fix isn't really a total fix, more like a band aid.
  • From time to time the statistics stop working or are delayed, that's really the only ongoing issue which occurs sporadically.
  • Our business has grown year over year using BigCommerce and has had a very positive impact on ROI
  • We've seen our conversion rate grow once we dropped the free theme and upgraded to a paid theme for the visual experience for our customers. We only made this change in June but the conversion rate chart is on a steady incline since the upgrade. Free themes may be a good place to start out but once you get the kinks worked out, you should look for a better front end by getting a paid theme.
  • We are more streamlined for larger volume days in terms of managing the fulfillment side of things and BigCommerce keeps everything organized very well.
If you are small, you don't have to pay much to get started with BigCommerce. As you grow your business, BigCommerce is there to grow with you with a bigger plan. In fact, you may want to upgrade to the Plus plan as soon as you can afford it so that you can utilize the Abandoned Cart Recovery feature which has literally paid for itself 20 fold over a year. It's like getting an extra month of sales in the year, and it would be considered a month better than normal based on our performance. I'm doing this review in August of 2019 and we started using this in August 2018, it took a few weeks to configure the emails properly, but once we got that sorted out, it's been great to see the revenue coming in on the abandoned carts.
We use a variety of products from third parties, Mailchimp, Hotjar, Elfsight for Instagram integration, Shipstation for logistics and fulfillment, and Eye4Fraud for fraud security. We can manage these applications thru BigCommerce directly or thru the website dedicated to the applications themselves depending on the level of integration that BigCommerce has with the 3rd party software.
We sell high-risk items as far as the banks are concerned. BigCommerce allows me to make the changes I need to make myself without having to rely on a web designer to assist me. Squarespace and Stripe dropped us for selling "drug paraphernalia" so we needed a solution quickly that our merchant account would work thru and BigCommerce is the solution we needed. I've dealt with WooCommerce & Shopify in the past selling similar products. We are extremely happy with our current setup with BigCommerce over any solutions previously used.
If you are looking for a one-stop-shop for an e-commerce website, then look to BigCommerce for a solution which you can build yourself without knowing how to code. You may need to copy and paste some scripts to get bells and whistles incorporated into your website and if you can't figure it out yourself, the BigCommerce support team is right there to help you via chat whenever you need them. If you have a super small shop with only a few items, BigCommerce may be overkill but if you plan to grow your product offerings, then it may be worth considering.

BigCommerce Feature Ratings

Product catalog & listings
10
Product management
9
Bulk product upload
Not Rated
Branding
9
Mobile storefront
9
Product variations
9
Website integration
9
Visual customization
9
CMS
9
Abandoned cart recovery
9
Checkout user experience
Not Rated
eCommerce security
10
Promotions & discounts
9
Personalized recommendations
Not Rated
SEO
9
Multi-site management
Not Rated
Order processing
9
Inventory management
9
Shipping
9
Custom functionality
5