Item: BigCommerce
Rating: 2
Author: David Mason

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

BigCommerce is our eCommerce platform. We migrated to there from our own proprietary platform after realizing how much easier it was to work with a third party system than trying to maintain our own in-house system. It is our only eCommerce platform, and we use it for all of our websites.

Pros and Cons

Product importing.
Strong basic features.
Third-party integrations.

Transparent Pricing (current pricing is misleading)
There's not a huge ability to create custom functionality.
I can't share catalogs across multiple sites.
I'd love to have faceted search on the lower level plans.

Return on Investment

No need to manage a server
Streamlined customer service.
Allowed abandoned cart recovery.

Approximate Annual eCommerce Revenue

$500,000 to $1 million

Scalability

BigCommerce allowed me to scale up, and their monthly fees went up as I passed more and more of their revenue thresholds. But then my revenue started going down and I was expecting my monthly fees to drop again to be in line with their billing policies. It turns out, they have their system set to automatically raise your prices, but not to lower them. They expect the customer to inform them when they drop below revenue thresholds and tell BigCommerce when it's time to lower prices again to be in line with their published pricing. Furthermore, it took them three weeks from the time I submitted a ticket about my billing until they responded to it.

BigCommerce Customization

We use a handful of third party apps. The integrations with these are normally quite easy to use and allow us to add functionality quickly. They can often be expensive though, depending on the service we're adding. We use APIs to do our own custom updates to our products and catalog.

Alternatives Considered

OpenCart

I tried using an open-source platform and debated using this instead of BigCommerce. The open-source platform would be cheaper on a month to month basis and much more flexible when it came to customization, but was far more expensive to get initially set up and required us to carry much more in house expertise.

Key Insights

Do you think BigCommerce delivers good value for the price?

Are you happy with BigCommerce's feature set?

Did BigCommerce live up to sales and marketing promises?

Did implementation of BigCommerce go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy BigCommerce again?

Likelihood to Recommend

BigCommerce does a decent job with large catalogs of products, though it certainly lacks the ability to customize. Customer service used to be a real strength of the platform, but they've recently gone downhill in that area. On my latest ticket, it took me three weeks to get a response, and the response I received was infuriating (it seems like they had some fine print in the agreement that allowed them to bill me far more than I should have been paying based on what was stated on their pricing page).

BigCommerce: a strong-hosted eCommerce platform

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with BigCommerce