Item: BigCommerce
Rating: 7
Author: Marisa Lytle

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Big Commerce as our primary eCommerce platform for three websites. One is B2B and the other two are B2C. We are a gift manufacturer and sell only in the US.

Pros and Cons

The startup was very fast: we migrated from Demandware to BigCommerce and it was a fairly quick (4 months) process for our 5600 SKU catalog.
The process of onboarding new SKUs is very easy which is good because we churn about 2000 new SKUs in and out each year.
The system has a very simple back end so we don't require a lot of development hours as we did with Demandware

Page load speed is terrible: very low SEO scores as a result.
If you have anything out of the ordinary as in multiple promos running simultaneously on a tiered pricing structure it can't handle it.
No ability to override their site map which is automatically created via the system, this results in poor SEO as we have had a number of site map errors with Google due to this.
Many Google Search console errors are thrown because of how they hard code in the robot txt and do not allow users to remove that code.
In general, not very SEO friendly.

Return on Investment

It reduced our cost of doing business due to the lower maintenance and development costs
It allowed us to go to market quickly and efficiently.
It has not allowed us to optimize our SEO or improve our page load speed to an optimal level.

Approximate Annual eCommerce Revenue

$1 to $10 million

Scalability

As we have grown, it is getting increasingly difficult to make the improvements needed to increase our traffic because of its inability to address SEO optimization issues.

We have several plug-ins with Big Commerce including a product personalization tool, site search optimizer, product merchandising engine, product configuration tool, and those integrations were fairly simple to make thanks to the API.

Alternatives Considered

Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Kibo eCommerce (formerly Mozu), Shopify Plus and Magento Commerce Cloud (formerly Magento)

Other than Shopify all of these solutions require a lot of development and maintenance as they are very custom. Shopify had a good product for direct to consumer but not as good on the B2B facing side of our business. We also don't like the stance they are taking on customer data.

Likelihood to Recommend

If they are a consumer only business and don't have a ton of SKUs its great, low maintenance. If you fall outside that box, however, it's not very flexible and their support staff doesn't really have an answer because they'd prefer you just stay inside the box.

BigCommerce is a great plug and play solution but you can't go outside the box with it.

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with BigCommerce